Novell and Tencent, reportedly China's biggest Internet service portal, have set up a research lab in Shenzhen, China, to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform.

Tencent, which is supposed to have 480 million active users and 568.6 million IM accounts, is going to use SUSE Linux and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system.

It's also suppose to use Novell's intelligent workload management solutions, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create an IDC cloud platform that users can use to build, purchase and run business apps. IDC vendors typically lease resources from solution providers and resell them.

Most people are focusing on its search results and other basic services. Despite the rising temperature Google still has one-third of the Chinese search market. Many Chinese academics, especially those fluent in English (and they have lots more than we have Chinese speakers) depend on Google.Com.

But I don’t think these are Google’s primary weapons. The two I look at most closely are:

• Infrastructure
• Open source process

Both could be overcome, but let’s look at them more closely.