Open data in China's 'Silicon Village' ready to connect to the cloud

The provincial and city governments of Southwest China's Guizhou Province have announced they will connect all their public data to the Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co, the operator of Apple's iCloud service in China, according to Xinhua News on Sunday.

The move, which aims to create an all-in-one data-sharing and exchange system, will help speed up the building of a big-data-based public service system, as well as the application of a 5G experimental network in 2019, an official said.

The "Guizhou on Cloud" program is China's first official data sharing platform among governments, businesses and the general public.

Over the past decades, the initiative to develop big data technology has transformed one of China's poorest provinces to a high-tech hub, pitting it against Silicon Valley.

In 2018, 1,625 brick-and-mortar companies completed their integration with big data technology, with telecommunication services of the province seeing a 165.5% spike in the process. The added value of its electronic information manufacturing industry has risen to 11.2%.

In addition, the revenue of information technology related services has jumped to 75.8%, a local government report indicated.

The government has promised to build 1,000 demonstrative projects, bringing 2,000 real-economy companies in to ride the data wave, as well as to invest 12 billion yuan (1.78 billion U.S.dollars) into its information infrastructure industry.

The lack of talent in the big data pool

As Guizhou's big data industry has a market value of over 110 billion yuan (nearly 16.3 billion U.S. dollars), it will play a dominant role in the province's economic development.

But now, the whole industry is struck with a harsh problem: a lack of employees.

According to the statistics, there is a shortage of two million workers in the industry and companies are struggling to recruit qualified candidates.

To solve the problem, the local government launched a talent exchange program last July.

The program collects information about graduates from all universities and give them out to the corporations who need their skills. By pooling information, the efficiency and accuracy of the job recruiting system will be improved.