36Kr Interview | NetEase Smart Enterprise Technology VP Chen Gong: Stand with customers and make technical reserves for diversified entertainment and social scenes

With the trend of remote office and digitalization brought about by the epidemic, network information security is closely bonded with more businesses, which has become a survival problem that most enterprises have to face. The rising number of financing from startups and the vigorous layout of Internet giants in technology and business have become the best evidence of the heat of this round of security market heat.

In the midst of this, communication security is also heating up. Under the circumstance that the underlying infrastructure of communication technology is gradually mature and market awareness is rapidly increasing, the field of communication security is exploring new product and service forms and business logic. On the one hand, it cuts the stable service demand from the communication cost of enterprise customers, and on the other hand, it starts from the technical scenarios to establish industry attributes in some areas with more mature ecology and provide complete solutions for enterprises.

At the same time, with the rapid development of a new generation of communication technology, the increasing improvement of content supervision, and the urgent upgrading of the demand for digital risk control, the pan-entertainment industry, known for its diversified scenarios, is undergoing a disruptive innovation. On the one hand, in the face of the digital content compliance boom, all content production platforms, distribution platforms, and content subjects need to pay for "security", most notably in the music and short video industries. Based on this background, some platforms with self-built capabilities have seized market opportunities to provide services for external enterprises through their own mature underlying technology and services, among which NetEase Yidun, a security service provider that joined NetEase Smart Enterprise as a sub-segment business at the beginning of this year, is a typical representative.

On the other hand, the innovation of service scenarios brought about by technological upgrading has once again awakened people's imagination. The continuous emergence of product outlets, the re-picking up of future concepts, etc. have produced huge value and bubbles. The urgent needs of B2C enterprises for scenario technology have also brought new growth points to the enterprise service market.

On May 29, NetEase Smart Held the NetEase MCtalk Pan Entertainment Technology Summit in Beijing, interpreting the innovative achievements of the pan-entertainment industry from a technical point of view, and releasing two products: "NetEase Cloud Letter - NetEase Easy Shield One-stop Secure Communication Solution - Secure Communication" and "NetEase Cloud Information Global Intelligent Routing Network - 'WE-CAN' (Communications Acceleration Network)".

To this end, NetEase Smart Technology VP Chen Gong shared with 36Kr the technical layout of NetEase Smart Enterprise and the product logic of "Safe Pass".

36Kr: What tracks does NetEase Wisdom currently focus on in the entertainment and social networking?

Chen Gong: NetEase Smart Enterprise includes Three sections of NetEase Cloud Trust, NetEase Cloud Business, netEase Yi Dun, of which Cloud Letter provides PaaS services for integrated communication, including interactive capabilities and communication capabilities, so we have been exploring new scenarios in the field of entertainment and social networking, such as video social, audio social, game social, etc., and we have a very high degree of fit. After NetEase Yidun joined us at the beginning of this year, it gave us the addition of new scenarios and the inspiration of development direction from the aspect of entertainment interactive content security, and also brought us many customers in the game field, especially in the mobile security section of social games. So we quickly did the integration of products, services and algorithms, and it was also under such an opportunity that we launched the product of "security pass".

Secondly, entertainment social networking often appears a lot of outlets and phenomenon-level tracks, whether it is the "thousand broadcast war" or the Clubhouse audio social at the end of last year, for us, it is essentially a test of the technical ability of multiple scenes such as audio and video social networking. In general, we will first lay a solid foundation for the core technical capabilities, because the outlets in the market cannot escape the corresponding capabilities of audio and video, AI, algorithms, etc. in any case, and in this regard, we are constantly reserving and iterating, so we can meet the emerging vents. At present, our overall penetration in the game industry is relatively good.

36Kr: Pan Entertainment is an industry with frequent outlets, how to understand the role played by NetEase Smart Enterprises in these outlets?

Chen Gong: As a technology provider, when smelling the outlet, how to quickly and easily provide products and services to these enterprise customers who want to innovate and seize the opportunity is the most important thing for us.

Whether it's entertainment social or other areas, I think technological innovation is mainly divided into two parts. One is the innovation of the product form, the other is the underlying technological innovation, the market can use new technical capabilities to empower the product form. At present, What NetEase Zhiqi is doing is the latter. For example, audio and video technology, which is actually a difficult technology, but for enterprise users, they can quickly, conveniently and flexibly realize product innovation and functional iteration based on our technology and services.

Just like our NetEase Cloud Music, many of its products use the underlying services of NetEase Cloud. Based on the innovation and support of technology, Cloud Music has made a lot of scenes at the product level that are very good to experience. On the other hand, innovative scenes driven by technology, such as listening to cloud music together, are themselves constantly strengthening in terms of interactivity and fun. Overall, in the face of the outlet, in fact, we hope to be able to extract the corresponding solutions and technical capabilities and quickly build a system.

36Kr: Taking the technical layout of NetEase Cloud As an example, what changes and trends have been generated in the service scenarios driven by technology?

Chen Gong: As a PaaS layer service provider, we are constantly iteratively deepening audio, video and IM technology, mainly in order to coexist deeply with customers' product innovation needs from a technical point of view. With the development of AI and cloud technology, the user's psychological expectations will become higher and higher, from audio to video to VR, AR interaction, including everyone regaining the attention to metaverse scene technology, these new heat will lead to changes in user habits and carriers.

In this process, what NetEase Smart Enterprise needs to do is to be with users and customers. For example, the full-latency hierarchical communication service proposed today is also our understanding of each other's pain points in the process of communicating with customers, so we have carried out a subversive technological innovation. On the other hand, the innovative scenarios that customers can see, we will also intervene in advance to do the operation. For example, in the communications industry, our current audio and video laboratory is doing some operational work for the end-to-end transmission of VR and AR immersive experiences.

Returning to the interactivity and fun just mentioned, these are the two main trends in the application of B2C enterprise customer products, and we have also refined the division of labor from these two dimensions. Interactivity is more at the application level, such as code-free product services. In addition, we have laid out a lot of open source solutions for entertainment social products for startups and long-tail customers, which can help them quickly copy and build online products in a day or two. In terms of fun, we provide algorithm support for C-end functions such as bel canto, voice change, beauty, and makeup, as well as the recently launched spatial sound effects, which are widely favored by game customers.

36Kr: With the advent of the era of refined operation, how to deal with the increasingly refined service and growth needs of enterprise customers?

Chen Gong: At present, the cloud merchants under NetEase Wisdom Enterprise mainly provide marketing growth services for merchants. From the perspective of NetEase Cloud Business, I feel more deeply that the improvement of infrastructure and the improvement of market education in the general environment are great benefits for all ToB businesses, and there are changes in the entire marketing channel. In the era of private domain traffic, the information gap has become narrower and narrower, and enterprises are increasingly hoping to be able to obtain customers, convert and manage through personalization and new technical means.

The industry experience we have accumulated in the process of supporting some of NetEase's head products can help us better serve external customers, help enterprises achieve business growth at the same time, but also be able to analyze and feed back market trends, based on NetEase's diversified product scenarios and huge C-end ecology, which will be a relatively big advantage.

The definition of NetEase Cloud Business itself is to solve the link relationship between consumers and enterprises. First of all, we will help enterprises see consumers through big data through accurate insights, combine some basic marketing tools and sales tools to help enterprises reach and follow up more accurately, and combine the whole life cycle of enterprises for intelligent analysis and optimization, which applies a large number of AI+ data capabilities. In addition, compared with PaaS, it is more tested by the technical capabilities of SDK and API interface, SaaS customers pursue easy-to-use and stable products and services, SaaS services need to have stronger industry attributes, and sufficiently clear data link follow-up methods. Therefore, we provide customers with a complete set of solutions of "tools + services + traffic + industry experience".

In the era of refined operation, merchants hope to improve operational efficiency and reduce customer acquisition costs through intelligent methods. In general, cloud providers, like the "security pass" we released today, also provide a converged solution for enterprises.

36Kr: At the beginning of this year, NetEase Yidun joined NetEase Zhiqi, what value has been generated by this business integration?

Chen Gong: NetEase Yidun is a relatively good supplement to the business of NetEase Smart Enterprise, because from the perspective of large industry logic, especially in the entertainment industry, the requirements of communication itself and content security audit are integrated. For us, the launch of the new product "Security Pass" is also to maximize the use of the advantages of "communication + security", which plays a certain role in promoting the entire industry.

At present, there are some common pain points in the industry. First, customers often report to us that it is cumbersome to connect with different service providers, and that sharing content and data between different vendors is a threat to data security. The services provided by SecureCom are able to avoid this problem.

Secondly, for most of our customers, itself has to bear the more expensive RTC service, in addition to the content of the inspection of the time to generate additional inspection costs, from the cost control, "security pass" can save customers an average of 20% of the cost, in some typical 1V1 inspection scenarios can be reduced by about 50%.

Third, from the perspective of native technology, after we integrate the two services of communication and security, we can abstract some specific algorithms on the common server, such as audio noise reduction, video enhancement, etc., which can improve detection efficiency through artificial intelligence content security detection.

Therefore, our original intention is still to integrate services from the perspective of customers, and also aim at this track. For our customers, they often have a knowledge blind spot in communication security supervision, in view of the problem of customer cognition, NetEase Yidun has established a public opinion monitoring network on digital risk control, real-time monitoring and collection of domestic and foreign public opinion on the whole network, risk prediction, and the first time to inform customers. From the perspective of market layout, this is a long-term thing, but because there is a relatively large market space, and we are also relatively good at doing this, we can carry out large-scale replication, so we hope that in the future, we can bring subversive upgrades to the industry in terms of cost, applicability, and testing quality.