Last week I was fortunate to be able to visit China for the first time.  I was presenting at our ASPAC CIO summit in Hangzhou which is about two hours south of Shanghai.  The event brought together about 20 of our key customers in the ASPAC region to allow us to update them on GXS, our solutions and an opportunity to hear from some customers and partners on how they are managing their B2B infrastructures.  It was interesting for me to hear first hand about some of the challenges they faced, especially from automotive and high tech companies, on how they have established their supply chains in this region.  Establishing these supply chains has been even more difficult for western based companies who not only have to work in a completely different culture and environment but they also have to overcome some significant IT related infrastructure challenges as well. 

China has been making great strides in improving both their IT and transportation infrastructures recently, both are key enablers for the growth of their economy. Take their transportation infrastructure for example, I landed at Shanghai airport last Wednesday morning, their International Terminal was only a few months old, nearly half a mile long, and apart from our flight arrival, the terminal was more or less empty when we arrived.  The airport is connected to the centre of Shanghai via a state of the art Maglev train system, allowing you to get to Shanghai in less than 30 minutes.

To the south of the airport a new three lane toll road allows you to reach the southern regions around Shanghai with great ease. I must have travelled on this toll road for at least eighty miles and I hardly saw any other cars.  No doubt in a few years time, as more and more cars find their way onto these roads, they will become as busy as other major highways around the world. The key thing here is that the Chinese transport authorities have had the foresight to put this superb transportation infrastructure in place now to allow the region to start planning for future growth.  There is no doubt that the Beijing Olympics have had an impact as well, many visitors from western countries will be visiting some of the great tourist hot spots around Shanghai.  This Olympics will be a showcase for China to demonstrate to western companies that they have the transportation infrastructure in place to allow them to get a foothold in this region. 

In addition to improved transport links, China is making great strides in improving its IT infrastructure.  Until recently it was the more prosperous areas on the east coast of China that have benefitted from having access to the internet.  Interestingly last week it was reported that internet usage in China has now surpassed the U.S with nearly 16% of China’s population using the internet. China has seen a 61% growth from 137million to 221 million users in the last year alone and by 2012 it is estimated that China will have 490million internet users.  Now this growth wasn’t due to an overnight improvement in the country’s phone and broadband network, nearly a third of this growth, 75million, was due to the rising popularity of Cyber Cafes.  Many users realising that Cyber Cafes have much faster broadband connections than the modem dial up connections found in many houses, well those houses that have a phone line installed.

Today’s internet is already bursting at the seams and you can imagine by 2012, with an influx of new internet users in China and other parts of the world, that the performance of the internet will dramatically slow down.  So as with China’s foresight to build a state of the art transportation network, what plans, if any, are in place for improving the performance of the internet? 

Well, in the same month that China became the largest user of the internet, a new internet infrastructure was announced by CERN, the original architects of today’s internet infrastructure.  They have built a global replacement for the internet which is estimated to be 10,000 times faster than today’s broadband connections allowing for example a full length feature film to be downloaded in a matter of seconds.  The project, know as ‘The Grid’ (a name probably inspired by the film The Matrix!) will become live this summer when the Large Hadron Collider Particle Accelerator becomes available for the first time. The grid will be used to transport the terabytes of data that are likely to be produced from this machine. 

Whereas today’s internet was created by linking together cables and routing equipment destined for making phone calls, The Grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres.  Within the next two years there are expected to be 200,000 servers connected to the grid around the world, providing unparalleled processing power.  The global fibre optic network is being built in a hub and spoke fashion, for example the UK regional hub has 8000 servers connected to the grid system already.  Most of these servers will be located at academic institutions, but how long will it be before the power of The Grid is made available to other users around the world? 

There are many parallels between the new infrastructure that CERN has created and GXS’ own ‘Trading Grid(R) ’ B2B infrastructure that has been implemented around the world.  We have world class hubs or data centres located in North America and Europe, connected by high speed OC12 fibre optic connections. We provide a means for any company, no matter what their technical capability to be able to connect to this network and begin trading with partners anywhere in the world.  We are investing a significant amount of money in our Trading Grid infrastructure as we believe that for companies to grow they will need access to a best in class B2B trading platform that will allow them to trade with partners any time, any place and anywhere around the world. 

So, an interesting trip for me, an opportunity to learn about a new culture and the rapid technological progress being made in this region.  But despite all this progress, one of my main memories from the trip was seeing a house being demolished at the side of the toll road leading from the airport.  Nothing unusual in this you may think until I tell you that this three storey house was being demolished by four men standing on the top floor pounding the brickwork using only sledgehammers!

In the meantime, if you have a quiet moment and you want to learn more about particle accelerators, you can find more information aboout them here