It’s Saturday morning. I’m in Paris for a three-hour layover to a connecting flight on my way back from Shenzhen, China, where I attended the fifth Tencent Cloud International Summit. While my colleagues and I reflected on our overall summit impressions in a separate blog, I’m going to focus here on Tencent’s sovereign cloud offering. As Tencent pursues its overseas business expansion through its sovereign cloud solution — the Tencent Cloud Enterprise (TCE) — here’s what international customers should know about it:
- Tencent has a clear and deliberate sovereign cloud strategy. Unlike other vendors in the APAC region — like Alibaba — Tencent has decided to be very clear and deliberate on its sovereign cloud offering, which we’ll assess further in our upcoming Sovereign Cloud Platform Landscape. Tencent isn’t new to the digital sovereignty challenges of local and foreign customers and has purposefully developed a full-stack platform specifically designed to overcome them.
- TCE is a full-stack cloud platform. TCE’s platform shares the same source code as Tencent’s public cloud. Having the same architecture provides a strong guarantee for continuous investment into the product. All regions and availability zones can be managed by one unified web portal, while the public and the private cloud have the same management logic. TCE also appears highly scalable, allowing customers to start with a single region and expand to multiple regions and availability zones as needed.
- The platform comes with security features and has high hardware compatibility. TCE offers a wide range of security products — including operations security, terminal security, and data security — ensuring comprehensive protection for its customers. It’s also important to highlight TCE’s compatibility with mainstream hardware manufacturers like Cisco, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo. Customers can choose their hardware and software without being bound to specific vendors. This is a perk for clients with various sovereign hardware requirements across regions and industries.
- TCE caters to specific customer segments and scenarios. TCE can provide fully localized deployment and integrated PaaS and operation products to financial and government institutions per their requirements. Telecom operators can reuse existing hardware, integrate third-party software, and build industry clouds to sell resources; small and medium-sized enterprises using virtualization platforms — such as VMware and Nutanix — can benefit from TCE’s flexible business models and scalable solutions. Unlike US hyperscalers, Tencent isn’t trying to boil the ocean. Instead, it’s taking a more surgical approach to the sovereign cloud market.
- A sound base of customer case studies contributes to TCE’s credibility. China Construction Bank is building the world’s largest financial cloud platform, supporting over 80,000 physical hosts and migrating core banking systems to TCE. Foxconn is expanding its TCE platform from one to four regions, supporting cross-country operations and improving efficiency through cloud edge deployment. On top of this, Tencent is now collaborating with Freel to provide AI computing services and is expanding the project from Malaysia to Thailand.
Tencent is now focusing on improvements in TCE’s intelligent computing and ecosystem adaptation, as well as enhancing the platform’s high availability and UX. There are plans to adapt to more GPU models, improve GPU resource monitoring, and add more AI agents and regulated functions.
Curious about how Tencent and Chinese hyperscalers compare in the sovereign cloud market? Reach out to Forrester and schedule a guidance session or an inquiry to help guide your sovereign cloud strategy and dig deeper into the broader concept of digital sovereignty.
