Zhang Tong, CEO of Defan: In the next 5-8 years, everyone will be the owner and editor of digital ideas

Low-code, no-code as a visual programming platform, catalyzed by the COVID-19 outbreak, is growing at an alarming rate in the global market. The U.S. Department of State (DoS) has been using ServiceNow's low-code platform to develop and deliver nearly a dozen low-code applications in just a few weeks in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, tracking the progress of the outbreak in various countries.

Not only in North America, but also in Asia Pacific, it is also following the pace of digitization with low (no) code as the core technology. According to the IDC report, Indonesia's low (no) code technology penetration rate is 86%, surpassing Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan. To meet all the digital transformation scenarios of China's digital economy in the future, at least hundreds of millions of new digital applications need to be developed, of which 80% will be developed by low (no) code platforms.

As the second largest digital economy in the world, can China shoulder the responsibility and mission of promoting technological development and innovation in the field of low (no) code, and lead global technological development and change? Can the popularity of low (no) code technology change the landscape of the global software industry? Haibi Research Institute launched the "Can China's Low-Code and No-Code Lead the World?" The in-depth series of reports, dialogue with the founders and executives of typical manufacturers at home and abroad, combing, discussing, analyzing, and predicting the development of low (no) code platforms at home and abroad, and deeply interpreting the Chinese and Western digital economy technology games under the ever-changing world political and economic pattern and the dark tide!

The guest of this issue is Zhang Tong, founder & CEO of Defan, to talk about the industry insights from the perspective of Defan's low code, and the following is the interview transcript:

Defan founder & CEO Zhang Tong

Tong Zhang: Founder & CEO of Defan

• EMBA of Fudan University
• "New Fortune" top 50 founders
• Director of Shanghai Industrial Internet Association
• Director of Fudan Future Industry Association
• Guest Lecturer of MBA Digitalization at Fudan University
• With more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, he has provided digital consulting and product services for large enterprises such as Midea, Huawei, and BYD

In the next three to five years, domestic manufacturers will catch up with foreign manufacturers

Reporter: Mr. Zhang, hello, how do you view the current development of low-code and no-code technology in China? Where does China's low-code play in the global landscape?

Zhang Tong: The concept of low code and no code was first proposed abroad, and from the perspective of the global low code and no code development pattern, foreign countries are still more leading, and we still have a clear understanding of this aspect.

So where is China's technology? Objectively speaking, the level of foreign manufacturers is uneven, capable of strong, there are slightly weaker, and Chinese manufacturers are the same, not to mention the current domestic definition of low code technology has not reached a complete consensus, so there is no very perfect standard to do the comparison between the two parties at home and abroad, which has many influencing factors.

For example, Gartner put forward specific key standards when evaluating low-code manufacturers, and the overemphasized "drag-and-drop way to make forms" by domestic manufacturers is actually only one of these key standards, especially at the level of internationalization and international data security, there is still a gap between domestic products and international products. So we are more in line with Gartner's standards to measure the technical development trend of low code, rather than simply talking to customers that low code is to solve the problem of procrastination.

Reporter: Do you think that there is a big gap between the technical framework and capability boundaries at home and abroad?

Zhang Tong: There is a certain gap, mainly because foreign manufacturers represented by Siemens, OutSystems, Microsoft, etc. have a first-mover advantage, after all, they do this thing earlier, China is relatively late, but you can see that the gap in the technical framework and capability boundary is gradually narrowing, China's manufacturers are very large in research and development investment, including Defan, more than 30% of the annual income is invested in research and development, so it will gradually catch up with international head manufacturers.

For the field of no code, the technical route at home and abroad is close, the goal is to replace Excel, but foreign software like Tree Table has been relatively mature, and domestic Companies such as Tencent and Ali have also made efforts and released their own more competitive products.

Reporter: The Chinese market is so vast, can The technical capabilities of China's low-code software catch up with the United States, or even surpass the United States?

Zhang Tong: I think that catching up with technical capabilities needs to be viewed from two aspects: application and technology.

From a technological point of view, the United States is currently leading in low-code technology, but temporary technological leadership does not necessarily bring application leadership. For example, in 3G and 4G technology, the United States and Europe are ahead of China, but because China has a very wide range of needs and network scenarios, we see that in 5G technology, China is already leading.

Therefore, the soil of application is very important, can cultivate a more leading technology, from the application level, the next three or five years of domestic manufacturers will definitely exceed foreign manufacturers, which is closely related to China's digital transformation demand, the market has a blowout digital application development needs. It is precisely such a rich soil of digital demand that will surely cultivate manufacturers that surpass the United States in technology.

The strategic layout is clear and powerful: focus on large-scale head enterprises

Reporter: What kind of problems do you think low-code technology mainly solves? Which industries are mainly affected?

Tong Zhang: At this stage, low-code technology mainly solves 4 types of problems.

The first type is the application around the enterprise management software, including rapid iteration of business applications around large ERPs such as SAP and Oracle, mainly to solve good user experience and business resilience, we often call this type of building business middle office and technology middle office, and ERP becomes the background;

The second category is cross-business process automation, solving cross-process problems of multiple applications, requiring process data access, integration, modeling, orchestration, etc., so the integration capabilities of the platform are very demanding, and the low-code platform needs to have strong iPaaS capabilities, and more emphasis is placed on the ability to integrate and API;

The third category is industry-specific digital solutions, such as product lifecycle management PLM, production execution manufacturing system MES, expense reimbursement, supplier management, etc., most of which are corresponding SaaS vendors extending their own business to build low-code platforms, and there are also low-code vendors to build industry-specific solutions, mainly emphasizing the ability to quickly build applications and integrate with existing system data;

The fourth category is the application of forms and OA, mainly for the approval scenario of collaborative office OA and BPM, leave, printing, etc., such as the use of dingtalk or enterprise WeChat, this part of the scene is relatively simple, more is a single scene application, such manufacturers are also very many, the future should be dingTalk, micro, feishu and other essential tools.

For these four types of scenarios, Defan is mainly laid out in the first, second and third types of scenarios, because Defan's products themselves are platform-based software suitable for medium and large enterprises, which can help enterprises build their own business middle office and technology middle office, and realize the rapid development of various digital solutions.

At the industry level, including automobiles, equipment manufacturing, finance, medicine, new economy, electronic chips, consumer retail, military, construction and real estate and other industries, these scenarios are involved, indicating that the applicability of platform software is very extensive.

Reporter: Can you introduce what strategic layout and key industries will be focused on next?

Zhang Tong: At present, defan's strategic layout is mainly based on the top 500 large-scale enterprises in China. 129 of the Fortune 500 cooperated with us, 141 of the top 500 Chinese manufacturing companies cooperated with us, and 7 of China's top 10 vehicle companies cooperated with us. The reason why Defan can become a company with a high share of the top 500 is mainly due to the fact that the strategic positioning of Defan is very clear, and we are currently mainly serving China's top 500 enterprises.

Because the large head enterprises for software capabilities requirements, technical foresight and performance requirements are very high, as well as in the process of use, the richness of the business requirements for digitalization are impossible for small businesses to experience, although it is extremely difficult for Defan, but I believe in "doing difficult and correct things", from 2014, we have adhered to this strategy, after several years of polishing, our products are more and more perfect, very obvious, in the process of customer selection, POC testing, Our products are very competitive, most customers will not hesitate to choose Defan products after passing through POC.

In particular, gartner's "China's Low-Code Competitive Landscape" report released in April this year, which ranked us side by side with Siemens, OutSytems, Microsoft and other world-class manufacturers as the core 6 low-code manufacturers, which also confirmed the correctness of our strategy. Gartner believes that LCAP low-code platform products such as Defan and Mendix should serve large enterprises with high IT maturity.

At the same time, Gartner also believes that in addition to defan's product capabilities to meet the needs of large enterprises, its rich experience in Serving Chinese head enterprises and its complete ecological capabilities are also important reasons for standing out in this track.

This also strongly strengthens our confidence that we will continue to strengthen our strategic goals in terms of products and services.

Defan has achieved a high share in the Fortune 500 and China's top 500, and in the future we will continue to strive to achieve an absolute leading share of the top 500, so we will continue to deepen the top 500 companies to provide high-quality products for top companies, and will gradually help the top 500 upstream and downstream enterprises to empower efficiency and help them and the top 500 companies achieve penetration in data and efficiency.

In terms of key industries, we have achieved industry leaders in the three major industries of automobile, equipment manufacturing and medicine, and will focus on the development of banking, construction real estate and Internet service industries in the future, Bank of Shanghai, Guangfa Bank, Postal Savings Bank, Baidu, R&F Real Estate, Country Garden, China Construction Eighth Bureau, etc. have established cooperation with us, and will accumulate a lot of experience in these benchmark users, and then feed back to our product capabilities.

Everyone is the owner and editor of a digital idea

Reporter: Do you recognize that "everyone is a developer"? Will such a future era of all-people programming arrive? If you agree, how long do you think it will take?

Tong Zhang: 20 years ago I would have used Excel, so can I call myself an "Excel developer"? No, I'm just an Excel user. We used to not edit a photo, but then with the beauty software, everyone can be beautiful, then we will say "everyone is a picture editor"? We won't, we'll just say that now each of us is a beauty guru.

Then the same is true for low-code platforms, where a series of operations performed on top of a low-code platform is not programming, it is just a simple, series of operations. So we can jump out and look at it, in other words, low code is just creating a digital idea, we can call it "everyone is the owner and editor of a digital idea".

The democratization of low-code is not only determined by the low-code tools themselves, but also includes the requirement for the standardization of hardware and business scenarios. When will we achieve "everyone is the owner and editor of digital ideas"? I think the next five to eight years can be seen.

Reporter: From the perspective of the government or the media, what efforts do you think can be done?

Zhang Tong: Any progress in science and technology is inseparable from the support and tolerance of the whole society. Does low-code technology really not require programmers? No, we just want to reduce the development cost of programmers and free up excess energy to do more important development work. This will require governments, industry and the media to work together to change public perceptions.

At present, the government is very supportive of China's digital construction, we can see the construction of the digital city of Xiong'an, the application of autonomous driving technology, the establishment of the science and technology innovation board, etc., we can also see that Beijing, Shanghai and other local governments have also launched a lot of digital construction strategies and plans, we hope that the government can support innovative enterprises through active fiscal and tax policies.

The publicity and promotion of the media is also crucial, "the wine is also afraid of the deep alley", I hope that the media can provide the market with objective and notarized professional information reference, help decision-makers identify truly excellent manufacturers, and listen to the voices of customers who have really used. Because customer reputation and market share is a valuable reference, only if the customer reputation is good, can prove that the manufacturers that provide services to customers are trustworthy, I am very proud of this, and our reputation among customers is very good.