Baidu Open Cloud launches video streaming, image processing, IoT services

Chinese technology company Baidu today announced the launch of a few new services within its Baidu Open Cloud public cloud infrastructure portfolio.

Baidu TianSuan (Smart Big Data) lets customers “collect, store, process and analyze big data,” Baidu said in a statement.

Baidu TianXiang (Smart Multimedia Cloud) includes face recognition and live video streaming, while Baidu TianGong (Intelligent IoT Service) is a full-stack platform for integrating cloud applications with internet-connected devices.

The additions bring Baidu more in line with the world’s leading cloud infrastructure providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Amazon and Microsoft have both introduced Internet of Things (IoT) services. Google has launched the Cloud Vision API that gives developers an easy way to do image recognition, while Microsoft recently launched the Cognitive Services portfolio. AWS, the biggest public cloud, intends to introduce new “machine learning and deep learning, artificial intelligence services … in the coming months,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said last month at the AWS Public Sector Summit.

In China, Baidu is a major technology company, with a widely used search engine and many mobile apps. China-based Alibaba also offers public cloud services. By contrast, Amazon and Microsoft, both based in the U.S., have called in partners to help them launch cloud regions to mainland China.

Update on July 18: Baidu has provided VentureBeat with a more detailed list of the new services.

Baidu TianSuan comprises Baidu MapReduce (BMR) with support for Spark, HBase, Hive, Hue, Pig, and Mahout; Baidu Machine Learning; Baidu Deep Learning Platform Paddle, which is a GPU-backed managed implementation of Baidu’s Paddle deep learning framework; the OLAP Engine cloud data warehouse with MySQL support; Baidu Elasticsearch; the Baidu Log Service (BLS); Baidu BigSQL, which is Spark SQL as a service; and a Kafka managed service.

Baidu TianXiang includes a Media Cloud Transcoder, Video On Demand (VOD), Optical Character Recognition, and Document services.

Baidu TianGong contains an IoT Hub, an IoT Parser, IoT Device, Baidu Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis, TSDB, and a Rule Engine.