Chen Liming, vice-president of IBM Global, at the 2nd World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Dec 18. [Photo by Wang Chengmeng/chinadaily.com.cn]

At the Second World Internet Conference in the town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, Chen Liming, vice-president of IBM Global, told a forum on Dec 18 of how he sees the value of cloud computing in its smart, innovative features.

Chen, who is also chairman of IBM Greater China, mentioned an example of this by describing how the US telecoms powerhouse AT&T worked with Mueller Water Products to install acoustic sensors in water pipes and used IBM's cloud computing technology to do data analysis to monitor the pipes and find problems in advance.

If that sort of technology can be widely applied to urban management, Chen continued, those tragic explosions in Tianjin and Qingdao might have been avoided, but that, currently many companies are not aware of big data and cloud computing's technological advantages, making it difficult for the technology to do what it can.

A survey of 257 companies across more than a dozen industries showed that only 47.7 percent of Internet companies use cloud computing technologies, with 15.6 percent of traditional enterprises in that state and fewer than 25 percent of small-to-mid-sized ones.

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing that shares resources, data and information provided to computers and other devices on-demand to provide users and enterprises with various ways to store and process their data in third-party data centers.

The WIC, which ran Dec 16-18, brought together more than 2,000 state leaders, government officials, business leaders, Internet titans, and experts from dozens of countries and regions. Its 10 forums allowed for an exchange of views on everything from Internet culture and communications, to innovation and development, digital economic cooperation, the Internet Plus, and the digital Silk Road, to cyber security and cyberspace governance.