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▎This time, has Tencent found the correct posture of ToB?
When will we use Tencent?
When chatting and opening WeChat, when playing "Glory of the King", or when I use Tencent video to chase the drama and brush idol?
But these are Tencent's past stories.
What is Tencent's new story?
If Tencent’s entrepreneurial history is divided into two, one is ToC, the entrepreneurship in the consumer Internet represented by QQ and WeChat; the other is ToB, the entrepreneur in the industrial Internet era represented by digital tools.
The latter, ToB’s entrepreneurship, is a new story that Tencent is experiencing. Today’s Double 11 Carnival Day also happens to be the 22nd anniversary of Tencent.
This new story is related to health codes, small programs, and Tencent conferences. More thoroughly, it is a story about the ubiquitous cloud.
Tencent’s first To B documentary in 22 years, "Yunqi Ten Years", goes live today
In the 300-page "Tencent Biography" published in 2017, the author of the book, Wu Xiaobo, only used one page at the end of the book to talk about the cloud computing business that Tencent had just emerged at the time. It is not that Tencent Cloud is not important, but at a time point like three years ago, there is still no clear positioning for the future strategic position of Tencent Cloud as an internal incubation project for Tencent Group and what it can develop into.
What's more, when the time goes back to ten years ago, in the face of cloud computing, a market of hundreds of billions, the entire industry is still in an irrational stage of frantic staking. What are you good at and where is the real value? , Industry participants can’t think about it. It's just that everyone vaguely feels that the "cloud" is the future.
For example, after conducting a comprehensive review of Tencent's social networking, mutual entertainment and other online virtual businesses, Wu Xiaobo commented in "Tencent Biography": "For Tencent, the future possibilities seem to lie outside the Internet in the virtual field."
Years later, the real economy and the Internet have become an inseparable community of destiny. The vigorous development of the industrial Internet has confirmed everyone's original judgment.
At this time, the cloud computing melee has ended, and everything has become more and more apparent.
From supporting the "steal of vegetables by the whole people" to full opening to the outside world
If the core of ToC is social, then the core of ToB is cloud.
No one would have thought that Tencent’s internal cloud platform department, which started incubating in 2010, could become the core of Tencent’s ToB and become the core of Tencent’s ToC business. After becoming Tencent’s ToC business, the strategic direction of the second venture will continue to write the Tencent story .
Tang Daosheng and others talk about the origin of Tencent Cloud
In September 2010, Tencent's open platform was officially launched. The launch of the platform means the opening of the functions and services of Tencent’s Qzone and other community products. For example, developers can use Tencent’s community open APIs to provide social games and practical tools for Qzone. And other third-party services.
In this process, these third-party partners generally lacked good infrastructure capabilities, so Tencent established Open Cloud, which is also the predecessor of Tencent Cloud, which mainly hosts third-party applications running on Tencent's community open platform.
At that time, the explosive growth of SNS-Game, a more iconic phenomenon is that the QQ farm game has set off a "stealing food for the whole people" fever.
QQ Farm Stealing Vegetables interface, the picture comes from the Internet
In order to support such an application that seemed to be a core service at the time, Qiu Yuepeng, President of Tencent Cloud, clearly remembered that the team mobilized various technical support from the entire company, and probably expanded several thousand servers. Although it is not the same as Tencent's expansion of 1 million core cloud servers in just one week during the epidemic, it is already a very large expansion of Tencent in that era.
If the application on Tencent's open platform is Tencent Cloud's self-warming, then the toddler Tencent Cloud took the first step in external training.
In September 2013, Tencent Cloud announced that it would be open to the entire Internet. That is to say, peers in the industry can choose to use Tencent Cloud whether they are partners on the open platform or not.
However, Tencent Cloud's fully open movement did not get more understanding at the beginning.
Can Tencent also be a cloud?
Regarding Tencent's cloud development, the outside world has questioned it for a long time.
These doubts are first manifested in the customer's reaction to Tencent Cloud.
The fledgling Tencent Cloud is questioned
Da Zhiqian, vice president of Tencent Cloud, joined Tencent in 2007. His main job at the time was to be responsible for the research and development of public components of Tencent QQ and other C-end products (similar to the current technology center). After Tencent Cloud was fully opened in 2013, he joined the Tencent Cloud belt production and research team. Speaking of Tencent Cloud’s early entrepreneurial experience, he has many impressive images:
"The biggest contradiction at that time was that every time we went to see a customer, the customer’s first reaction was that Tencent was still doing cloud? Why do we want to do cloud? These two questions must be asked every time we go to see customers, and we may I don’t have time to show my products and solutions. Basically, I have explained in the first half an hour that we are really doing cloud. The second is why we want to do cloud. We have been answering these two questions."
The financial report shows that Tencent Cloud's annual revenue in 2019 has exceeded 17 billion. But according to Da Zhiqian, when Tencent Cloud was just starting out, there was a year when people in their team and room discussed how to realize the 360 million KPI, which would find it difficult.
In this regard, Huang Bingqi, who is now the general manager of Tencent Cloud Internet Product Solutions Center and the head of SaaS ecological technology, also feels the same.
"Let’s not talk about the outside world. There may be more external voices and a bit more chaotic. Let’s look at Tencent internals. At first, it is politically correct to say that Tencent Cloud is not good," Huang Bingqi said, "If I say Tencent Cloud on the intranet Well, it must not be a good product of Tencent Cloud. It must be that either you are from Tencent Cloud or your relatives are in Tencent Cloud. This feeling."
In the video interview, Huang Bingqi recalled an experience of taking orders and choked for a while. The reason is that in the year when Tencent Cloud could be excited by winning a 200M bid, they messed up a major 10G customer project.
Huang Bingqi described the state of everyone in the office at that time: "At that time, no one spoke in our entire office area, and no one spoke in the afternoon." Later, with the joint efforts of the technical team, the problem was solved. Customers are also impressed by the technical capabilities of the Tencent Cloud team.
At that time, most of Tencent's own internal business hadn't gone to the cloud. "For the public cloud, we may still want to look at one of our own service capabilities from external customers, so that we can force ourselves to make a rapid improvement." Da Zhiqian said.
But how did Tencent Cloud grow gradually? Since when did it become stronger little by little? Ta Zhiqian can't tell. He only remembers the craziest time when he was able to run 5 customers a day in Beijing, and he was a technical background, while he was engaged in research and development while running customers.
At that time, it was the time when Tencent Cloud desperately proved itself to the industry.
In response to doubts, Tencent Cloud took three main actions at the time:
First, we must let the industry know that Tencent is not only doing cloud, but also doing a good job, and have confidence, so Tencent has established a large number of benchmark customer cases;
Second, on the issue of whether the investment is enough or not, Tencent has launched a 100 million yuan support plan;
Third, Tencent Cloud has been rolling in the technical team and organization building, and will soon make corrections.
In 2014, Tencent Cloud already had many major customers. Wang Huixing, vice president of Tencent Cloud, also recalled the process of constantly winning benchmark customers at that time: "Continue to beat this benchmark, this benchmark will be beaten, and the few customers who wait and see next to you will increase by 10%. Benchmarking, this good impression adds another point. This is a process of gradual evolution."
Heat up
The industry is also releasing positive signals.
The most iconic event in the cloud computing industry in 2015 was when AWS disclosed revenue and declared profit, Amazon's stock price rose 15%.
At the same time, Tencent's determination to become a cloud is becoming stronger and stronger, and its services are becoming more and more recognized. A Zhiqian gradually no longer needs to explain to customers the questions of "Tencent still doing cloud" and "Why Tencent doing cloud". And some companies started to come to the door and say they want to use Tencent Cloud services.
Tencent Cloud has gradually been placed in an important strategic position within the group.
There are three nodes with the most clear perception from the outside world:
First, the concept of "Internet +" mentioned by Ma Huateng in "Seven Road Signs to the Future of the Internet" in 2013 appeared in the government work report of the National Two Sessions in 2015. Premier Li Keqiang proposed to formulate the "Internet +" action The plan is to promote the integration of mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things with modern manufacturing. This aspect confirms Tencent's judgment in the "Internet +" direction;
Second, at the Tencent Cloud Technology Leaders Summit in September 2015, Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent and then president of the social network business group, said that the next five years will maintain an annual investment of 2 billion, and it is expected that the investment will exceed 10 billion yuan. He also stated that the 2 billion invested in 2016 will be mainly used for Tencent Cloud's infrastructure construction and operation, as well as talent recruitment and marketing.
Third, in July 2016, at the Tencent "Cloud + Future" Technology Summit, Ma Huateng delivered a speech on "New Exploration of Cloud Ecology" for Tencent Cloud for the first time. In the speech, he reiterated the "Internet + Infrastructure" The first element is the "cloud" view.
In 2016, Ma Huateng was the first Tencent Cloud platform
"I also want to sell an advertisement for Tencent Cloud. Everyone knows that there are already many cloud solutions in the industry, but I believe Tencent's solutions are different. We are not considering it as an independent business, but as the entire platform. Strategic considerations. So with our plan, you accept and get the entire Tencent platform, whether it is social or Tencent, all of our platforms are supported, and we have more than ten years of experience."
Driven by the power of the industry and the group, Tencent Cloud has gone from a state of "not being understood by customers why it is a cloud" and has entered the next stage of personal service to customers. At this time, Tencent Cloud has also achieved some obvious results.
Tang Daosheng used "a hundred flowers bloom" to describe that stage.
"I remember that in the mobile Internet business group ("MIG") there was a team that paid more attention to medical care, and in the social network business group ("SNG") there was a team that paid more attention to education and government-related services. We. Different teams (corporate services) were originally scattered in different BGs, and they are paying more and more attention to some support or empowerment for traditional industries." Tang Daosheng said.
The effort pays off. In the "2017 (January-June) China Public Cloud Market Share (IaaS)" report released by IDC Consulting, Tencent Cloud appeared for the first time in China, with a market share of 9.6%. Public cloud is second.
This has far exceeded the "360 million" KPI that Da Zhiqian thought was impossible.
Questioned again: Greenhouse? gene?
What grows in symbiosis with a hundred flowers is barbaric growth.
There is also the pain of Tencent's shift from ToC business to ToB business in parallel.
On the one hand, all lines of Tencent are actively exploring enterprise-level services. Since Tencent did not have a complete top-level plan for the ToB business at that time, these internally grown services might even sometimes conflict, and everyone may provide relatively competitive services of the same kind, such as the problem of "re-creating wheels";
On the other hand, Tencent, which has always been based on the ToC business model, has some episodes in the process of turning to ToB.
"In the beginning, we thought that Tencent’s technology could serve more than one billion users and netizens should be very mature... But then we discovered that these capabilities we originally envisioned were not very useful to customers, or did not meet their needs in the industry. Or our own technical capabilities are not as strong as originally thought." Tang Daosheng said.
Huang Bingqi also cited an example to point out a big difference between Tencent Cloud's internal services and external services, that is, their thinking needs to change from "heavy business and thin platform" to "thick platform and light business":
"Because Tencent has strong business development capabilities. Whether it is the QQ team, WeChat team, video team or various game teams, their development capabilities are very strong. Your infrastructure is a little flawed, and the network is a little unstable. We make up for it in business. We used this idea before. It is a way of focusing on business and thin platform. But the cloud is actually more of this kind of thick platform and light business. A pattern in which the feet and feet are reversed."
Tang Daosheng confessed that he was frustrated: "Many customers will come back and say that Tencent’s technology is just so-so, but I’m particularly happy or lucky because of the multiple internal teams. They also recognize their own shortcomings. After officially opening these services to the outside world, we will continue to polish and work hard. The feedback questions raised by each customer have become the driving force for our progress."
The road to entrepreneurship is always bumpy.
Maybe everyone’s expectations for Tencent, an Internet giant, are too high, or maybe Tencent’s performance on ToB is not as bright as the ToC business. When facing Tencent Cloud, which is playing the front line while making up for its shortcomings, the outside world has repeated doubts. :
"Tencent in the greenhouse... rests on its laurels... leads to a lack of innovation in the business..."
"Tencent has never had a ToB gene... The entire enterprise service is completely unable to keep up..."
Will such comments and speculations from the outside world promote Tencent to open up and innovate like the 3Q wars many years ago? It is difficult to confirm.
But what is certain is that before this, Tencent has actually been aware of its own problems.
"Change our organization"
There is a big difference between ToB and ToC. This difference requires Tencent, which has already customized ToB business, to carry out a reconstruction involving sales organization, channel organization, technical structure, business process and other aspects.
"Maybe at the C-side, when we are a special forces team, we can create a very powerful product. But for a large ToB business, it must be a process of group operations, and we must have a very strong organization. The ability to collaborate." Qiu Yuepeng said.
He also cited an example of signing a contract: "At the earliest, we thought he was a hero after completing the contract sales within two weeks."
The reason is that ToB takes a contract and requires sales, partners, fiscal and taxation laws, and even industry, product and other teams to confirm the contract. This involves confirmation of a lot of information such as contract risks, product delivery standards, and pricing profits. If there is not enough Organizational structure, process system, etc., a contract may not be completed in two months.
"Today we actually have a large number of contracts to be signed very quickly, so we have to build a process system to support it. Signing a contract is actually the first step. The real product is delivered to the final customer’s business line, and then to the final Acceptance is actually a very long process. This is that we must change our organization." Qiu Yuepeng said.
He believes that Tencent ToB has not yet established a perfect organization. In the future, it must seek a better balance between the organization's process system, organizational efficiency and risk control.
At this time, Tencent is brave to change.
Soon, Tencent announced a major organizational restructuring in September 2018. This is also the fifth organizational restructuring in Tencent's history. Tencent internally referred to it as "930 change."
Throughout the adjustment, Tencent Cloud was pulled out separately and together with other ToB businesses to establish the Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group ("CSIG"), led by Tang Daosheng.
The main purpose of this adjustment is to allow Tencent to focus its efforts on troubleshooting in the new round of ToB entrepreneurship. What it wants to solve is the previously criticized problem of repeated wheel building and internal collaborative innovation.
It was also this year that Tencent chose to separately disclose the performance of Tencent Cloud in its financial report for the first time: In 2018, Tencent Cloud achieved business revenue of 9.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of over 100%.
Came to the same trench
"Can't wait."
Wan Chao, vice president of Tencent Cloud, used these four words to describe the mood of the team after the establishment of CSIG. It is precisely because of this adjustment that the smart construction team he is responsible for has changed from the original infrastructure team to a team that can also rush to Tencent ToB. .
Wan Chao joined Tencent in August 2010. He has worked at Tencent for ten years now. Before joining Tencent, he was an external architectural design supplier of Tencent. After joining Tencent, he began to be responsible for the architectural design and interior decoration design of a series of Tencent office buildings in the planning and design department. The Wan Chao team had participated in the Tencent Shenzhen headquarters throughout the process The whole process of design and construction of the building and Binhai Building.
What does an infrastructure team engaged in architectural design have to do with ToB?
In fact, Tencent's smart building solution Wei Ling was incubated from this team.
Wan Chao sighed, after the organizational structure adjustment in 2018 and the addition of smart buildings to CSIG, WeiLeng has indeed achieved rapid development.
"If you use war as an analogy, in fact, in the past, others were more front-line combat troops. We were more of the logistics support department back then."
It's different after Wei Ling enters the "cloud".
"Everyone is in the same trench with each other. This mutual support is all-round, anytime, anywhere, even imperceptibly." Wan Chao said.
Wanchao's feelings have also occurred to different degrees in other business lines of Tencent ToB, and "team battles" have become a consensus.
"How come Tencent has so many people contacting me? Should you have a public team contacting me?" Wang Huixing, vice president of Tencent Cloud, mentioned a question he was often asked by customers before. Today, after the establishment of CSIG, the entire BG has developed public capabilities regarding products, services, brands, and sales systems.
"I believe that with this ability to gradually get through, the customer's previous problems and the contradiction of not knowing who to look for will be resolved." Wang Huixing said.
Not only is the ability to pull through, Tencent has also made overall changes in the underlying technical infrastructure.
After the 930 revolution, Tencent established a technical committee. The committee is led by Tencent Senior Executive Vice President and President of the Technical Engineering Business Group Lu Shan, and Tencent Senior Executive Vice President, and President of the Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group Tang Daosheng, two Tencent Offices, to promote open source collaboration and self-developed cloud development throughout the company .
Open source collaboration and self-developed cloud access point to two different directions. On the one hand, open source collaboration is used to eliminate technological islands left in Tencent, solve the problem of re-creating wheels in technology, and horizontally sort out and bridge the bottom of each business group. Common technical capabilities, breaking barriers, and strengthening internal openness and cooperation;
On the other hand, the self-developed cloud application is based on the public cloud research and development model, using abundant components and services on the cloud, and some excellent internal tools and components are uploaded to the cloud and opened to the outside world. The biggest change is that under this strategy, Tencent's original self-developed private cloud business began to accelerate its relocation to the public cloud. According to data, as of January 2020, 650 million monthly active users of Tencent QQ have all gone to the public cloud.
Lu Shan expresses his attitude towards Tencent Cloud: Helping to death
When CSIG was born, it also meant that Tencent would use teamfighting to attack the industrial Internet. Previously, Tencent's slightly broad concept of "Internet +" has focused on "industry."
With Tencent's deepening of the ToB business, the ToB team has grown from a dozen or twenty people, to 100 people, to 200, 300 people, and now CSIG has more than 10,000 people.
At this time, Tencent ToB is ready for both the organizational structure and the front-line ammunition.
break out
At the beginning of 2020, the new crown epidemic disrupted the pace of operation of the entire world. In order to survive the crisis, telecommuting, online meetings, online exhibitions, and use of health codes began to integrate into people's lives.
Tencent Cloud seems to usher in an important breaking point after the 930 revolution:
The first-line story of science and technology against the "epidemic"
In March of this year, the financial report released by Tencent showed that within two months after the launch of Tencent Conference at the end of December 2019, the number of daily active accounts exceeded 10 million, making it the most popular video conferencing application in China; currently Tencent Conference Over 100 million users;
In April, China's Canton Fair moved to the Internet for the first time in 63 years and announced that Tencent was officially designated as a technical service provider to provide overall technical support, platform R&D services and cloud resource support for the Canton Fair online event; one month later, Tencent’s "Cloud Conference and Exhibition" solution was officially launched Open to the outside world
In May, Tencent's anti-epidemic health code went online for 100 days, covering 900 million users;
8月，《关于开展第七次全国人口普查的通知》指出，全国人口普查采用电子化登记方式，腾讯云中标该项目，联合企业微信提供技术支持；
……
这一系列的爆发都与腾讯在930变革之后定下的“C2B”战略有关。
邱跃鹏隐约记得，在腾讯即将宣布930变革之前不到半个月，内部开了一次腾讯的管理大会，在大会上，有同事提出问题表达对未来云业务的不确定的观点。
但邱跃鹏表示，这种不确定性下，腾讯云更重要的是要坚定自身在消费互联网端所存在的优势，树立信心，并把这些优势跟产业端去结合，推动产业的协同发展。
“确实做ToB和做ToC有很大的差异，当然我们今天还是希望更多的发挥到C2B优势。”他说。
930变革之后，汤道生曾在2018年腾讯全球生态合作伙伴大会上详尽介绍了“C2B”。他表示，腾讯将用C2B方式服务产业，未来20年扎根产业互联网。
“一般情况下，客户跟我们谈合作、谈需求的时候，不会侧重在IaaS基础设施，而是重点提数字化、大数据的需求，CSIG会结合业务场景的需要解决他们问题，加强跟他的用户之间的连接，这是更多客户所关心的。”汤道生说。
他多次在不同场合强调过C2B战略，汤道生认为腾讯非常重视自身在C2B战略上的优势，正是这种优势让腾讯在ToB业务上展现出了差异化的能力。
不止于IaaS，也不止于PaaS，凡是能够挖掘C2B价值的事，都有可能成为腾讯ToB的发力点。这等于重新定义了云计算服务模式。
在这种C2B的更广阔定义下，腾讯云就像解除了封印：可以在行业存在短板，腾讯又擅长的通讯、营销等领域推出一些应用；同时，基于底层强大的IaaS和PaaS能力，充分利用腾讯消费互联网时期在微信、QQ、小程序等方面积累的与C端能力，以C带B，发挥“连接”优势，推动产业互联网的发展。
腾讯会议、云会展、健康码、企业微信等爆款产品都是在这样的条件下诞生的。
那么，此时的腾讯找到ToB的正确姿势了吗？
在ToB应用上的一系列爆款，是否意味着腾讯二次创业的成功？
这些问题还不能下定论。
用汤道生的话说，如果把产业互联网比喻成马拉松，他们可能只是走了前面的一两百米。这句话的前提是，现在的腾讯在ToB上已经有了清晰的目标，也有足够的能力随时调整组织、调整策略。
他们这么看腾讯ToB的未来
这个过程中，一定会有更多挑战续写未来的云计算故事。
只不过，当有人再问起“腾讯为什么要做云，腾讯怎么做云”的时候，腾讯的回答不再紧张，不再徘徊，它变得坚定而沉稳，它可能会说：
“我们做的就是云。”
（本文首发钛媒体APP，作者 | 秦聪慧）
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