DingTalk President Ye Jun
Low-code has ushered in an era of technological democratization, and data from DingTalk shows that by the end of December 2021, the number of DingTalk applications has increased by 5.56 times, the number of low-code applications on DingTalk has exceeded 2.4 million, and the number of all developers on DingTalk has exceeded 1.9 million.
In the past period of time, the low-code revolution has really happened around us, and perhaps without us realizing it, it has changed the daily experience of many people, such as the forms filled out during epidemic prevention and control, the reimbursement flow sent by the company's finances, the campus information application developed by teachers, and everyone can become a developer, not just a slogan.
After many people use DingTalk low-code to develop applications, many business flows migrate to DingTalk, compared with the extreme conditions of an App requiring a function in the past, and the experience has been greatly improved by completing multiple enterprise business flows in DingTalk.
But in the view of DingTalk President Ye Jun (whose name is not endless), this is not enough. Because with the growth of the number of applications, DingTalk is getting bigger and bigger, many people began to feel that DingTalk became bloated, looking for an application plus input search operation, it takes four or five clicks, the experience is still not good enough.
So the cool application came, which is DingTalk launched a new open capability at the March 22 ecological conference, users can directly call up the application components in the DingTalk working group or chat window, without downloading and installing the application, and without jumping to other interfaces.
This is a seemingly small but huge change, DingTalk for the first time will be the key business scenarios - work groups and other high-frequency scenarios to the ecological depth, DingTalk ecological business applications can be pushed to the group, single chat, calendar, documents and other fields in the form of cards, so that the business is more fluent, the message flow is naturally transformed into business flow.
In the past, enterprises spent a lot of effort to accelerate the transmission of news, the circulation of data, and the promotion of business, so they established a number of information systems with chimneys, and DingTalk solved it.
DingTalk is first of all an IM platform, so it first solves the problem of communication information transmission, and secondly, it is a collaboration platform, the basis of collaboration is that data can flow freely and consistently, low code makes DingTalk an application development platform, and cool applications further open up a high-frequency use of enterprise applications.
When we generally believe that low code is only a subset of development tools, it is a good way to fulfill the expectations of enterprises that want rapid application development, but more than that, DingTalk's message flow and low code are further combined into business flow, which makes the imagination space of the two grow greatly.
Last year, DingTalk proposed a low-code revolution that was the first step in PaaS, representing low-code as an APaaS that provides universal application development capabilities.
This year, on the basis of low code, DingTalk proposed to do BPaaS, which changed the way software was developed, delivered and used, so that cool applications could be realized.
Endlessly believes that the delivery and use of software in the future must be fragmented and high-frequency. When the application is created in large quantities, there are dozens or hundreds of applications within an enterprise, so it is important for the application to find people, rather than traditional people to find applications, and cool applications solve the problem of applications being used frequently and the interconnection between applications.
On BPaaS, DingTalk uses the cool application to allow business processes to be completed and forwarded in the form of cards in group chats, while DingTalk fully opens up product capabilities such as documents, audio and video, for example, electronic tags can be easily inserted into documents, so that low-frequency business applications in the past are used by DingTalk with high frequencies; in addition, DingTalk uses master data and connectors to connect applications and applications to maximize the value of data.
Low code one step forward, DingTalk needs to take a step backwards.
At this conference, the product, which has been established for more than seven years, for the first time has a systematic expression of its open boundary and ecological relationship, announced that it will only do the basic capability platform, maintain the positioning of the collaborative office and application development platform unchanged, continue to strategically invest in basic products such as documents, audio and video, projects, conferences, etc., and the rest are handed over to the ecology, including industry applications, professional applications such as human and property production, supply and marketing research, and the hardware is fully ecological.
DingTalk sinks, ecological openness - this strategy is in line with the positioning of the operating system; for ecological partners, open attitude and practical actions can attract more peers.
As a result, the logic of Alibaba Cloud Peg's integration has become more and more thorough. Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, previously said that many people understand DingTalk as a communication tool, but DingTalk goes far beyond communication itself. More than 1 million government workers in Zhejiang work on DingTalk, and developed more than 1,000 applications on the platform, all kinds of transactions are completed on DingTalk, which is the typical feature of the operating system, the operating system is to do some things by themselves, so that everyone can do more things on it.
DingTalk is getting closer to this goal. Analogous to the Windows operating system, every decline in technical difficulty has provided more people with the opportunity to use computers, the use of computing power has increased greatly, and the software industry chain has flourished.
Similarly, when DingTalk can carry content from graphic and video messages to simple business flows, and then to cool applications to bring more complex business flows, low code reduces the threshold for enterprise development of business, DingTalk can be understood as a business operating system, and the high-frequency use of services will also bring about the growth of cloud computing usage, and cloud Peg integration has indeed achieved an effect similar to the Wintel Alliance.
Cloud nails are integrated in the back, low code in front, DingTalk carries a strong potential energy, but for China's traditional industries, it is far from enough, how to find the cut of cool applications, how to do PaaS, and how to deal with the relationship with traditional software vendors, all these problems, Titanium Media also chatted carefully with the endless.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited by Titanium Media.
Titanium Media: What are the new considerations for DingTalk low code in the past year?
Not poor: Last year, the entire industry recognized the trend of low code, and many manufacturers followed suit, and this track got a very large amount of financing, which I think is also a very fulfilling thing.
DingTalk in the past more than a year, there are some new thinking, we want to talk to this industry about what is going on with To B, but also often challenged by people their product experience, function, advanced, anyway, who is stronger than us at which point, customers will come to find us, we want to take this opportunity to express their understanding of the future to the market.
We believe that in a long-term development process, continuous progress is very important, starting from digitalization, DingTalk is an organizational digitalization and business digitalization product, we believe that digitalization is a more progressive way. In addition, we will also insist on opening up, because the To B track, purely from the perspective of DingTalk, it is difficult to solve all problems, so we will emphasize that openness is also a kind of progress.
Our country's software industry has developed for many years, it should be said that it has been in a stage of traditional software, not bigger or finer, many are doing projects to do customization.
Through a set of open systems, through the ability of BPaaS, DingTalk has gone from the original APaaS to BPaaS, and we believe that it can help China's software industry to have new development in the context of opening up.
In this process, DingTalk will also assume a more important role, we do our own horizontal innovation, support partners to do vertical innovation. Vertical innovation and horizontal innovation are important for the development of the software industry.
Titanium Media: DingTalk proposed PaaS, as if the software industry has embarked on the road of similar hardware, what is the thinking behind it?
Not poor: The big background is that DingTalk now has 500 million users, and the growth is also obvious. In this context, we find that the needs of customers are increasing, and all walks of life are different. Our previous idea was to do some SaaS for everyone, DingTalk is a SaaS, so we did intelligent personnel, intelligent approval, online collaborative OA and so on. When doing these things, we believe that three hundred and sixty lines need these functions, and in the early days, this strategy was still relatively successful, accompanied by the rapid development of DingTalk.
After the epidemic to the present, the scale of DingTalk has grown very largely. The back of the growth is the challenge, more and more customer demand, the needs of various industries are very different, our previous approach is difficult to serve customers in depth, we can only solve the shallow needs of the enterprise.
So in this process, let yourself become a PaaS, cooperate with professional industry software developers in various industries, or it is the IT department of the enterprise, or the project company, and combine our PaaS with their professional business know-how to form a solution that meets the real needs of the enterprise, which we think may be an effective means to solve the proposition of the large-scale development of China's software industry.
We have also made some attempts, in many enterprises we walked down and found that it is not bad, so we think this is worth a very large investment, more and more like the previous epileptic general (Alibaba Cloud Intelligent President Zhang Jianfeng) said, DingTalk is a business middle office, in fact, I fully agree, but I made a small note in it, I said that this business middle office is a collaborative middle office, it can help a lot of software SaaS applications to collaborate with each other, help people to collaborate, human-computer interaction interface can become more friendly, In fact, we are solving this problem.
To solve this problem, it is to help SaaS providers, industry software developers, enterprise IT departments, they make digital vertical products, can be more convenient to use, more frequent use.
So before I often talked to the team about this point of view, DingTalk found another solution for China's traditional software industry, that is, we use high-frequency entrepreneurs to pull low-frequency software, so that Chinese software can be reached by more users, and then often can be accessed, so we position ourselves to go to PaaS.
We converge the common general capabilities that have nothing to do with industry attributes to PaaS, and the professional, personalized, and customized industry attribute capabilities are handed over to professional companies.
Titanium Media: How did you think about the cool application?
Not poor: For example, I have developed a lot of applications with low code, but it is inconvenient to use, always point to the workbench, find this application point into, there are about four or five clicks, we feel very inconvenient.
And after many low-code applications are created, they also encounter problems, enterprises create 200 applications a year, and they can't find applications at all, so we want to think about how to make the use of applications more frequent, so we think of cool applications, in high-frequency scene message flows, approval flows are implanted, so that you can immediately connect with cool applications.
Titanium Media: After the popularity of low code, we saw a trend towards the democratization of technology, and research and development is actually a right. Originally in the hands of professionals and IT departments, through the advancement of low-code technology, spilled over to the hands of business departments and front-line employees, what new impact do you think will be brought to the organization and management of enterprises?
Not poor: My response is that low code gives businesses and people within organizations more opportunities to create applications, which in turn brings more sense of accomplishment. I think it's DingTalk doing this thing and bringing about changes in the industry.
In the past, the application or system developed by the enterprise, even if it is a digital department, or an ordinary business person, it has no chance to be used, today we let you be simple, low-cost development, after the development is completed, in the DingTalk such a high-frequency use platform, you will easily feel, I developed something that is used, there are users, then you have a sense of achievement, you will stimulate the enthusiasm for the next development.
Titanium Media: The popularity of low code also reminds us of the popularity of mobile phones, the extreme reduction of the threshold for internet use, and then bring a wave of huge changes beyond our imagination, low code will repeat a similar process in the software field, do you think the changes they have undergone are within your expectations?
Not poor: I think so far, I've seen some developers and apps that are doing better low-code, overall. Within our original expectations, first of all, I couldn't do those things, and secondly, we thought he should be interested in doing them. In fact, we've seen a lot of financial people, HR, teachers, all sorts of other roles, come up and develop these things ourselves. Now for every 10 low-code developers on DingTalk, 1 is finance, 1 is personnel, and 1 is administrative.
That is the situation we had expected to see.
I often tell the team this point of view, low code to say that you can compare it to the cut in the vibrato, the cut screen gives many people a simple template to create a short video, you can create a very good small movie, giving people a very professional feeling, thus accelerating the development of the entire vibrato.
In fact, the significance of low code for China's software industry is also a bit like the cut in Douyin, we can be our own director, business logic and business process by ourselves to achieve, just such a process.
Titanium Media: For the IT department within the enterprise, low code reduces the burden of development, in fact, adds some additional responsibilities and work, how do you think they have to adapt to this change?
Not exhaustive: There must be a change to the IT department. First of all, I think that for the IT department, the original productivity has been liberated, he actually has to do a lot of work to change the demand every day, and now the business department can do some things, then the IT department people can concentrate on doing something more meaningful. Whether it is the underlying model construction, or this IT governance between systems, or the top-level planning.
Why did the previous IT department feel less valuable? Because he spends a lot of time doing things that are relatively worthless, change it to this today, change it to that tomorrow.
The low code is a very friendly thing for the IT department, the previous IT governance applications are relatively small, that is, the application richness is not enough, the most traditional IT governance management hardware, asset management, management permissions.
Today, as our low-code or PaaS capabilities expand, applications within the enterprise will be extremely rich, and every link will be digitized. Like the digitization of nail badges we talked about before, the digitization of conference rooms, including the VR glasses we released, the digitization of workstations, and the digitization of all aspects, the core issues that the IT department has to deal with have become data security, data strategy, data transfer or data transactions, data attribution, etc.
IT departments should focus more on governance and management, policies and standards, rather than performing a lot of basic work, which is either outsourced or developed by the business department employees themselves with low code.
I think there is a high probability that the IT department may leave some people who do architecture, or people who do some core code development, and many people will be liberated.
Titanium Media: The impact of low code on the software industry is still very large, and in terms of expansion, what changes do you think will occur to the entire software industry and ecology?
Not poor: I've been thinking about that. In the past two years, a lot of time has been invested in this matter, and china's software industry has not had a few large companies until now. Unlike the United States, which is also big, that is also big, and it feels like the market value of a SaaS is very high, and it can have hundreds of billions of dollars.
The first of several major problems in the Chinese software industry is that they are all doing projects, because customers want to customize, and the United States does not have so many customizations, which is a big problem.
The second is that the sales and service system of China's software industry is "human flesh", constantly building branches, and then door-to-door direct sales, because the cost of establishing a trust relationship between software suppliers and enterprises is very large, so China is still traditional "relationship marketing".
Although some people now say that it is a product-based drive, it is actually difficult. Most of the traditional Chinese enterprises, or the management of mature enterprises are older, they believe that the relationship between the two of us is good, I see you, I am willing to buy your list, the trust relationship is a big problem encountered in the Chinese software industry, so it will have an impact on the sales and service system.
Third, all software in China has a common problem, that is, the frequency of use is very low, that is, low-frequency software, occasionally use it, feel that there is no value. The next year of renewal, the boss will definitely challenge you for half a day, after all, how much this thing is useful, the IT department is not good to prove that what you do is valuable.
Can the work done by DingTalk solve these problems in the industrial chain? I think the core value of DingTalk is a trust intermediary, so that SaaS software vendors and customers have a good platform, you use these software here, the experience is good and safe, and there is some credibility, in addition, try to transfer this delivery process from the original human flesh project delivery, to use low code to configure, do scaling.
For low-frequency problems, we use the DingTalk cool application to break the software into small pieces, and embed the components of this software in the chat process, so that you can quickly interact.
In the future, DingTalk will do horizontal integration, software suppliers will do vertical integration, horizontal and vertical connection, which may have some help and acceleration for the development of China's software industry.
Including the previous software to build branches to shop sales, now do not use, DingTalk service providers across the country more than 7,000 people, are the sales of these software suppliers, can help push to DingTalk customers, they no longer have to build a huge sales system service system.
I think these are all problems that the DingTalk platform can solve.
Titanium Media: For traditional software such as Yonyou and Kingdee, is low code a good thing or a bad thing for them?
Not poor: I think it should be a good thing, but from their point of view, it may take some time to adapt.
Like Jiandao Cloud, it should now be the top three low-code platforms, which can save a lot of time for companies that do software delivery.
Software architecture has always mentioned SOA, and later microservices, and has always mentioned a variety of solutions. Realistically speaking, whether it is SOA or microservices, it is solving problems for developers and making the developer's own architecture more flexible, but he has not solved the problems on the demand side.
Whether the demand changes more frequently than the architecture changes, the low code itself solves a big pain point, that is, how to deal with the high-speed change of the demand.
This is not to say that the software architecture itself is unreasonable, the software architecture is reasonable, it must be changed according to the requirements, and the demand is an idea today, an idea tomorrow.
To B is this feature, to B demand changes, the frequency is much greater than the sustainability. It is impossible for a demand to remain unchanged for a year, often three days and two ends to you to mention, this can not be changed to this, the external environment has changed, the enterprise will immediately follow the change.
Therefore, Chinese software does not have a very good solution to cope with changes in demand, whether it is microservices or SOA, it is not too good to solve. But today, through low code, through APaaS, BPaaS, we have largely solved the high-frequency changes on the demand side.
Titanium Media: Cool apps want to completely break the software, how does this thing do?
Not exhaustive: We are doing incremental, not completely denying the previous development system.
In the past, when developing an OKR system, the leader said that the PROGRESS of OKR was reported to me, and then the subordinate sent a link to the leader, waiting for the boss to click to open a new window, which was such logic before. However, we think that the user experience brought by jumps is very poor.
Now the cool application to solve the problem does not change the independent software system, while standing in the chat window user's point of view, without jumping, in the chat window, the sent link will be parsed into a widget, the chat person can see all the content corresponding to this component, but also direct interaction. Agree with this as a boss, or write two notes, and solve the problem during the chat.
We already have more than two dozen SaaS software vendors that have access to the cool application, fragmenting its core module, not fragmenting the entire software, and some modules are suitable for completing the business flow in the message flow, because the message flow is the highest frequency.
Chinese software has not actually solved this problem, but invisibly solved by DingTalk, we solved the problem of high-frequency use of software, we made the application more frequent, so that you in the communication process, the business flow will pass.
Titanium Media: What adaptations and adjustments do SaaS vendors need to make in cool applications?
Not exhaustive: We have a standard process to help them apply to the Cool App Competency Center.
He can register the cool application widgets that he has done, DingTalk will be assigned this permission to him, not everyone can develop, it must be certified and approved, which is equivalent to a set of mechanisms like the mini program on the shelves, we have to review the content, the interface is up to the requirements, before it can be passed.
We are now working on a new feature, such as I chatted with you in DingTalk, before I @ you, you will receive a message, later we will add a new symbol, such as slash "/", in the chat window enter "/", will load the widgets.
If I write an OKR, I show that OKR, and it's the widget that comes out, so he makes the interaction more user-friendly.
Titanium Media: If you want to make a popular low-code application, what capabilities do you think you should have?
Not poor: I think the main thing is the business abstraction ability, which is also a boundary between the programmer and the product manager that can never be crossed, the product manager gives a lot of things to the programmer, the programmer does not necessarily understand, but the low code is done by yourself, you know what you want, a good low code application, I think you must first understand very well what you want to do.
Is to draw a flowchart, you want the user to see what the first interface is, the core logic is who is the user, see what interface and then what to enter on the interface, and finally click after the submission, the next step to which interface.
For example, you have to do a review system, this thing you must know better than me, the first step should be how to do first, the second step of the third step, after thinking clearly, you yourself will set up this interface, the process is stringed together, who has the permission to submit the manuscript, who has the right to review, what key points should be paid attention to when reviewing the manuscript, such as whether there is a violation, whether there have been any words, this thing we do not understand, but you are more experts than us.
For people who are purely technical, a development engineer who wants to understand this business may also understand the literal meaning, and after doing it, he finds that this is not the case, and he has to change it repeatedly.
Titanium Media: Is low-code capability a must-have capability for digital enterprises in the future?
Not poor: Definitely a must, but definitely not all. It is a necessary and insufficient condition for the digital transformation of enterprises, enterprises do a lot of digital systems, can not only rely on low code, it still has to rely on full-code full code, do a lot of complex logic, complex judgments.
Titanium Media: From the background data of DingTalk, what kind of low-code data is there, for example, can you see what the most used low-code scenarios are, or are there any other interesting findings?
Not exhaustive: There are a few interesting data now. First of all, enterprise DAUs using low-code applications have been on the rise, and the number of users is rising every day, and from the release in January last year to the present, it has maintained a very healthy user volume increase.
The second is that the number of applications has been rising, and thousands of new applications are developed every day and then deployed to DingTalk, and there is no interruption in DingTalk.
So a lot of our confidence and judgment in this industry comes from data, he is not like some business, today there are more people, tomorrow there are fewer people, but it has been rising, indicating that more and more people are participating in this track.
We have also seen the categories of applications, from the Perspective of the DingTalk platform, there are many applications based on mature template transformation, such as CRM, sales management, order management, etc., as well as industry applications, such as safety production management, all of which are high-frequency applications, so it will become a template.
Titanium Media: DingTalk's big customer strategy, how to combine with low-code technology and low-code ecology?
Not poor: Now basically every big customer will use low code, when we push him DingTalk, several customers I visited will buy another one separately, and now it is like this.
For the new business system, this combination is no problem, just buy it to build it yourself, and now the most difficult thing to combine is the connection between the old system and the new system, or the expansion of the old system, "combination" is the biggest difficulty.
Titanium Media: For the low-code business model, what kind of overall consideration does DingTalk have?
Not poor: Now the low-code business model, through the free strategy to attract users, the core business model is to sell our Yitai, Tritium cloud and other product platforms, the platform of course has a data limit, such as allowing 1 million records or 10 million records.
Another model, that is, I build a set of invoicing and inventory templates, I sell this template to customers, not only the platform, but also sell templates to customers, platform plus templates, customers can continue to change on the template, on the basis of the platform to do corporate customization modifications.
For DingTalk, we did ecology last year, we did DingTalk, we did DingTalk, do connectors, is to allow more low code to be able to dock with DingTalk, this year's words like yi to build this side, the independent goal is commercialization. Because now large customers use more and more suitable rides, basically buying a set is one or two million.
Titanium Media: When it comes to opening up the ecology to other manufacturers, there is a trust problem that cannot be bypassed, how are you going to solve it?
Not poor: To put it bluntly, the trust between us and SaaS software providers, the most core point is data security, as long as the SaaS vendor data security problems are solved, I will definitely trust them, and then the product experience will be done a little better.
In order to solve these two problems and experience this piece, we optimized the integration of personnel and industry and finance in BPaaS, and the integration of our own HR interface, which looks like a product made of DingTalk.
In addition, the problem of data security and trust, we and Alibaba Cloud engaged in a computing nest, third-party development of the application, you can use the computing nest as an ordinary Alibaba Cloud, but after the deployment, I have a variety of restrictions and constraints, application developers do not have to worry. But I make sure that third parties don't take the data away and that it's a secure SaaS environment for the customer. In this way, enterprises buy SaaS software without worrying too much about data problems, which is our second means of solving the trust problem.
Finally, the company bought a SaaS, in a few days to replace, the previous practice is to fill in all the data again, today because of BPaaS, when you need to switch to another similar product, you can take the data directly over. As long as the customer is docked with DingTalk, DingTalk will help migrate these core data in the master data, so that for the customer, he is not worried about being "kidnapped", the data itself is safer and more convenient to migrate, and there is a guarantee of the computing nest.
Titanium Media: For the resistance and rebound of traditional software developers, what are The considerations of DingTalk?
Not poor: there will definitely be resistance, there will be a certain cost, in order to solve this cost, we have given certain benefits, depending on whether the developer can balance.
DingTalk is not a traffic platform, the traffic platform can distribute everything through traffic, but DingTalk is a high-frequency entrance, is to use high frequency to pull low frequency, I will take this to exchange with developers, to see if he is willing to transform the system. Once the transformation is completed, there is a chance to get a very convenient experience, the display, forwarding, editing interaction of the chat interface components are solved, which is a new experience.
(This article was first published in the Titanium Media App interview |.) Liu Xiangming, author | Shuai Zhang, Editor | Gaihunda )