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China megacorp Tencent parrots Communists' 'Internet Plus' edict

'Software-defined networking is key architectural strategy' says party. Sorry, veep

Chinese megacorp Tencent is pushing ahead with an edict from China's Communist Party to improve the country's internet connections by upping its investment in software-defined networking.

Tencent is most well known for its WeChat messaging and payments app, which the company says has 500 million active users.

In March, China's premier Li Keqiang outlined plans to boost domestic technology adoption and give Chinese tech firms a chance do do better overseas.

He said the country must develop an "Internet Plus" action plan to integrate "mobile internet, cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things with modern manufacturing. This is intended to encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial networks and internet banking, and to get internet-based companies to increase their presence in the international market.”

Those remarks are believed to echo the sentiments of Pony Ma, chairman of Tencent.

Speaking at the Huawei Networking Conference 2015, Tom Bie, veep of Tencent's technical engineering biz, said, "Internet Plus is an important framework", and that the company was committed to building its architecture to achieve it.

"Access is the first important component," Bie said. "Secondly, [it's about] how different data centres can be connected. We have hundreds of thousands of servers deployed in China and overseas, which call for a great exchange of data and information. How can we make that more reliable? Thirdly, there is our data centre network. We have invested a lot to support overseas data centres in order that they can operate smoothly and process Big Data in future."

Investment in SDN will help consolidate those components of the firm's architecture and achieve better reliability and speeds, he said.

Also speaking at the event, Wei Chen, China GM of Intel's Internet of Things group, said investment in tech was key to the country's continued growth.

"China has been the world's factory. However, our efficiency is not high enough. If that continues it will be replaced by other countries."

Not surprisingly, his answer is to shove more chips into the country's manufacturing industries in order to provide maintenance-on-demand services. ®

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