Dialogue with Guo Haozhe, Chairman of Donghua Smart City: What did we do right to escape the "inner volume" and "follow the trend"?

Author 丨He Sisi

Edited by 丨 Zhou Lei

"Roads are built to facilitate the driving of vehicles, and as the number of vehicles increases, the roads must be continuously upgraded, which were previously cement, and may be asphalt in the future," Guo Haozhe, chairman and CEO of Donghua Smart City Group, explained the key points of smart cities with the example of road construction.

The simple words of "if you want to be rich before building roads" are passed down by the people, which is not only a recognition of the practice of building roads to get rich, but also a yearning for a better life in the future. From the perspective of people's living standards and economic income, it is obvious that the country has opened up the "last kilometer" of poverty alleviation. After poverty alleviation, in order to enhance people's happiness in life, the state put forward the concept of "smart city and digital village".

The first road construction began to change to "what kind of road to build".

In fact, the concept of smart city was proposed by IBM in 2009. Compared with European and American countries, the mainland started late, and it has been 10 years since 2012. At this stage, there is no shortage of Internet manufacturers, technology companies and start-ups, but from the current smart city construction effect, there are few successful cases, behind which is the lack of technical talents? Intensification of market competition? Or is it the prevailing corporate wind of infighting?

With these questions in mind, Leifeng recently launched an in-depth dialogue with Guo Haozhe, chairman and CEO of Donghua Smart City Group, trying to find answers to questions through this dialogue.

"Follow the trend" smart city, this road is not easy to walk

In fact, the phenomenon of "following the trend" in the technology circle has always been prevalent, and after the concept of smart city was proposed, many Internet companies, operator companies, technology companies, and financial companies participated in it, and became the main force in promoting the construction of smart cities.

For example, Tencent's "WeCity Future City" strategy, HUAWEI CLOUD's application-centric cloud-native infrastructure, and JD Cloud's concept of "dual-network integration" have formed a situation in which a hundred flowers bloom.

As we all know, the mainland upgraded smart cities to a national strategy in 2014, and most enterprises only began to enter the smart city track after 2014. However, Donghua Software has smelled the business opportunities brought by smart cities to future industrial development before other enterprises.

The first move of Donghua Software was in 2012, integrating the high-quality resources within the group to initiate the establishment of the smart city business department, in 2013 donghua cloud was established, after a year of exploration, in 2014, the establishment of the donghua smart city group.

Talking about why the Smart City Track?

Guo Haozhe said that the concept of smart cities in the context of globalization is constantly emphasized, and the concept of continuous emphasis may be of great help to the future development of the industry; second, in 2013, no one in the Chinese market can explain what smart cities should do, how to do it and do very few companies.

"In this exploration process, Donghua Software has given us support in terms of qualifications, funds, brands and values, in addition, Donghua has accumulated thousands of industry customers, giving us many opportunities to try," Guo Haozhe added.

New things often contain opportunities and challenges, and smart cities often bring greater challenges to enterprises than opportunities. It is understood that between 2014 and 2017, Donghua Smart City Group mainly built the underlying infrastructure for the city; after 2017, it began to do various levels of application on top of the infrastructure.

In the early days, Donghua tried to build websites and APPS in the mobile Internet ecology to improve work efficiency and improve people's livelihood, but the download rate, usage rate and user experience of the people at that time were very poor.

"Until 2017, the Internet leaders began to actively embrace the industrial Internet, and the increase in technology, capital and talents gradually increased in depth and breadth, which is also an important reason for the development of Donghua Smart City Group's business," Guo Haozhe introduced.

Like smart city service providers, the practice of smart cities around the world is not smooth, according to Guo Haozhe, 2014 to 2017 is in a left and right game period, and there are no particularly good cases and progress in China in the past three years. At that time, there were relatively few IT procurement projects that could be covered and the urban service system was seriously under-invested in the software system, and it was difficult to drive some deeper effects.

"Customers will not invest more money if they don't see the effect, and they won't see the effect if they don't invest more money, which forms a vicious circle."

Talent is not omnipotent, but without talent it is impossible

Since the rise of smart cities to a national strategy in 2014, after 7 years of development, the construction of smart cities has long been different.

As we all know, the construction of smart cities requires mature and complete solutions, as an extremely complex urban digital construction and operation system, smart cities include a large number of subsystems such as smart transportation, smart logistics, smart security, smart parks, etc., and these different systems and different attributes require a large number of high-quality, strong ability, high-level talents, that is, compound talents who understand both IT and OT.

Experts in related industries have said that the lack of talents is the shortcomings of the current smart city construction. We need a large number of compound talents, who must understand both big data artificial intelligence and traditional industries, especially in transportation, energy consumption, e-government and other industries.

As a new track, smart city also has the problem of recruitment difficulties, and breaking the talent shortage has become an important problem that needs to be solved urgently in this field.

Guo Haozhe, the leader of Donghua Smart City Group, elaborated on the importance of talent for new business development. He said that entering the new field is first of all to find talents, without talents I will not do this in my life, only when talents are gathered, I will continue to invest manpower, material and financial resources, so that real talents can succeed is my principle of doing things.

However, the recruitment of talents of Donghua Smart City Group is not a smooth road, it is understood that the start-up team of 3 people to the current talent team of more than 1,000 people, Donghua Smart City has spent 7 years.

"Talent acquisition is more about like-mindedness, shared values and technical competence. Following the principle of "thinker-solution-implementer", that is, recruiting some people with insight to transmit values and ideas, and then passing on their ideas to technical experts to form a set of deliverable solutions," Guo haozhe added.

At the same time, he admitted that the expansion of the team has certain difficulties, because it is necessary to try different things in the early stage, but it is not necessarily profitable. After continuous trial and exploration, what kind of war can be won, what kind of technical direction to break through, what kind of people are the most important, and the business logic will become clearer and clearer.

Leifeng Network noted that at present, relying on Donghua Smart City Group, a number of sub-research centers such as smart cultural tourism, smart transportation, smart agriculture, smart park, and smart education have been hatched.

The "Change" and "Unchanged" of Next-Generation Infrastructure

With talent, technology can be more skilled.

As more and more enterprises enter the market, the moves of various enterprises are various, but they are not far from their origins. The first is the ability to build the underlying infrastructure, and then build the scene application on the basis of the maturity of the infrastructure.

The essence of the city is "a complex functional network platform that realizes production efficiency and the improvement of citizens' happiness under the conditions of limited resources such as space, environment and energy through the aggregation and supply of infrastructure and public services." "In this context, the urgent problems that need to be solved in urban transformation can be boiled down to dealing with the contradiction between limited infrastructure and service capacity and rapidly growing demand.

Infrastructure marked by railways, highways, power grids, etc., has supported successive industrial and urban revolutions characterized by mechanization, electrification, and automation. Then in a new round of smart city transformation, innovative infrastructure will realize the digitalization, networking and intelligent development of cities.

Guo Haozhe believes that 2017 is a watershed year for the development of smart cities. 2017 is the first generation of infrastructure construction period, and after 2017 is the innovation period of the new generation of infrastructure. At present, the first generation of infrastructure, including data centers, cameras, etc., has been completed.

The infrastructure we originally did could only reach 10% of the infrastructure of intelligent cities, or even less. The smart city is a huge track, including one, two and three industries and multiple sub-tracks. In the future, all devices must move towards intelligence, such as smart manhole covers, smart toilets, smart street lights, smart cameras, etc., which require the construction of a more intelligent underlying infrastructure.

"The purpose of road construction is to facilitate the driving of vehicles, and as the number of vehicles increases, the road should be continuously upgraded, which was previously cement, and may be asphalt in the future," Guo Haozhe cited the example of road construction to explain the key to infrastructure in the process of smart city construction.

If the need for smart city construction is the internal cause of the development of next-generation infrastructure, then new infrastructure is its external driving force. According to Leifeng Network, Donghua Smart City is conducting sensor research at the National Nanoscience Center.

Guo Haozhe said that the development of sensors will push the next generation of infrastructure to a new stage, we do sensors in order to connect more scenarios, such as the realization of vehicle-road collaboration to play a key role in sensors. Of course, this research and development capability is not available to every company, but it is necessary to layout in this direction.

The road of "inner volume" of smart cities will not work

Talent and technology are complete, and the next stage is to create greater value.

As mentioned earlier, at present, the smart city track has already had software companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu Internet factory; China Mobile, China Telecom Operator Enterprises; JD.com, Huawei, and Yonyou, Donghua, etc.

In fact, for smart cities, most of the above enterprises are "cross-border", with the purpose of finding new business growth points to achieve their own social value. It is also based on this that most people label these companies as "competitive".

But if you want the city to be more intelligent, you often need to use a lot of cross-field and cross-industry technology, which is not something that a company can complete independently, and the most direct form of expression is cooperation: the cooperation between Internet manufacturers and software manufacturers, the cooperation between operators and technology companies, and so on.

Guo Haozhe believes that there is no competition and do not compete, if all cloud vendors are caught in the same kind of competition, everyone will go extremely difficult, if the technology is not leading to do a good job, if the technology is not leading, and unwilling to do service, and want to speculate on the concept, it is a flash in the pan.

The so-called competition is classified competition, such as transportation advantages, financial advantages, hardware advantages, etc., so that it will show a matrix ecological development trend.

Leifeng noted that in 2018, Donghua Software signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent and obtained Tencent's investment. Speaking of cooperation, Guo Haozhe said that the direction choice will always be questioned, but what can be done has been done, and then do it is nothing more than a problem of small market share, just in a saturated small market to grab the share, it is better to change a dimension to do more valuable things, this is the strategic key to choose cooperation, the cooperation with Tencent at that time is the key to our technology integration market integration. ”

In the face of excellent cloud vendors in the market, why choose Tencent?

Guo Haozhe explained that when we judged which Internet company to choose, we found that Tencent's products had the most core advantages in service connection, and what Donghua wanted to do was to deepen the application scenario service, and the service needed weChat and enterprise WeChat such technology product connectors.

At the same time, Tencent, as an Internet manufacturer, also needs industry analysis capabilities and landing delivery capabilities, and everyone will definitely have chemical effects when combined.

It is reported that in 2018 alone, the Donghua Smart City team released a number of products with Tencent Cloud, realizing cooperation in more than 50 projects; in 2020, Donghua Software and Tencent Cloud jointly won bids for billions of projects; in 2021, Tencent Cloud and Donghua Software deepened strategic cooperation and will continue to cooperate closely in the fields of digital government, smart industry, and smart healthcare.

Companies involved in building smart cities are not decathlons, but each has its own area of expertise, and it is inevitable that there will be setbacks in this process, but they are all releasing their core capabilities. Huawei's core infrastructure, JD.com's e-commerce logistics capital flow, Tencent's social connections, and Ping An's fintech services are all key advantages that continue to extend core competitiveness.

"How to turn competition into synergy is a positive guide," Guo added.

Write at the end

Smart cities have become a strategic choice to promote urbanization, improve the level of urban governance, improve the quality of public services, and develop the digital economy.

The construction of smart cities is in full swing, but from the current point of view of the process of smart city construction, the mainland is still in its infancy, and there is still a long way to go. For the demand side, it is necessary to actively embrace the smart city and carry out smart practice; for smart city service providers, it is necessary to continuously update and iterate products according to the construction needs of different cities at different stages and improve service capabilities.

The construction of smart cities still has a long way to go, and although the road is far away, it is coming!