(Yicai Global) Aug. 31 -- Inspur Group, a conventional Chinese tech company, will evolve into a new type of internet company with cloud + big data to form an ecology with its own platform, Peter Sun, its chairman and chief executive, told Yicai Global in a recent interview.

Inspur views the cloud business as its key development direction and will float a separate initial public offering for it, Sun said.

The company is reshuffling its business as it embarks on its second funding round. "We want the public to better know Inspur Cloud," he stated.

Inspur has four listed companies -- Inspur Electronic Information Industry, Inspur Software, Inspur International and Shandong Inspur Huaguang Optoelectronics -- which all ply a high proportion of standard IT businesses.

The group will lay its primary emphasis on government cloud services. Traditional internet companies use powerful applications to acquire user data, thus becoming large data repositories, in Sun's view. "We, by contrast, depend on cloud to help governments achieve data aggregation, sharing and opening to realize data authorization operations," Sun said.

Tech firms formerly regarded completion of project construction as task completion but now focus on provision of services, "Providing cloud services is 'babysitting,'" Sun told Yicai Global. His company helps operate government data, changing its task from 'babysitting' to 'housekeeping' of government data.

Inspur now supplies cloud services to 22 provincial and over 120 municipal governments and is building a data opening and sharing platform.

China now has four kinds of participants in the government cloud market: major telecoms such as China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, Huawei Technologies, New H3C Group and other classic IT companies, internet service providers such as Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Kingsoft Cloud and system integrators like Taiji Computer.

"Many standard tech companies start their businesses by providing solutions for government. Compared with internet giants, though they lack the flexible architecture, they have amassed experience in government-end business segments and can therefore compete with these giants.

"Because they are more familiar with government business, they have progressed in expanding channels in the early phases since they have sales channels in many municipal governments," Henry Yan, International Data Corp. China's senior research manager, told Yicai Global.

China is a rapidly developing government cloud environment. Over 90 percent of provincial governments and 70 percent of municipal ones have built or are building  cloud platforms, and these will generate a domestic market worth nearly CNY30 billion (USD4.4 billion), a white paper on sector development by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology projects.

Editor: Ben Armour