Let digital native SMEs make good use of the cloud, improve R&D efficiency based on the cloud, build an agile organization, rapidly expand business, and improve the development resilience of SMEs. In the "Digital Native Enterprise Innovation Forum" at the Alibaba Cloud Summit 2023 Beijing Station, He Chuan, head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Nest, delivered a keynote speech on "Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest Accelerates Enterprise Digital Nativeness Through Digital Tools".
A digital native enterprise is a new type of enterprise, which refers to the use of technology and data as the basis, the use of digital methods for operation and management, and the delivery of products, services and experiences relying on technology. As a staunch supporter of SMEs becoming digitally native, Alibaba Cloud hopes to lower the threshold for SMEs to go to the cloud and use the cloud through Alibaba Cloud's advanced technology, easy-to-use products, and solid services, and accelerate traditional enterprises to become digital native enterprises.
Let digital native SMEs make good use of the cloud, improve R&D efficiency based on the cloud, build an agile organization, rapidly expand business, and improve the development resilience of SMEs. In the "Digital Native Enterprise Innovation Forum" at the Alibaba Cloud Summit 2023 Beijing Station, He Chuan, head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Nest, delivered a keynote speech on "Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest Accelerates Enterprise Digital Nativeness Through Digital Tools".
Regarding how Computing Nest can accelerate the digital native of enterprises, He Chuan said: "On the consumer side of software, what enterprise customers need is a digital toolbox to meet the digital needs of the business by using excellent software. The goal of Computing Nest is to provide enterprise We will create a toolbox that brings together excellent software to accelerate the integration of cloud computing and industry, and work with customers and partners at both ends of digital supply and demand to activate digital elements through technical power and truly realize industrial digitization and business value enhancement.”
The following content is compiled based on He Chuan's speech.
Two years ago, at the Alibaba Cloud Beijing Summit in 2021, we released the Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest service, hoping to provide software service providers with an integrated PaaS platform on the cloud and build an industrial ecosystem on the cloud through Feitian's technical capabilities.
Today's content, one is to report the progress of the past two years, and the other is to fulfill the promise we made to our customers two years ago.
The topic of today's forum is "Digital Native", and everyone will definitely think of another word: "Digital Transformation". From digital transformation to digital native, just as we discussed cloud migration a few years ago and now discuss cloud native, this proves that enterprise digitalization has entered the second half and opened a new stage. The essence of digitization is to activate the potential of digital elements and create value for business.
For an organization, whether it can achieve digital transformation and rely on digital natives is nothing more than two things: one is to have digital genes and ways of thinking, and the other is to have digital technologies and tools.
In the past two years, Computing Nest has been committed to providing platform and technical support for partners in the field of software services, and supporting software service providers to create better tools to help enterprises better realize digitalization and digital native.
Computing Nest, a toolbox for enterprise digitization
From an engineering perspective, cloud computing is also a tool. In recent years, I have an obvious feeling in communicating with enterprises. Today's customers are less and less mentioning the functions of the cloud itself, and customers' demands have changed from improving IT efficiency to creating value for business.
In my opinion, this phenomenon itself is a manifestation of the maturity of the tool attributes of cloud computing. The same is true for enterprise software. If the tool level can be done well enough, it can be easily accessed when needed, and flexible and easy to use when used. The attributes of business value creation carried by the software can exert the greatest effect.
But we also found that the current software market cannot satisfy these two points very well. For software service providers, maybe everyone has done a good job in the functions of the software itself. But for customers, how to find the right software, how to reduce trial and error costs, reduce transaction costs, how to ensure service quality and business security during use, these general needs have not been well met.
Of course, there are many reasons behind this. China's software market is still immature. If you look at industry data, the SaaS form in the US market, the proportion structure of standard software form and custom development is very healthy; in China, SaaS only has a market of 100 billion, which is less than 1% of the total IT investment, and standard software only accounts for 26%. . Judging from the development process of mature markets in Europe and America, it is the general trend for SaaS and standard software to become mainstream, but the difference is that this change will occur in a superimposed rather than gradual manner. One of the big variables is cloud computing.
China's cloud vendors already have very mature IaaS capabilities and relatively mature PaaS capabilities, which will accelerate the development of China's software industry. The way to accelerate is not just to provide basic cloud resources, but to make software more efficient at the engineering level, thereby improving business efficiency at both ends of supply and demand.
On the consumer side of software, what enterprise customers need is a digital toolbox to meet the digital needs of business by using excellent software. The goal of Computing Nest is to create a toolbox that gathers excellent software for the digitalization of enterprises, improve the business efficiency of enterprises, and finally realize business value.
As a toolbox, at the source, Computing Nest satisfies the needs of various enterprises in different scenarios through rich software pre-integration. At the same time, through the integration of various transaction channels, it opens up software from transactions, service delivery, to software management. , providing a full life cycle guarantee for the use of software by enterprises.
Over the past two years, more than 600 software service providers of various types have joined Alibaba Cloud Computing Nest, covering various categories from basic software to application software, from general software to industry software, and providing a wealth of solutions for business digitalization of enterprises. Tool support.
Compared with a software selection platform, I think the more important value of Computing Nest is a service fulfillment platform covering the entire life cycle of software.
Free trial: Through the free software trial capability provided by Computing Nest, enterprises can test different software at zero cost, find the software that really matches their business, and reduce the cost of trial and error;
Safe and reliable: During the use of software, Computing Nest provides authorization and audit mechanisms to ensure the safety and reliability of software services;
Out of the box: Computing Nest can realize one-click launch and one-stop management of software and dependent cloud resources, so that any software can be used out of the box like SaaS, and can also keep data on its own like traditional software. In the environment, data security is fundamentally guaranteed.
Computing Nest is a general framework for cloud-native software
There should be many software companies on site and online today, so let's change our perspective and come to software service providers.
For software service providers, engineering efficiency and commercial efficiency are equally important. Commercial efficiency includes reducing trust costs and transaction costs between us and customers. If service costs and technology costs can be reduced enough, engineering efficiency will eventually increase. into commercial competitiveness.
With the development of cloud computing today, the pervasive atomization capability is no longer enough to meet the needs of software service providers, and it is necessary to provide higher-level functions and API interfaces for software service provider scenarios. And this is exactly what Computing Nest is doing, by shielding the complexity and capability aggregation of the cloud, making it easier for software to achieve cloud nativeization. To give a few examples:
The efficiency of privatized deployment is often a headache for software companies. Due to the current situation in the Chinese market, most software will provide an enterprise version for independent deployment. Compared with SaaS, the delivery cost of independent deployment is higher, and the operation and maintenance is more difficult. big. By pre-integrating software, Computing Nest enables privatized deployment to be out-of-the-box and hosted like SaaS without technical transformation, which can improve operating efficiency dozens of times.
As for the SaaS of software, Computing Nest provides a general management and control framework, which can enable software to realize SaaS activation and subscription charging without the need for application transformation, so that software companies can quickly innovate business models.
One of the problems faced by the SaaS model in China is how to solve the problem of trust, and the essence of trust is a sense of security. How to make customers truly perceive security? In addition to the rational issue of ensuring technical security, it is also necessary to solve the perceptual issue of user perception. Computing Nest solves the black box problem of SaaS environment through transparent mechanism design by transparently transmitting necessary information to users, including environmental information and audit logs generated during operation.
In China, the difficulty in the development of the software industry also lies in the scattered software sales channels. Computing Nest has opened up Alibaba Cloud's own platforms, such as: cloud market, DingTalk, and also opened up Alibaba Cloud's distribution partners, such as: Changhong IT. At the same time, we also support ISVs to use Compute Nest's service integration and contract performance capabilities in their own channels. We do not require partners to bind software sales with Alibaba Cloud to maximize their business efficiency.
Let cloud computing become a bridge connecting the two ends of digital supply and demand
The biggest advantage of cloud computing is flexibility, which is why more and more enterprises realize business innovation on the cloud.
And we hope to accelerate the integration of cloud computing and industry through Computing Nest, and work with customers and partners at both ends of digital supply and demand to activate digital elements through technical power, and truly realize industrial digitization and business value enhancement.
In 2021, we released Computing Nest and began to use technical means to support the development of digital products.
In 2022, we launched the Computing Nest Accelerator to accelerate the business development of software companies through technology + market means.
This year, we will continue to increase efforts to provide special funds to accelerate the SaaS transformation of software service providers, accelerate the connection between software supply and demand through joint Alibaba Cloud dealers across the country, and reduce the trial cost of enterprise software by providing free cloud resources. We hope that more companies will join us in accelerating the process of industrial digitalization.