Kylin to take on global giants with new OS

Kylin Software, a newly merged company from the union of the two leading domestic software and operating system makers－China Standard Software and Tianjin Kylin Information, will develop an independent OS under the name of Kylin, which is expected to generate an industrial value of 1 trillion yuan ($141.2 billion), a company executive said.

"Riding on the tide of artificial intelligence, mobile computing and cloud-connected next generation technologies, the company will build three products. They are a desktop and server operating system, a cloud operating system and an embedded operating system," Kylin Software vice-general manager Li Zhenning said.

The two companies were previously under China Electronics Corp. They also announced they were joining hands with the Tianjin municipal government to develop a self-independent OS whose headquarters will be in the North China municipality.

CEC said it will invest tens of billions of yuan and nurture an elite team of over 10,000 researchers to develop a domestic operating system in the next five years.

"The evolution of the Kylin OS is expected to open a new chapter for China, changing the status quo that local OS companies are mostly small scale with a distorted and segmented market," he said.

To achieve those targets, Li said the top challenge would be to harness human resources as the company tries to establish a team of over 10,000 in the next five years in Tianjin.

"To tackle the challenges, our latest move will see the formation of a 1,000-people team this year. We will partner with local software and hardware companies to build user-friendly homegrown software and hardware platforms and solutions," he said.

In the future, the company expects China's OS market to be more compatible, and it will help build a better ecology among related industries.

Zhou Shengxi, the chief economist of the Tianjin Municipal Industry and Information Technology Bureau, said they are making efforts to "foster an industrial ecology among homegrown chip Phytium, OS maker Tianjin Kylin, and supercomputers. Tianhe supercomputer and supercomputer maker Shuguang are headquartered in the city."

China's software OS industry is currently dominated by foreign companies such as Microsoft's Windows, Google's Android and Apple's Mac OS.

Development of the Phytium-Kylin systems is now changing the situation as it has become a major OS used in the country's banking and military sectors.

Kong Jinzhu, general manager of the Tianjin Kylin Information Technology Co Ltd, said that the combined investment for the top 10 Chinese OS makers was no more than 1 percent of the figure invested by Microsoft.

Ni Guangnan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said more efforts are needed to accelerate independent innovations in core technologies and establish a safe domestic information technology system.

China Standard Software and Tianjin Kylin partly shared the name of Kylin in their products.

The NeoKylin Linux OS developed by China Standard Software and the Kylin server OS developed by Tianjin Kylin are the two most important domestic OS products in the market. The logo of the two systems is Kylin, an auspicious animal in Chinese culture.

The NeoKylin Linux OS fully supports mainstream open hardware platforms at home and abroad, covering the server version and the desktop version, and it is compatible with more than 4,000 software and hardware products, said Han Naiping, general manager of China Standard Software.