After four years of using DingTalk, Guangxi Liuzhou Iron and Steel Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Liugang"), which ranked 191st among the top 500 Chinese enterprises, finally chose Alibaba Cloud.
In 2017, after comparing multiple service software, Liugang Cold Rolling Mill finally chose DingTalk, and then built 400 low-code applications on DingTalk, followed by 100% of the business to DingTalk, covering more than 90% of the management links such as equipment, production, safety, and capital, becoming a successful case of the steel industry moving towards a digital "transparent factory".
Four years later, on October 14, 2021, Liugang and Alibaba Cloud signed a cooperation agreement to promote the successful model of the cold rolling mill to the entire group and move the business to the cloud, so that the "cloud nail integration" model gradually landed in Liugang. Han Zonggui, deputy secretary of the Party Committee of Liugang Group, said bluntly that with the help of Alibaba Cloud's global leading technology in cloud computing, industrial Internet, artificial intelligence and other aspects, it will promote digital transformation to "take root and blossom" in liugang group's industrial production line.
As the second largest airport management group in the country, the model of the western airport is slightly different, the group first chooses to go to the cloud, and then DingTalk appears.
In 2019, the western airports have successively moved their infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud; two years later, in the second half of 2021, the western airport group will "move" 25 airports in the four provinces (regions) of Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia and Qingdao to exclusive DingTalk, and more than 100 low-code applications will land on front-line scenarios such as security, passenger service, and epidemic prevention management.
After only more than a year of integration, Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk began to achieve each other, and the customers, data and business of the two were integrated and infiltrated; and cases such as Liugang and Western Airport embracing the "Cloud Nail in One" new productivity tool are being staged in factories and offices in all walks of life in China.
The growth and transformation of a large industry is often inseparable from the influence of the macro environment of the times. Over the past 20 years, China's consumer Internet has led the global wave of innovation along with the United States, and now a similar scene is happening in the industrial Internet.
Taking the epidemic as the trigger point, collaborative office software has become the ticket for the digitization of the industrial Internet. Alibaba's DingTalk, Tencent's enterprise WeChat, Byte's Feishu, Huawei's Alibaba WeLinK, etc. have competed to debut and become the forerunners of enterprise organization digitalization.
Subsequently, low-code platforms such as DingTalk's Yiqiao, Tencent's micro-ride, Huawei's app Rubik's Cube AppCube, NetEase Shufan Qingzhou, and Baidu's Aisuo have successively entered the game. They are either symbiotic with collaborative office software or bundled with cloud business, and Chinese enterprises, especially traditional small and medium-sized enterprises, have begun to be embraced by the torrent of the times and big factories to embrace digitalization.
The second wave of digitization around the world is coming. In this digital revolution, the digitization of individual business units such as ERP, CRM, and MES is no longer the protagonist, and a universal, inclusive, personalized, low-cost, and innovative tool platform for activating each chain of the industry has become a new choice.
Such changes are not just in China. At the other end of the ocean, Microsoft sees the Power Platform low-code development platform as its "sixth cloud," which CEO Nadella calls "one of Microsoft's biggest bets of 2019 and beyond"; Siemens acquired the low-code platform Mendix for $700 million, and Amazon also entered low-code application development through Honeycode, enhancing the market competitiveness of its "platform + low-code" model.
The Internet industry likes to make analogies, and Alibaba compares cloud and DingTalk to "INTEL+WINDOWS". DingTalk CEO Ye Jun likes Microsoft and its leader Nadella, and he has mentioned Microsoft's demonstration effect on many occasions. He told the Zhitong Finance APP that Nadella insisted on long-term ism, insisted on openness, and insisted on cloud and end, which created Microsoft with a market value of 2.5 trillion US dollars today, "Which is also the philosophy of DingTalk adhering to long-termism."
In terms of longitudinal comparison, in the enterprise service track, Alibaba's "cloud + DingTalk + low-code" model is the most microsoft-like enterprise in China. The bottom layer of Microsoft's low-code platform Power Platform is azure cloud computing services, and the upper layer is Microsoft-related application software. In the "Cloud DingTalk Integration" strategy, DingTalk's positioning happens to be connected to enterprise business applications and Alibaba Cloud IT infrastructure.
After multiple rounds of evolution, unlike collaborative office tools such as enterprise WeChat, Feishu, and WeLinK, DingTalk is an enterprise-level application development platform, which is also the direction in which its competitors are working.
China's small and medium-sized enterprises like to use DingTalk. As China's "specialized and specialized" enterprise, starting from 2020, Wuxi Putian Tiexin Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Putian Tiexin") will deepen the integration of DingTalk with other systems, including SAP, logistics system, equipment management system, marketing system and so on.
Wu Louluo, deputy general manager of Putian Tiexin, told the Zhitong Financial APP bluntly that the company "has more than 400+ applications in DingTalk, and the daily work matters are as high as 500+". The value brought by the fact that the delivery efficiency of Potevio Iron Core orders increased by 50%, labor costs decreased by 50%, process quality increased by 73%, equipment maintenance costs decreased by 80%, and per capita output value doubled.
In the past year, hundreds of cases like Putian Tiexin have been presented in various activities in the media and DingTalk. Among them, there are traditional manufacturing industries such as FAW and Longhui Lifting, new manufacturing industries such as Oriental Risheng and Fenghua New Energy, service industries such as Laoxiang Chicken and Western Airport, composite enterprises such as Oriental Hope and Fosun, and even "hidden champions" such as Shadow Stone Innovation and Hyperion, who are all writing the true story of using DingTalk to transform each chain of manufacturing.
On the road to accelerated expansion of DingTalk, such as Shandong Energy, Liugang and other corporate customers, throughout China's government affairs, education, medical care, manufacturing and other real cases and stories, is also the key to motivating and persuading other companies to practice digitalization, try "cloud nail integration" and migrate to the cloud platform. For example, more than 50% of China's specialized new giants are using DingTalk for digital innovation.
At the same time, Alibaba Cloud serves millions of customers around the world, including more than half of the A-share listed companies and 80% of China's science and technology innovation enterprises, and the two are beginning to open up to each other. According to public reports, shandong energy, Luhua Group, Bosideng, Libai, Belle, Mengniu, Fosun, Xtep and other large enterprises have chosen "cloud nail integration" for digital transformation.
Here, the "Cloud DingTalk integration" strategy is gradually becoming clear, that is, in the industrial Internet, the users and data of Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk are connected to each other. There are two aspects to the foothold: Alibaba Cloud can use DingTalk as the to B entrance to deliver Alibaba Cloud services; DingTalk can help Alibaba Cloud enterprises to deepen the pipeline of enterprise services and solve the revenue data problem of DingTalk.
"It turns out that DingTalk may have more small and medium-sized customers, and More Alibaba Cloud large customers." However, it was slowly discovered that Alibaba Cloud's large customers actually need DingTalk, and they also need to be similar to this kind of refined product; on the other hand, among DingTalk customers, there are also some small and medium-sized enterprises that are slowly developing, and they also need the services of the entire Alibaba Cloud, so the two are 1+1 greater than 2." DingTalk should take the leaf to fully expose the essence.
Yi Tie is DingTalk's low-code tool platform. If DingTalk is thought of as a 24-hour robot, opening up a low-code platform is equivalent to reclaiming a fertile black land, like building an APP STORE. Therefore, the outside world has seen a more open DingTalk: on the one hand, it advocates that enterprises create "DingTalk native" applications through DingTalk, and on the other hand, many APIs are also opened to support enterprises to integrate DingTalk applications independently.
In the past year, DingTalk has opened up more API interfaces, relaxed the entry conditions of ISVs (independent software developers), and reduced the proportion of ISVs. So far, DingTalk has opened more than 2,000 API interfaces, of which the number of open this year is more than the sum of previous years; it has become the largest enterprise SaaS in China, with more than 500 million users and 19 million organizations; in the DingTalk application market, the annual transaction volume of software developers has increased by more than 800%, which is the fastest growing and largest enterprise application market in China.
DingTalk's low-code applications grew rocket-like from 380,000 in March 2021 to 2.4 million at the end of the year. According to DingTalk's current situation, it will reach 10 million by 2023. And if at the current growth rate, this data should be able to complete or even rush to the target end point ahead of schedule.
For comparison, Apple launched the App Store in 2008, and the number of App Store apps reached 5,000 at the end of that year. At the end of 2015, the number of App Store apps reached 1.75 million, compared to about 2 million today. There are about 5 million active apps in 2020.
For example, in the cold rolling mill of Liugang Group, 33 departments have joined the DingTalk organization, 1500 people are online every day, and more than 200 employees have mastered the ability of low-code development, and the low-code ability has penetrated into the factory line and profoundly changed the liugang cold rolling mill.
"There are now only 3-4 skilled technicians, and with the advantages of DingTalk's low-code development, our philosophy is that everyone has the opportunity to become a digital talent." Lu Zhaogang, director of the cold rolling mill of Liugang Group, said.
When more and more enterprises like Liugang and Putian Tiexin promote front-line practitioners to "developers", when they begin to transform their daily work autonomously, when they begin to do IT innovation independently, the full-link digitization of all walks of life in China has quietly rolled out.
Spending on technologies and services that support digital transformation (DX) of business practices, products, and organizations worldwide reached $5.9 trillion between 2018 and 2021. However, the failure rate of digital transformation of global enterprises is nearly 80%, and the failure rate of big data projects is as high as 85%, including IBM and GE.
In the view of He Shaojie, chairman of Haiber Group, some companies in Germany and the United States have high digital costs, and the cost of informatization accounts for 40%-50% of the annual investment. "But if We Invest in a Smart Manufacturing 4.0 architecture like Germany's, it will soon reach a dead end."
"DingTalk is what we think is relatively cost-effective, can achieve a certain degree of digital means, DingTalk has a lot of third-party applications, we are looking at it repeatedly, there are new things out, we will go to find, now do small work orders, but also hope to break the difficulty of data connection." He said.
The "cloud nail integration" model is not to allow Chinese smes to invest huge amounts of money in digitalization like large enterprises in Germany or the United States, but to play a new, low-cost productivity tool to activate the innovation and vitality of the entire industry from the two levels of organizational digitalization and business digitalization.
In terms of the general environment, China has the world's largest enterprise group, of which the number of small and medium-sized enterprises exceeds 43 million, most of which are still in the initial stage of informatization. Such a large group of enterprises, for the enterprise service market, is not only a trillion-level Red Sea, but also like e-commerce, cosmetics and other industries, it can accommodate different trial and error possibilities, and explore the most abundant applications, the first technological innovation and leading business models.
In reality, China's enterprise service software has not achieved the same global leading position as games and e-commerce. In the traditional database and ERP markets, Oracle, SAP, etc. have always existed like towering mountains; in the cloud computing market, they have encountered sniper attacks from AWS and Azure.
However, in the new round of digital revolution of the industrial Internet, in the field of cloud services + online office collaboration + low-code platforms, relying on the advantages of China's vast region, tens of millions of enterprises, and the largest labor market, leaning over to deep ploughing and serving enterprises, Chinese enterprises are likely to continue to write their glory in the consumer Internet in the era of industrial Internet.
In June 2020, Microsoft's low-code platform Power Platform officially landed in China, which is the beginning of its layout in the two world's largest industrial Internet markets in China and the United States, and is also the biggest challenge for Ali, Tencent and Huawei.