research paper on direct marketing

Direct Marketing Issues in Emerging Markets—Review and Proposition

• First Online: 25 February 2021

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• Mahuya Adhikary 2 &
• Atanu Adhikari 3  

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The advent of several traditional and non-traditional communications has prompted many manufacturers and retailers in emerging economies to redesign their traditional marketing channel structures by engaging in direct marketing routes. This chapter demonstrates the impact of direct marketing on consumer behaviour in emerging markets. We primarily illustrate how direct marketing affects the degree to which customers accept direct communication as a substitute and complement of indirect communication for buying at a traditional store or an online platform. In this chapter, we develop the related theory, a scholastic argument, and bring several propositions related to direct marketing effects in emerging economies.

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Adhikary, M., Adhikari, A. (2020). Direct Marketing Issues in Emerging Markets—Review and Proposition. In: Adhikari, A. (eds) Services Marketing Issues in Emerging Economies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8787-0_6

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Marketing Intelligence & Planning

ISSN : 0263-4503

Article publication date: 1 February 1998

Increasing competitiveness in the marketplace has led to pressure being applied to brands and past poor brand management in the 1980s saw brands suffering under short‐term, profitability‐based aims. The need for stability throughout the commercial environment in the 1990s has led to the longer‐term view now being adopted by marketing practitioners. This paper will highlight how direct marketing can be employed as a strategic marketing management tool to build a brand through the establishment of a mutually beneficial relationship. In this paper the authors will demonstrate the important role that direct marketing can play in establishing and building a brand through the in‐depth analysis of a single case study within the business‐to‐business arena. By using the case study approach the authors will combine relevant theory and practice to illustrate the potential of direct marketing in brand building.

• Brand loyalty
• Corporate image
• Direct marketing
• Organizational development
• Public sector

Gardiner, P. and Quinton, S. (1998), "Building brands using direct marketing ‐ a case study", Marketing Intelligence & Planning , Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 6-11. https://doi.org/10.1108/02634509810199418

Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited

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The direct marketing-direct consumer gap: qualitative insights

2001, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal

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Call for Papers | Journal of International Marketing: Digital Platforms and Ecosystems in International Marketing

The business world has witnessed the emergence of new digital technologies and business models in the past two decades. For example, the rise of digital platform business models in retail and IT services has disrupted traditional models, making firms reconsider their business strategies and creating new opportunities for marketers to create value for buyers and other stakeholders (Perren and Kozinets 2018). Digital platforms intermediate between sellers, buyers, and other stakeholders via digital architecture often manifested as mobile and web applications (e.g., sharing economy platforms; Kozlenkova et al. 2021). The platform firm decides on the extent of governance accountability it will take in the entire value-creation process. Ecosystems, of which platforms can be a part, are networks of independent but interdependent actors participating in an industry’s or economic sector’s value chain (Nambisan, Zahra, and Luo 2019). Both platforms and ecosystems create value via direct and indirect network externalities (Kumar, Nim, and Agarwal 2021; Sridhar, Mantrala, Naik, Thorson 2011; ), with value cocreation at the core of actors’ business models and strategies.

In today’s Internet Age, digital platforms have no geographic borders. Platform business models are becoming a go-to strategy for international firms across the globe. For example, retailers are increasingly considering the platformization of their brands to add more value to their core offerings (Wichmann, Wiegand, and Reinartz 2022). With the help of digital technologies, it has become easier to expand into multiple markets simultaneously without diluting the supply chain advantages and brand positioning. Consider the low-cost e-commerce firm Temu from China, operating in more than 50 global markets and developing a strong ecosystem after launching in 2022. Temu consumers get access to various global sellers, making the domestic and international markets more competitive (Deighton 2023).

At the same time, marketers with new ways to create and capture value get access to an expanded target market. For example, as an entertainment platform, Netflix has launched different product and subscription pricing strategies in markets like India to compete with Disney, Amazon, and Reliance (Sull and Turconi 2021). Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter connect project creators and backers across the globe. Social media platforms have further amplified the reach of such retail and commerce platforms across both business and consumer markets (Gao et al. 2018). Thus, digital platforms and ecosystems can be considered a contemporary approach to internationalization and thereby are of great interest to marketing managers, policy makers, and regulators in both developed and emerging markets (Hewett et al. 2022).

However, research and knowledge of the dynamics of digital platforms and ecosystems in international marketing is still rather limited. A deeper understanding of how digital platforms can be utilized in the global marketing efforts of businesses is needed. Understanding digital platforms utilized across markets for sustainability, water conservation, health care, and other pressing issues and from the perspectives of NGOs and governments is urgently needed (Falcke, Zobel, and Comello 2024).

The purpose of this special issue, therefore, is to significantly advance research investigating the role of platforms and ecosystem business models across various facets of international marketing. Of special interest are papers focusing on the evolution and formation of digital platform-based global marketing strategies and business models, providing concepts, frameworks, theories, and empirical insights helpful for customers, firms, regulators, policy makers, and governments.

Research bearing on (but not limited to) the following questions is welcome: 

• Different modes of platforms and ecosystems as internationalization approaches: a. How orchestrator firms build digital and nondigital architecture across different markets while entering or growing in a market. b. How these modes differ due to within and across market heterogeneity leading to different marketing strategies. c. How the consumer culture of a market complements the different modes.
• Impact of platform and ecosystem approach on the international marketing mix: a. How stakeholders drive or impact product development and innovation processes. b. How integrating private label brands by platforms and using seller data impacts platform outcomes. c. How pricing strategies evolve and change over time with platforms and ecosystem approaches. d. How subscription and non-subscription pricing strategies evolve across various markets. e. How the supply chain and distribution network strengthens or weakens as the industry moves toward platform and ecosystem approaches. f. How the orchestrator firm develops or chooses partners for various marketing activities across and within developed and developing markets. g. How the promotion mix of the platform and ecosystem-based offering differ from traditional business models within and across industries (B2B vs. B2C) and markets. h. How culture interacts with platform and ecosystem strategies, and how this impacts firms and other stakeholders.
• Impact on market structure, competition, and consumer and stakeholder welfare: a. Do platforms and ecosystems command higher market power, impacting the welfare of consumers and other stakeholders? b. Do platform and ecosystems approaches vary across industries (e.g., retail, energy, transportation)? How does these approaches impact the marketing mix in a market? c. Does higher platform power lead to consumer and stakeholder welfare erosion? d. How can marketers navigate the competition and coopetition to make a platform successful across various markets? e. What lessons can be learned from technology platforms like Google and Apple to navigate the tricky technological and regulatory landscape? f. What is the role of government and regulatory bodies in supporting or deterring the platform’s growth to ensure the welfare of stakeholders? g. Do dark patterns affect customer welfare? (For example, subscription pricing charges and policies that are not visible to consumers and the role of regulators.) h. Is there a loss of local livelihood that affects sellers as platforms integrate private label brands? i. What is the impact of the rise of circular platforms on sustainable value chains and stakeholders across developed and developing markets?
• Customer attitudes and actions within and across platforms and ecosystems: a. Conceptual similarity for customer-based outcomes for platform firms and other stakeholders. b. Measurement of customer experience, satisfaction, and engagement with digital platforms and ecosystems. c. Management of failures and customer recovery in multisided platforms and ecosystems. d. Customer journey management across various digital and nondigital touchpoints in platforms and ecosystems. e. Interdependence of consumers’ relationships with and perceptions of brands or partners operating across platforms and ecosystems. f. How marketers can explore circular platforms and ecosystems to help firms be sustainable value chains and positive customer attitudes. g. Platform exploitation by customers and disintermediation.

This list of topics and questions is reflective but not exhaustive of the current state of industry and academic literature. We call for more interdisciplinary and foundational research to expand the horizons of platforms and ecosystems literature in International Marketing. We invite all types of research—qualitative, behavioral, and empirical—and encourage researchers to identify multiple sources of data and motivation for this special issue.

Submission Process

All manuscripts will be reviewed as a cohort for this special issue of the Journal of International Marketing. Manuscripts must be submitted between March 1, 2025 and May 30, 2025. All submissions will go through Journal of International Marketing ’s double-anonymized review and follow standard norms and processes. Submissions must be made via the journal’s ScholarOne site , with author guidelines available here . For any queries, feel free to reach out to the special issue editors.

Special Issue Editors

Nandini Nim, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Texas at El Paso (email: [email protected] )

Murali Krishna Mantrala, Ned Fleming Professor of Marketing, University of Kansas (email: [email protected] )

Ayşegül Özsomer, Professor, Koç University, and Editor in Chief, Journal of International Marketing (email: [email protected] )

Adner, Ron (2022), “Sharing Value for Ecosystem Success,”  MIT Sloan Management Review , 63 (2), 85–90.

Deighton, John (2023), “How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model,” Harvard Business School (April 25), https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/how-shein-and-temu-conquered-fast-fashion-and-forged-a-new-business-model .

Falcke, Lukas, Ann-Kristin Zobel, and Stephen D. Comello (2024), “How Firms Realign to Tackle the Grand Challenge of Climate Change: An Innovation Ecosystems Perspective,”  Journal of Product Innovation Management , 41 (2), 403–27.

Gao, Hongzhi, Mary Tate, Hongxia Zhang, Shijiao Chen, and Bing Liang (2018). “Social Media Ties Strategy in International Branding: An Application of Resource-Based Theory.  Journal of International Marketing , 26 (3), 45–69.

Hewett, Kelly, G. Tomas M. Hult, Murali K. Mantrala, Nandini Nim, and Kiran Pedada (2022), “Cross-Border Marketing Ecosystem Orchestration: A Conceptualization of Its Determinants and Boundary Conditions,”  International Journal of Research in Marketing , 39 (2), 619–38.

Kozlenkova, Irina V., Ju-Yeon Lee, Diandian Xiang, and Robert W. Palmatier (2021), “Sharing Economy: International Marketing Strategies,”  Journal of International Business Studies , 52, 1445–73.

Kumar, V., Nandini Nim, and Amit Agarwal (2021), “Platform-Based Mobile Payments Adoption in Emerging and Developed Countries: Role of Country-Level Heterogeneity and Network Effects,”  Journal of International Business Studies , 52, 1529–58.

Nambisan, Satish, Shaker A. Zahra, and Yadong Luo (2019), “Global Platforms and Ecosystems: Implications for International Business Theories,”  Journal of International Business Studies , 50, 1464–86.

Perren, Rebeca and Robert V. Kozinets (2018), “Lateral Exchange Markets: How Social Platforms Operate in a Networked Economy,”  Journal of Marketing , 82 (1), 20–36.

Sridhar, Shrihari, Murali K. Mantrala, Prasad A. Naik, and Esther Thorson. “Dynamic marketing budgeting for platform firms: Theory, evidence, and application.”  Journal of Marketing Research  48, no. 6 (2011): 929-943.

Sull, Donald and Stefano Turconi (2021), “Netflix Goes to Bollywood,” Teacher Resources Library, MIT Sloan School of Management (February 22), https://mitsloan.mit.edu/teaching-resources-library/netflix-goes-to-bollywood.

Wichmann, Julian R.K., Nico Wiegand, and Werner J. Reinartz (2022), “The Platformization of Brands,”  Journal of Marketing , 86 (1), 109–31.

Other Resources

Adner, Ron (2017). Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy,”  Journal of Management , 43 (1), 39–58.

Akaka, Melissa A., Stephen L. Vargo, and Robert F. Lusch (2013), “The Complexity Of Context: A Service Ecosystems Approach for International Marketing,”  Journal of International Marketing , 21 (4), 1–20.

Gawer, Annabelle and Michael A. Cusumano (2014). “Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation,”  Journal of Product Innovation Management , 31 (3), 417–33.

Glavas, Charmaine, Shane Mathews, and Rebekah Russell-Bennett (2019), “Knowledge Acquisition via Internet-Enabled Platforms: Examining Incrementally and Non-Incrementally Internationalizing SMEs,”  International Marketing Review , 36 (1), 74–107.

Kanuri, Vamsi K., Murali K. Mantrala, and Esther Thorson (2017), “Optimizing a Menu of Multiformat Subscription Plans for Ad-Supported Media Platforms,”  Journal of Marketing , 81 (2), 45–63.

Zhou, Qiang (Kris), B.J. Allen, Richard T. Gretz, and Mark B. Houston (2022), “Platform Exploitation: When Service Agents Defect with Customers from Online Service Platforms,”  Journal of Marketing , 86 (2), 105–25.

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Cloud in China: The outlook for 2025

After a relatively slow start, China has made rapid strides in migrating to cloud computing and now has the world’s second-largest market after the United States. China’s public cloud is expected to more than double in size in the next few years, from $32 billion in 2021 to $90 billion by 2025. 1 Data from Gartner.

To date, China’s cloud adoption has been led largely by consumer-facing companies, which need elastic, on-demand access to unlimited computing power to help them respond to huge fluctuations in customer demand. During China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, for instance, e-commerce traffic, transactions, and gross merchandise volumes can reach up to 30 times normal daily levels. Popular live-commerce shows with real-time purchasing and audience interaction also make enormous demands on computer infrastructure. The streaming room of top influencers can have up to 100 million views and over $1 billion in presales in a single day.

About the research

For the McKinsey China Cloud Survey 2021, we surveyed 278 decision makers in enterprise IT, digital, and cloud from a wide range of sectors: IT, e-commerce, transport and logistics, education, retail, healthcare, auto, finance, real estate, hotel and restaurants, manufacturing, and industrial. The executives taking part came from local public and private companies, state-owned enterprises, and multinational corporations.

The survey was designed to gather data and generate insights in four main areas: cloud-adoption status and plans, motivation to shift to cloud, cloud purchasing factors, and challenges and capability gaps.

To be selected for the sample, companies needed to have annual revenues in excess of 1 billion renminbi, a workforce of more than 500 employees, and a digital transformation already under way or at the planning stage. The purpose of the survey was not to provide a representative view of the market but to generate indicative insights into cloud adoption in China.

Consumer-driven growth will remain an important driver of cloud adoption, but we believe the next wave of migration could be spearheaded by China’s critical industrial and manufacturing sectors. To better understand the developing cloud landscape in China, we surveyed 278 decision makers in enterprise IT, digital, and cloud from a wide range of sectors, and derived insights about where business value is likely to be created in the next few years (see sidebar, “About the research”).

Private cloud remains prominent in China’s hybrid and multicloud future

Over the next few years, the pace of China’s cloud migration will be broadly in step with the rest of the world’s, with a 19-percentage-point increase expected in IT workloads shifting to cloud between 2021 and 2025. But China differs from other countries in its high proportion of private cloud, which is expected to reach 42 percent by 2025, compared with 36 percent for public cloud. 1 “Public cloud” refers to on-demand, pay-by-use services and infrastructure offered and maintained by a cloud service provider; “private cloud” refers to self-hosted, dedicated hardware running packaged software to provide consumable services; and “traditional server” refers to self-hosted, dedicated hardware with no packaged software providing consumable services.

Only 11 percent of the companies in our survey intend to be mostly on public cloud. The remainder will continue to combine private cloud with traditional servers or use hybrid cloud , and 49 percent intend to become cloud native. Demand for private-cloud customization is very high in China, constraining scalability and profitability. Our analysis suggests that companies typically choose private cloud because they doubt their ability to configure public cloud securely, operate in a regulated sector such as financial services, or prefer to keep data in house.

Most Chinese enterprises are not keen on recurring-cost models for enterprise IT and software spending, preferring instead to make one-off or up-front payments to capitalize IT and software costs (and use up any remaining annual IT budget). As a result, cloud service providers (CSPs) seeking growth in China will need a strong value proposition in private as well as public cloud and the ability to support enterprises in managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure. They will also face the challenge of finding a scalable economics model and managing short- to medium-term economics that are likely to be less attractive than in developed markets.

When enterprises are selecting CSPs, just 19 percent intend to use a single provider, while 76 percent intend to partner with multiple CSPs. Only 5 percent believe they can build cloud themselves without external help.

The two most important sectors economically lag in cloud adoption

While sectors with numerous tech-savvy and digital-native companies, such as e-commerce and education, have shifted a significant portion of their IT workloads to the cloud, others have not—notably, the labor-intensive industrial and manufacturing sectors that contribute more than a quarter of China’s GDP . But that could quickly change given the latest national policy guidance.

In its 14th five-year plan for 2021–25, China seeks to transform the industrial and manufacturing sectors by boosting digitization and productivity to offset rising labor costs and slowing population growth. 1 The People’s Republic of China’s 14th five-year plan, covering the years 2021–2025, was passed by the Chinese parliament, the National People’s Congress, in March 2021. The plan calls for the adoption of industrial internet-platform applications to triple from 15 to 45 percent, and the digitization of management and operations to increase from 55 to 68 percent in product research and development (R&D), manufacturing execution, internal operations, maintenance services, and similar processes. As a result, the industrial sector is poised for transformation, with 32 percent of local IT workloads expected to migrate to (mostly private) cloud by 2025. Travel, transport, and logistics is expected to see the next-highest shift to cloud, at 26 percent.

Business growth is the biggest reason for migration

Our survey found that the three most important reasons for migrating to cloud were the need to scale fast to support business growth (cited by 60 percent of executives as one of their top two reasons), the need to increase IT efficiency (43 percent), and the need for high availability and resiliency (36 percent).

Notably, only 17 percent of executives said their main reason for migrating was to gain access to software as a service (SaaS). This is understandable given the size of China’s SaaS market, which was worth just $5.2 billion in 2020, a tiny fraction of the $120 billion US market. The broad adoption of SaaS applications and tools would unlock enormous opportunities for innovation and value creation, but it would require a fundamental shift in Chinese companies’ willingness to pay for software.

The biggest barrier to migration is the perceived difficulty and cost

When asked to identify their top two concerns about cloud adoption, 94 percent of survey respondents cited the cost and difficulty of migration, security, and regulatory compliance. By contrast, only 16 percent were concerned about the lack of a compelling business case.

This suggests enterprises have yet to fully appreciate cloud’s ability to improve efficiency, boost productivity, and capture business value. Clear messages about how revenues and margins can be enhanced by adopting cloud could help CSPs and technology providers convince businesses to make the shift.

Cloud leaders have more than 70 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud

Clear differences in cloud adoption have emerged between companies:

— Leaders had more than 70 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud in 2021 and expect to reach 90 percent by 2025. We subdivided them into two segments: Public-cloud leaders (16 percent of the survey sample) are typically consumer-facing enterprises that look to their CSPs mainly for technical performance and support with key accounts. Private-cloud leaders (21 percent of the sample) are typically state-owned enterprises, financial and real estate firms, or traditional manufacturing and industrial companies; they favor private-cloud and hybrid solutions because of security, regulatory, or data-compliance constraints or latency requirements, 1 Latency requirements refer to the need to minimize communication times between client requests from local devices and the CSP’s cloud infrastructure. and are therefore unlikely to move to public cloud.

— Followers (34 percent of the sample) had between 50 and 70 percent of their IT workloads hosted on the cloud in 2021, with a roughly even split between public and private cloud. Most followers are multinational corporations or relatively price-sensitive businesses. They are starting to accelerate their cloud migrations, but many are struggling with the shift to a new cloud operating model.

— Laggards (29 percent of the sample) had only 31 percent of their IT workloads on the cloud—less than half the share for leaders—in 2021. On average, two-thirds of their workloads are still hosted on traditional servers, typically because they began their digital transformation late and lack clear road maps and business support for cloud. Their share of IT workloads on the cloud is expected to rise sharply, to 60 percent by 2025, but they will still lag well behind leaders’ 90 percent. It’s worth noting that the largest relative increase in cloud adoption in the next three years is expected to come from laggards (up by 29 percentage points) and followers (20 percentage points).

In terms of public-cloud adoption, there is an enormous gap between laggards, with only 13 percent of their IT workloads on the public cloud in 2021, and public-cloud leaders, with 58 percent. This gap should persist to 2025, when the share of IT workloads on the public cloud is projected to be 72 percent for public-cloud leaders but only 24 percent for laggards.

Internal business-facing functions have the greatest gaps in cloud adoption

The aggregate numbers for China’s cloud-based IT workloads—roughly 60 percent in 2021, rising to 78 percent in 2025—mask wide variations in adoption rates between different functions and between leaders and laggards within functions. Consumer-facing functions, such as marketing and sales and service operations, have the highest average adoption rates, at 69 percent and 64 percent, respectively, while more internal functions, such as logistics, manufacturing, and risk, have the lowest. One of the largest gaps within a function is in strategy and corporate finance, where leaders average 47 percent adoption and laggards just 11 percent.

We broke these nine functions into 40 “domains,” or groups of business use cases, and found that the average cloud adoption rate in each domain varied enormously, from less than 5 percent to 60 percent. We then broke these 40 domains down across 12 industry sectors and found that the average adoption rate by domain and industry was less than 25 percent. This further demonstrates that Chinese companies still have enormous opportunities to develop, adopt, and scale use cases that have a direct impact on revenues and margins.

Examples of promising domains with low adoption rates include:

— Marketing and sales: customer-retention management, pricing and promotions, personalization, omnichannel fulfillment

— Service operations: contact-center automation, chatbots, asset tracking and maintenance

— Product development: process design R&D

— Supply chain: sales and parts forecasting, store operations, inventory and parts optimization, procurement, spend analytics

— Manufacturing: digital twins and 3-D modeling simulations, yield and throughput optimization, predictive maintenance

— Human resources: performance management, optimization of workforce deployment, sales force execution

Key industry-specific use cases with direct business impact offer the greatest potential for cloud pull-through

The opportunities to improve revenue or EBITDA through industry-specific use cases will be the most powerful factor in persuading lagging sectors and businesses to adopt cloud. Our experience is that cloud adoption alone is not enough to unlock business value. Instead, enterprises need to reimagine how business models and processes can be improved through applications and solutions that take advantage of cloud. These use cases are likely to be developed and implemented through partnerships between CSPs, technology providers, and the enterprises themselves.

One example is the digital twins 1 Digital twins virtually replicate real-world assets for use in simulations. used to simulate, test, and validate new manufacturing processes before they are put into full-scale production. By using digital twins, a supplier of machinery, robotics, or automated systems can typically reduce R&D costs by 5 to 10 percent in product manufacturing and 40 to 50 percent in process design. Yet only about a fifth of the manufacturing and automotive companies in our survey—and none of the industrial companies—had adopted digital twins or other forms of cloud-based simulation in product development.

Top Chinese CSPs lead the market, but global CSPs still have substantial value pools to address

In our survey, 70 percent of respondents expressed a strong preference for Chinese cloud service providers. That leaves 30 percent of the market that could be realistically addressed by global CSPs, comprising the 10 percent of companies that strongly prefer global CSPs plus the 20 percent that are open to CSPs from any region.

When assessing CSPs, the top three buying factors for Chinese enterprises are cybersecurity and data compliance, performance and technical requirements, and key account and operations support. Other significant factors include domain-specific solutions and value for money. The leading Chinese CSPs are perceived to be at least twice as strong as other competitors across almost all key buying factors.

Although global CSPs are not the preferred choice for most Chinese companies, roughly 30 percent of companies are open to using global providers, which translates into a total addressable cloud market of $30 billion to $70 billion by 2025. Our survey indicates that public cloud could account for 45 percent of this total addressable market, similar in size to the entire public-cloud market in Germany—the fifth largest in the world at $25 billion.

What enterprises and CSPs can do to accelerate cloud journeys

Businesses wanting to accelerate their shift to cloud and capture some of the more than $1 trillion of value at stake need to ensure that they take the right approach and put key enablers in place. Following are some of the most important steps:

• Target investments at business domains where cloud can enable revenue and margin improvements. In our experience, carefully selecting applications within a specific domain to move to the cloud and sequencing these moves thoughtfully delivers far more business benefit than a wholesale “lift and shift” approach aimed at cutting IT costs. Applications should be aligned to specific business cases and quantifiable business value so they can be prioritized and tracked.
• Set up a governance model that facilitates collaboration between IT and the business. To manage the strategy and governance of their cloud migration, successful companies create a business-execution office comprising business, finance, and technology leaders, who are jointly responsible for delivering the migration and defining business value, key performance indicators (KPIs), migration paths, economic models, and prioritization criteria. The business-execution office is often supplemented by a cloud center of excellence made up of engineers, architects, and product designers. Their role is to design the foundational reference architecture, translate migration scenarios into deployable archetypes, integrate modern ways of working into a cloud-native operating model, facilitate rapid adoption across the business, and champion site-reliability engineering to optimize the cloud’s operational efficiency.
• Build a cloud-native operating model to unify and standardize infrastructure management and technology delivery. To prevent legacy IT processes, manual interventions, and multiple handoffs from impairing migration speed and quality, successful companies redesign the entire technology-delivery process. They reengineer every step—from architecture design and infrastructure-resource provisioning, through application development, testing, and deployment, to production, monitoring, and incident handling. They also ensure that the new processes are highly automated and have extensive self-service functionalities to provide a seamless developer experience.

For their part, global CSPs seeking success in the Chinese market could target sectors where they can bring global best practices to bear and offer a suite of technology solutions to accelerate business value creation. They could help clients to define their cloud target state, focus on how to create value, plan a clear migration route with separate paths for legacy and modern applications, manage a hybrid model during the transition, and support private- and public-cloud operations thereafter. Along with local CSPs, system integrators, ecosystem technology providers, and coaching and change-management firms, they will also participate in cloud ecosystems to build technology solutions that improve outcomes for Chinese businesses.

China’s cloud migration is now entering its second wave. Adoption in the next few years will be driven by the introduction of an array of industry-specific solutions to improve business performance.

Kai Shen is a partner in McKinsey’s Shenzhen office, Anand Swaminathan is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, Xiaoxiao Tong is an expert in the Shanghai office, and Kevin Wei Wang is a senior partner in the Hong Kong office.

The authors wish to thank Xinghong Fang, Jayne Giemzo, Chris Thomas, Joanna Wu, Tiff Wu, and Jeff Yang for their contributions to this article.

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Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

At michigan state university, first direct measurement of beryllium-7 electron-capture reported in physical review c paper.

In a recent paper published by  Physical Review C (“First direct  7 Be electron-capture  Q -value measurement toward high-precision searches for neutrino physics beyond the Standard Model”), scientists from Central Michigan University , McGill University , TRIUMF , Colorado School of Mines , and FRIB reported the first direct measurement of the beryllium-7 electron-capture decay value using Penning trap mass spectrometry (PTMS). 

The experiment was performed using the Low Energy Beam and Ion Trap (LEBIT) Penning trap at FRIB and utilized the Batch-Mode Ion-Source (BMIS) to deliver the unstable beryllium-7 samples. 

The result of the experiment yielded a measurement three times more precise than any previous determination. The scientists noted that the improved precision and accuracy of the beryllium-7 decay value is critical for ongoing experiments that measure the recoiling nucleus in this system as a signature to search for beyond the Standard Model neutrino physics using beryllium-7-doped superconducting sensors. 

The experiment extended the capabilities of LEBIT and used the first low-energy beam to be delivered by BMIS at FRIB for PTMS. It also measured the lightest-mass isotope at the time with LEBIT. 

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Office of Nuclear Physics, the National Science Foundation, Michigan State University, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Central Michigan University, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Michigan State University (MSU) operates the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) as a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. User facility operation is supported by the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics as one of 28 DOE-SC user facilities.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of today’s most pressing challenges. For more information, visit energy.gov/science .