"For a long time, we've resisted a lot of pressure from the commercial and other layers, and we're very, very cautious about that." When asked by reporters about the current commercialization progress of enterprise WeChat, Li Zhifeng, vice president of Tencent Enterprise WeChat and head of ecological cooperation, said so.
Following the opening of WeChat and the opening of the traffic pool valve in 2018, enterprise WeChat further accelerated internal collaboration. Not long ago, the enterprise WeChat, Together with Tencent Documents and Tencent Conference teams, announced that the integration of the three major products has been connected, and a new set of efficiency collaboration functions has been jointly launched on the enterprise WeChat.
With the continuous emergence of enterprise-level customer needs, Li Zhifeng said that enterprise WeChat is constantly adjusting the balance point in the middle, bit by bit bias, but, "this can not immediately say whether enterprise WeChat began to tilt towards commercialization, I think it is more of an adaptation to the needs of enterprise customers." ”
In the balance gradually inclined to enterprise-level customers, under the principle of "do not disturb" slowly infiltrated into the commercial dynamics, behind the change of enterprise WeChat, is the collaborative office industry in the wave of digital transformation in the increasingly fierce competitive situation. Earlier, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in an internal letter: "In the next decade, the biggest certainty is the popularization of digital technology, and the entire social economy and life will be fully digitized." Based on this, DingTalk, which occupies the first-mover advantage, continues to expand its territory, the enterprise WeChat gradually relaxes its commercial restraint attitude, and gathers the Feishu of Internet startups with product experience to find another way, and Huawei WeLink, Kingsoft Documents, Graphite Documents and so on continue to upgrade and innovate.
At present, the industry's head advantage temporarily stays in DingTalk, but behind the enterprise WeChat, Feishu and other products rush to catch up, the enterprise service track that has not yet been fully excavated does not follow the law of two and eight, under the wave of enterprise digitalization, the cat and mouse game in the collaborative office field may play a new competition point.
Stand tall
At the enterprise WeChat conference, Huang Tieming, vice president of Tencent's WeChat business group and head of enterprise WeChat, announced the latest achievements - the number of real enterprises and organizations on enterprise WeChat exceeded 10 million, the number of monthly active users exceeded 180 million, and the number of active users connected to WeChat exceeded 500 million. The enterprise WeChat team disclosed that every hour, 1.15 million employees of the enterprise interacted with users on WeChat 140 million times through the enterprise WeChat.
In contrast, in mid-October 2021, DingTalk announced that the number of users had exceeded 500 million. In November 2021, Feishu officially released the new version 5.0, when Feishu CEO Xie Xin told the first financial reporter that Feishu has grown well in the past year, but data such as daily active is a measure of the C-end industry and is not suitable for B-end products.
According to Analysys Qianfan data, in November 2021, dingtalk had 156 million monthly active users, 720 million enterprise WeChat monthly active users, and 703,800 feishu.
A senior executive of a startup that has been used by all three software told the first financial reporter that there is a redundancy problem in some of the functions of DingTalk, but it entered the market earliest, precipitated a large amount of data, if there is no special reason, there is no need to replace; the consistency and ease of use of Feishu is the best, but too much emphasis on OKR, there is a feeling of being invaded by corporate culture; compared with the similar cost of DingTalk and Feishu, the enterprise WeChat is based on weChat's huge traffic pool, and the starting cost is lower.
Lu Qingwei, vice president of Tencent Enterprise WeChat and head of industry expansion, shared a customer case that in the past consulted an automobile manufacturer to choose the reason for the enterprise WeChat, the other party said that the cost of online office software training is high, the company has 70,000 employees, each person's training cost is 70 yuan per hour, and the enterprise WeChat continues to experience consistent with WeChat, regardless of the size of the enterprise, the level of education of employees, whether they have contacted the computer, can use enterprise WeChat like weChat, Combined, it saves 4.9 million yuan for the company in one hour, so in Lu Qingwei's view, the need for special employee training is one of the important reasons why many companies choose weChat.
Another reason, Lu Qingwei said, is that the ability of enterprise WeChat and WeChat to communicate can allow enterprise-level customers to contact consumers and help customers bring business growth. At present, the total number of service providers of enterprise WeChat has reached 120,000, of which the total number of excellent service providers exceeds 4,000. The ecological capacity can cover 97 industries, with 1232 unique interfaces related to weChat and up to 1900 third-party interfaces.
But TO B industry, the first-mover advantage is the most difficult to cross the mountain, a number of business people told the first financial reporter that the cost of replacing the collaborative office software is too high, such as no special reason, there is no need to replace, and because of this, although the enterprise WeChat has a huge traffic advantage, but lagging behind DingTalk for many years, in the process of catching up, the number of customers, the landing industry, the number of active users and other core indicators, it is still difficult to look back.
For this gap, Li Zhifeng said that the digital transformation of the entire enterprise must not be the digitization of a single small individual, it must be the state of the entire reality architecture network running up, but in the end, who can really connect the enterprise and connect the B-end to the C-end, Li Zhifeng believes that the opportunity for enterprise WeChat here is very large.
On November 17, 2021, Feishu, a subsidiary of ByteDance Group, officially released the new version 5.0, including a comprehensive upgrade of the brand logo, visual experience, and new products such as Feishu personnel, Feishu contract, and Feishu approval. In the same month, Feishu placed its first advertisement since its inception on the airport, and the effect was good. Xie Xin did not disclose the specific considerations behind the launch, but the increasing competition in the industry may be one of the reasons.
In addition to the head enterprises, the collaborative office industry has been upgraded under the wave of enterprise digital transformation. In December last year, Kingsoft Office released kingsoft digital office platform, creating an enabling solution covering content creation and management, collaborative office, and business digitalization, which can support large and super large organizations including governments, state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, and large-scale private enterprises, and establish an exclusive digital office platform. Jiang Zhiqiang, senior vice president of Kingsoft Office, said, "To exaggerate, overnight, many companies' original information offices have been changed to digital offices. ”
In the same month, Graphite Documents launched an enterprise-level cloud Office built by enterprises and organizations - Graphite Office. Wu Jie, founder and CEO of Graphite Documents, told the first financial reporter that Graphite is gradually promoting the landing of customers in various industries, such as focusing on Internet online education in 2019, focusing on intelligent manufacturing, innovative manufacturing and real estate industry in 2020, and focusing on the financial industry and central enterprises and government agencies in 2021.
Respective advantages
The same track, relying on straight lines is difficult to surpass, in the pattern of multi-foot standing, each family tries to open up a path according to the advantages of the curve.
Among the enterprise-level cooperation customers displayed by enterprise WeChat, Xiaomi Group is among them. But what is interesting is that Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Group, has repeatedly stood for Feishu, saying that Feishu "the more it is used, the more comfortable it is" "Xiaomi has chosen Feishu, and it has been a period of time, feishu is very concise and efficient in information creation, sharing, and collaborative office, and indeed it is becoming more and more comfortable." Huang Wang, CEO of Xiaomi Huami, also praised the Feishu experience and publicly said in the circle of friends that he was "eager to write code for Fei".
It is understood that in xiaomi as an example, the company's internal mainly based on feishu, the external channels based on retail stores are mainly based on enterprise WeChat, industry insiders told the first financial reporter that the enterprise WeChat is very large in addition to the accumulation of WeChat traffic, there is also a change in the upper limit of the number of people, convenient for sales-oriented enterprise-level customers to develop business.
Built on Top of WeChat, "connection" has long become the true color of enterprise WeChat. Zhang Xiaolong once said, "Only when the enterprise WeChat is extended to the outside of the enterprise, it will produce greater value." Huang Tieming announced that the number of real enterprises and organizations on the enterprise WeChat exceeded 10 million, after which, the WeChat customer service capabilities launched by the enterprise WeChat, the upstream and downstream connection capabilities of the enterprise, and the integration of Tencent documents, Tencent conferences and enterprise WeChat will further strengthen the connection capabilities of enterprise WeChat in terms of efficiency collaboration.
Taking offline sales stores as an example, the enterprise WeChat fully opens up the connection with the WeChat video number, and the enterprise's video number live broadcast room will set up a shopping guide entrance, and consumers can access it with one click. Previously, the "industrial interconnection" function launched by enterprise WeChat can add all upstream and downstream suppliers and distributors to the address book, and through the classification and hierarchical management of the address book, the communication link of upstream and downstream enterprises is shortened to the mobile phone screen.
For DingTalk, DingTalk president Ye Jun said that DingTalk is a more "heavy" existence than the enterprise WeChat and Feishu. "We're definitely heavier than them, what's the solution for our weight?" Because we entered this industry early, this is our advantage, because the "heavy" early, I built this ecology, I got more ecological resources to assist the blessing, although I am heavy, but these enterprises are not our services, are to do ecological service providers to provide services. Ye Jun said.
In order to promote products to more enterprises, DingTalk has a number of regional teams across the country, in-depth education, Internet, manufacturing, medical, government, catering and other industries, the enterprise is divided according to large and medium-sized, medium-sized and small and medium-sized. Ye Jun said that if the To B enterprise is too light to be replaced, it cannot only do a very simple chat function, and the company has been grasping the middle degree. "We usually have to serve dozens of large enterprises by one person, and I now run at least one business a week on average." Because To B is relatively heavy, it is difficult to understand what he needs without going to the scene. “
For Feishu, Xie Xin said that unlike its counterparts in the market, peers are aiming at the needs of the market, and Feishu just started to start from ByteDance itself to meet the company's internal needs. However, for whether Feishu can meet customer needs externally, especially companies that are relatively different from ByteDance, the team is not sure in their hearts, so they have been in the process of testing.
Since the beginning of this year, Feishu's customer range has expanded from the initial concentration of customers in the Internet, technology, entertainment and other industries to Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng of new energy vehicles; Yuanqi Forest, Wenheyou of new consumption; and then to Sunac China and Xuhui Group of real estate; Wanda Film and Television Group in the field of culture and media, GetApp; Anker Innovation and Horizon in the field of advanced manufacturing.
Speaking of competition, Fang Yongxin, a partner at Alibaba and head of DingTalk Education Line, said in an interview, "DingTalk's efficiency has been verified, and we are struggling with habits." In my heart, I hope that DingTalk will be used for work and study, and WeChat will be used for life, which is a personal space. Fang Yongxin said that no one in the social field of WeChat has shaken, but Douyin has still emerged, and DingTalk has also risen, which just shows that this space is large enough and needs too many different types of enterprises to come in.
Ecological contest
Although there are hundreds of schools of thought in the field of office collaboration, it is undeniable that DingTalk, which is built on Alibaba Cloud and WeChat, an enterprise built on Tencent Cloud, is the most competitive racer at present, and has developed to the level of competition ecology.
Canalys data report shows that China's cloud infrastructure market increased by 54% year-on-year to $6.6 billion in the second quarter of 2021. Among them, Alibaba Cloud accounted for 33.8%, HUAWEI CLOUD accounted for 19.3%, Tencent Cloud accounted for 18.8%, and Baidu AI Cloud accounted for 7.8%. Alibaba Cloud's financial report shows that its revenue in fiscal 2021 is 60.12 billion yuan, and the proportion of government and enterprise industry revenue continues to rise through deep ploughing of the government and enterprise service market.
A number of industry insiders told the first financial reporter that although the experience of Feishu products is very good, the sales logic in the enterprise-level customer group is not only dependent on products, the technical level of cloud service security support, the sales level of cloud service packaging and sales, etc., are important decisions affecting the decision-making of enterprise customers, and therefore, the current Feishu customers are temporarily focused on small Internet startups, and the number of users and monthly active users is also small.
Focusing on DingTalk and enterprise WeChat, the two compete in multiple dimensions such as cloud services, customer competition, and ecological construction. In January 2022, DingTalk and Enterprise WeChat released the latest products and developments. Ye Jun said, "We can't do everything, we just do what suits us." From the perspective of DingTalk Manufacturing Industry Solution 2.0, DingTalk takes "data same frequency" as the entry point, takes "manufacturing on the code" product as the exclusive base of the manufacturing industry, provides basic products such as equipment nails and piece counting day knots, and combines the capabilities of Alibaba Cloud platform to launch pin and energy consumption nail products, providing the manufacturing industry with adaptable and easy-to-expand digital productivity tools. In addition to the manufacturing industry, DingTalk has also expanded its office collaboration to education, medical and other industries.
In 2022, enterprise WeChat will also focus on the introduction and layout of ecology. Li Zhifeng said that the enterprise ecology has four major characteristics - "a stronger ecological team, more comprehensive industry coverage, more open ecological capabilities, and richer products and services." This year, enterprise WeChat launched three major ecological functions - the first is the application "fast launch", partners do not need cumbersome "shelf review", developers can quickly launch the application; secondly, employees "quick installation", the application does not need to be authorized by the administrator to use, employees can also add and recommend themselves; the third is the "interface square", partners can open the interface to each other, improve the efficiency of ecological cooperation.
Different from the past single CRM of finance, taxation, administration, customer service, etc., Cai Qianbin, founder and CEO of Chenfeng, said that Chenfeng hopes to create a closed loop through the enterprise WeChat, so that enterprises can connect the whole process of sales, customer service, operation, and transactions in the WeChat ecosystem. It is also through service providers like ChenFeng that the enterprise WeChat opens the ecology through open interfaces and expands the customer base.
Chenfeng internal employees told the first financial reporter that the highest barrier in the service provider industry is not technology, but the provision of industry solutions, which requires a lot of manpower and material investment, through long-term in-depth understanding of the industry and enterprise characteristics, in order to develop accurate solutions.
Behind the ecology, it needs the solid support of cloud services, so to a certain extent, the competition between DingTalk and the enterprise WeChat is also regarded as the competition between Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. The first-mover advantage accumulated by Alibaba Cloud enables DingTalk to cultivate a large number of customers in the manufacturing industry. Ye Jun said that DingTalk, like other industries, absorbs the real demand from the industry through co-creation with the industry, "not DingTalk has developed the manufacturing industry, but the manufacturing industry has developed DingTalk." ”
At present, Tencent is still in the early stage of the manufacturing industry, after Tencent's senior executive vice president, cloud and smart industry business group (CSIG) president Tang Daosheng said in an interview with the first financial reporter that the current customers of Tencent's cloud services in addition to large and group enterprises, there are also waist small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as developers or individual users, making the business strategy of CSIG more and more clear in the past three years. As for the evolution and upgrading from personalized solutions to standardized solutions, Tang Daosheng said that a process is still needed, but the specific time is not yet a clear number, "at the beginning will pick some relatively easy to pick fruits, with the iteration of technology, the original dare not touch now dare to, but Tencent will continue to focus on the basic underlying platform, more personalized support is provided by industry partners." ”