After two years of running wildly, where is the next step for the Tencent meeting

Economic Observation Network reporter Ren Xiaoning

On December 26, dozens of employees of Tencent Conference left Chengdu to return to Shenzhen, where they worked in the WeChat team of Chengdu enterprises for more than 5 months. After that, the enterprise WeChat Chengdu team will come to Shenzhen and continue to develop internal opening functions together with the Tencent conference team.

In January next year, a new version of WeChat for enterprises will be connected to the Tencent conference. In addition, the Tencent conference is also intensively prepared, and Tencent calendar, Tencent documents, translators and so on.

In November this year, Wu Zurong, vice president of Tencent Cloud and head of Tencent Conference, said with great emotion that the outside world paid more attention to the commercialization of Tencent conferences than Tencent. On the afternoon of December 27, a reporter from the Economic Observation Network asked him, so, what are Tencent's commercialization requirements for Tencent meetings? Wu Zurong said that in fact, the company did not make specific requirements for commercialization of them, and what everyone was most concerned about was how Tencent Conference formed a linkage and synergy with the enterprise WeChat and documents.

On December 25, 2019, Tencent Conference was born. In September last year, Tencent's conference users exceeded 100 million, and now there are more than 200 million users. Without the rapid growth of the epidemic, this product, which at first seemed to be used only for meetings, has made a lot of changes. In the next stage, where will tencent meetings go? Wu Zurong, vice president of Tencent Cloud and head of Tencent Conference, and Qian Min, general manager of Tencent Conference Product Center, answered reporters to this.

Open up tencent internally

In September last year, Tencent's conference users exceeded 100 million, and this year, the number of users broke 200 million. In Tencent's conference department, the number passed quietly, and it wasn't until a week later that they suddenly found that it had already exceeded 200 million, and there was no great joy or celebration.

The main focus of the team is to collaborate with other Tencent internal products. At present, Tencent Conference is working with Tencent Documents, and soon, all user conference modules of Enterprise WeChat will be provided by Tencent Conference, and after that, Tencent's accumulated voice-to-text and translation capabilities will also be launched at Tencent Conference.

"In a sense, it's the hope of the crowd. Whether it is a foreign or domestic suite, there is a common trend, that is, to achieve the same account access to each other. Wu Zurong explained.

The new version of enterprise WeChat that will be released next month has begun testing within Tencent, and they can use enterprise WeChat to book meetings, initiate meetings at any time, and record key points with documents during the meeting. Tencent Conference's 200 million users can seamlessly connect with enterprise WeChat users. At the same time, this means that the 400 million users of enterprise WeChat may become service users of Tencent Conference.

In the next step, Tencent Conference is still trying to develop the function of exchanging business cards, meeting at Tencent Conference, now can not add contact information to each other, need to leave WeChat in the chat. After that, you will be able to add business cards to each other, or pull up the WeChat group with one click, Wu Zurong told reporters that the internal has been polished for several rounds, and it will definitely be online next year, and the online time is not in Q1, but in Q2.

External opening up is accelerated

Tencent's conference team is located in Shenzhen Tencent Building, there is a certification laboratory on the 25th floor, and every day, there are many hardware companies waiting for certification here. Wu Zurong even said that there are some "Versailles", because there are many hardware products waiting for certification, they cannot quickly complete so many certifications, and they have to entrust third-party institutions to do preliminary screening to improve certification efficiency.

When participating in infoComm China 2021 in July this year, Tencent Conference was also a popular party. Almost all hardware companies hang or hope to hang logos of Tencent conference partners on their booths. The world's two largest manufacturers in the audio and video hardware industry, Logitech and ploy, one of the global partners on their official website is Tencent Conference.

"Because we are determined not to do hardware, our partners fully trust us." Wu Zurong said that they would continue to walk this road. Before Tencent entered the conference market, there were already enough and sufficiently subdivided hardware companies in this market, including displays, microphones, etc., and already had professional companies. Tencent does not do hardware meetings, so it is recognized by hardware companies.

On December 16, Tencent Conference began to establish cooperation with software companies. Evernote is the first, Qian Min said, some people have been taking notes on Evernote for many years, and the cost of sudden migration is very high, because they choose to unite with Evernote, and future users can take notes while holding meetings, which is smoother.

After enough partners, Tencent Conference can now provide a complete set of cloud video conference room solutions, including high-definition audio and video conferencing, wireless screen projection, collaborative whiteboard and centralized management background, etc., and is also installing its own products into more companies. Not long ago, Tencent Conference completed the transformation of 300 conference rooms in 2 days at Shell Company, making full use of their original equipment. Shell's employees are completely unaware when they go to work on Monday and can continue to use Tencent Meeting Rooms smoothly. Xiaohongshu put forward the demand on the last two days of the National Day holiday, and the Tencent meeting brought in hardware vendors and integrators, and also completed the layout of 70 conference rooms in 2 days.

Commercialization progress

There is a recent paragraph in the psychology world: If you have been talking to flowers and flowers during the quarantine, please do not look for me, when the flowers and flowers talk to you, come back to me. Although it is a paragraph, it also reflects some changes in people's psychological state under the epidemic. During this time, psychological institutions also became one of the paying users of Tencent Conference.

Although Tencent has no requirements for the commercialization of Tencent conferences, this product has a paid function from the beginning. Tencent meetings are free of charge for meetings with less than 300 people, and companies with more than 300 people need to pay for the access needs of more than 300 people, such as large-scale training and forum summits.

Qian Min told reporters that in the past year, Tencent Conference has served many head companies. Financial roadshow, retail, education, medical care, public prosecution and law department, specific companies such as Shell, Coca-Cola, CCCC, Xiaohongshu, etc. The reason why many companies buy the Enterprise Edition of Tencent Conference is because the company's employees are accustomed to using the free version of Tencent Conference, which is equivalent to the C-end experience accelerating the purchase behavior of the B-side.

According to IDC data, the size of China's video conferencing market will exceed 10 billion yuan in 2024, and the cloud conferencing market accounts for nearly 40%. In China, according to incomplete statistics, there are about 50 million conference rooms, and less than 1% of the conference rooms that are really on video conferencing are still huge. Qian Min, general manager of Tencent Conference, believes that the market space here is very large. "It's a lot of value, but it's going to be a long-term process."