On June 6, in the International Conference Center of Zhongguancun Software Park, Houchangcun, Beijing, which is the largest in China and known as the center of the world's Internet, a technical director from the well-known domestic central media Internet is presenting to the CDEC2023 China Digital Intelligence Ecological Conference (Beijing Station) ) The host complained:
"We now attach great importance to the application of low-code and no-code platforms. The company specially arranged for two R&D personnel to use the Tencent Weibo platform to develop applications. But the result they gave me was that the low-code and no-code platform could not be used, and the experience was very poor. , it is better to use the original technical framework directly..."
What worries him is that from the perspective of enterprises, they will definitely develop based on low-code and no-code in the future, but what should we do now that developers are extremely resistant?
Coincidentally. A week later, on June 14, in another top software park in China, the Pudong Software Park Innovation Experience Center located in Shanghai Zhangjiang Science City, a chairman of a large Chinese paper group was speaking at the CDEC2023 China Digital Intelligence Ecological Conference (Shanghai Station) in the closed-door salon, I would like to shout out to all the guests from IT and Internet companies:
"Current ERP and other software and Internet manufacturers do not really understand the business, and the digital applications they build fundamentally cannot meet the operation and management needs of enterprises. The construction of future digital application systems must rely on low-code and no-code platforms. Development and construction by people who understand the business..."
In Yun Fengcheng's view, these voices from Party A's customers actually reflect an important status quo of the low-code and no-code industry: low-code and no-code have won the love of leaders and management in all walks of life, but they have been criticized The anti-favor of software developers.
As the founder and CEO of Beijing Kate Weiye Co., Ltd., a high-quality manufacturer in the domestic low-code field, who has a persistent pursuit of low-code platforms, Yun Fengcheng further showed that these different views and cognitions It fully demonstrates that the current domestic low-code market has reached an inflection point of development: first, the popularization and education of concepts has been basically in place, and the penetration rate of low-code and no-code applications has exceeded 5%, entering the growth stage from the introduction period; second, The availability of products is basically in place, big manufacturers start to enter the field, and fierce competition suddenly emerges. This will push the domestic low-code and no-code market from the introduction period to the growth period, and usher in rapid growth.
However, Yunfengcheng is also deeply aware that this kind of development environment will quickly attract more and more manufacturers to join this field. Although the market has a bright future, he also deeply feels that it will be very difficult to fight his way out in such a market that "quickly becomes a red sea" and finally achieve success.
The research data of Haibi Research Institute once predicted that around 2025, more than 80% of low-code and no-code companies in the market will be eliminated.
At present, domestic IT giants such as DingTalk, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Feishu, and Volcano Engine; foreign IT giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google; domestic software giants such as UFIDA, Kingdee, Inspur, and Neusoft; Siemens, SAP , IBM and other foreign software giants have fully entered the low-code and no-code market, and without exception, they are all listed as the key strategies for the company's future development, and they have invested heavily. Facing the crushing competition from the giants, independent manufacturers like Kate Albert began to face huge competitive pressure, even the pressure of life and death! They must immediately make a unique strategic choice and do everything possible to get on the fast-moving low-code and no-code high-speed train. Otherwise, they will only be able to shrink in a certain market segment that the giants look down on, and they will not be able to become trendsetters in the era of digital intelligence.
Of course, what is exciting is that once you get on the low-code and no-code high-speed train, it will enter an extremely vast and huge market, and it may also become an industry giant in the era of digital intelligence.
This is what makes Yun Fengcheng anxious and excited. This Tianjin native born in the 1980s has a persistent spirit that likes to challenge new things, constantly pursue progress, and achieve a career. It is also him who, together with the team, has embarked on a unique development path in the melee of the low-code and no-code market.
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From JEPF to unique JEPaaS
Fifteen years ago, the young Yun Fengcheng just entered the software industry.
At that time, China had just survived the financial crisis, and the entire economic environment was bright. Numerous ISVs and system integrators are busy doing big projects to make big money. "And I stumbled into a fast-growing start-up company by mistake." Yun Fengcheng said that at that time, the company introduced an asset management software that ranked first in the world at that time——IBM's MAXIMO.
MAXIMO has a feature that he will never forget, it has a powerful rapid development platform. This is his first exposure to rapid development platforms. "I was shocked by its powerful functions. There is such a thing in the world? Aren't we programmers going to lose our jobs?" "This is my real thought at that time", Yun Fengcheng still remembers this clearly now .
However, after using it for a period of time, Yun Fengcheng found that MAXIMO also exposed many problems, and it was still somewhat unacceptable in China, and various limitations restricted its further development. In this case, the company asked to develop a similar product, and Yun Fengcheng was fortunate to be appointed as the person in charge by the company. From then on, Yun Fengcheng started his "low-code platform" road.
According to Yun Fengcheng, 2014 is a critical year in their development. This year, they developed the first rapid development platform - JEPF. From the initial Ant, Pcat to JEPF, they have always been oriented to meet the actual needs of the project, with the aim of improving development efficiency and shortening the software delivery cycle. Over the past few years, after several hundred million (contract value) project tempering, the product has gradually matured and stabilized. It can be said, "The birth of JEPF in 2014 marked the first semicolon in my career."
However, the carefully tempered JEPF did not make Yun Fengcheng happy for long. "In the past few years, I have been working so hard that I forgot to look up at the world. In 2014, when I seriously looked up at the world around me, I found that the entire software circle was completely different. The Internet, mobile Internet, Internet of Things, big data Data is nothing new, but I still don’t know it, and instantly feel that I have been eliminated by the industry.”
In a word, JEPF, which has been developed with great difficulty, has fallen behind in terms of technical architecture. This dealt a big blow to Yun Fengcheng. "But I have never been knocked down so easily." After a brief downturn, Yunfengcheng found a new direction for herself—"to be a PaaS platform for the To B industry."
At that time, due to the rapid development of companies such as Fenxiangxiaoke and Salesyi, there was a wave of SaaS entrepreneurship in China. China's SaaS industry was pushed to the forefront all of a sudden, and capital also favored this track extremely; Be their first choice. For a time, the rapid launch of SaaS products has become a great demand.
Yun Fengcheng keenly grasped that after years of hard work, traditional ISVs often have their own unique features in products and have accumulated a lot of customer reputation, but the transformation to SaaS will definitely not be smooth. "Technical cost and time cost are two big mountains in front of them." Yun Fengcheng believes that if you want to complete the SaaS transformation without any SaaS experience, you need to step too much, and many companies give up halfway.
"This is where our opportunity lies." Therefore, Yun Fengcheng and his team decisively decided that the upgraded version of JEPF should be positioned to solve the rapid development of SaaS applications and is a typical PaaS platform. But unlike most PaaS products in the market, they focus most of their energy on supporting SaaS applications while pursuing the use of the most advanced containerization technology, so as to help software companies quickly realize the transformation to cloud computing. "We are committed to developing a platform product that is more suitable for business needs. Inside the team, we call it a 'chicken that lays eggs'. This is how the powerful JEPaaS platform was born."
China Software Network found that in the low-code PaaS market at that time, JEPaaS had three obvious advantages: first, its unique and precise positioning was aimed at SaaS application development; Impossible; third, it has many engines with rich functions such as form engine, report engine, rule engine, and event engine. Generally, 80% of the functions can be directly configured through JEPaaS, and the development speed is very fast.
With its deep product advantages, JEPaaS is unique among many low-code platforms.
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Integrating with state-owned enterprises to create high-end JECloud
"For more than ten years, our low-code platform JEPaaS has made great achievements in users' informatization construction." Yun Fengcheng commented on this product that condensed the efforts of the entire team.
However, with the update and iteration of software technology and the comprehensive upgrade of enterprises' demand for informatization and digital intelligence construction, Yunfengcheng found that JEPaaS was somewhat unable to deal with some large and complex projects, so the plan to create a new platform product gradually put on the agenda.
Yun Fengcheng told China Software Network that during the project demonstration stage, the team was hesitant about recreating a new product or carrying out in-depth transformation and upgrading on the original product. At first, they chose the former in order to save costs. After 3 months of in-depth development, the progress of the project was slow, the architecture design was in a dilemma, and the effect was always unsatisfactory. In the end, the whole team decided to make a big decision to increase the project budget on a large scale and rebuild a brand new low-code platform. Use it to represent Kate's highest technical level to serve new and old customers.
This brand new platform product is named JECloud. The technical positioning of JECloud is to use the latest and most cutting-edge technology system, and all module engines are redesigned, regardless of UI, UE, or robustness. It is fully designed and developed to ensure that it meets the expectations of users and the accumulation of the team for ten years.
After two years of dedicated research and development, JECloud will be released in Beijing in July 2022. China Software Network believes that JECloud can be said to be a high-end product in the low-code platform industry. It has three distinct competitive advantages. First, it all adopts microservice architecture, which is a low-code platform (LCDP) driven by dual engines of domain model (DDD) and code generation (CGG). It not only adopts the microservice architecture of the low-code platform itself, but also achieves decoupling of various functional services built. Second, it has a complex BPM engine, which can support users to use a visual workflow engine to personalize the configuration of the process, and at the same time support engineers to support in-depth development of it, such as return, rejection, endorsement, circulation, countersignature, judgment, branch, multi- Special logic such as person approval. At the same time, it also integrates the data analysis engine to realize the ability to integrate with BI. It has a variety of visual data analysis tools such as group reports, cross reports, report forms, pie charts, column charts, radar charts, bar charts, and scatter charts. The analysis components built with the graph report engine can be used anywhere on the platform , such as top menu, function menu, inside the form, portal engine, function extension panel, etc. Third, it fully supports Xinchuang. Provide a complete domestic software and hardware deployment solution, fully adaptable and seamlessly compatible with domestic chips, operating systems, middleware, databases, office software, etc.
It is worth noting that it is actually very difficult for a low-code team to bear such a budget. China Software Network found that many low-code platform providers were unable to continuously and deeply iterate and upgrade their products because of funding problems, which had a great impact on the company's development. Fortunately, during this period, the entire team was integrated into the state-owned enterprise ecology, and Kate Weiye was integrated into Changsha Water Group. Moreover, he began to provide informatization and digitalization services for the entire group.
Yun Fengcheng believes that this capital operation has played an important role in the development of their entire low-code platform products. On the one hand, the whole group supports them to continuously upgrade the low-code platform and can support the required R&D investment; The application scenarios provide practice for polishing products.
It is by adopting such a development path that the entire team can concentrate on product development and bring the team's core capabilities to the highest level. Yun Fengcheng is full of gratitude for the support of the group leaders, and is determined to use his own low-code platform to create a greater cause in the future construction of digital China!
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Toward open source and towards ecological development
In the view of China Software Network, Kate Albert, which owns JECloud's high-end low-code platform and is backed by state-owned enterprises, is fully ready to face the direct competition of major giants and calmly board the high-speed train of the low-code platform. At the same time, Kate Albert should not position his main battlefield as the digital support within the group. It should be able to find a way to go out, undertake a greater mission, and carry a greater cause.
Yun Fengcheng told China Software Network that this is also a question he has been thinking deeply since last year. It is what they have been exploring and looking forward to so that the excellent products of the team can have a wider stage and create greater value, so as to bring higher feedback to the entire group.
In the end, the solution he gave was: "open source". Make JECloud unreserved and completely open source; build JECloud open source ecology, use the ecological power of the whole society, pursue the stage of digital intelligence without boundaries, and create the peak career in the era of digital intelligence.
"It was not an easy decision to make." It takes great courage, courage and determination to invest tens of millions of R&D funds for the company and launch a software product as open source after several years of R&D and polishing. This means rebuilding a new business system based on open source software, but whether the new business system can bring benefits to the enterprise requires careful design and certain risks.
"We have sorted out several reasons for the open source of the product, but in the end there is only one thing that really convinced me: how big a practical problem can a product solve for the society?" Yun Fengcheng believes that Kate Albert's open source is not intended Hype, but really thinking about how to maximize the value of an excellent product like JECloud, not to bury the great efforts of the entire team for a decade or two, and to better meet the actual informatization and digital intelligence of the enterprise needs and solve the pain points in the digital transformation of enterprises. This is actually the consistent service tenet of Kate Albert, and it is also the responsibility of a state-owned enterprise.
Facing the current competitive landscape in the low-code market, Yunfengcheng deeply understands that relying solely on Kate Albert's high-end low-code platform software is powerless and a drop in the bucket. We must rely on the strength of the whole society to use JECloud, a high-end "software machine tool". , to produce large, medium and small digital application systems of various industries and categories. At the same time, we will cooperate with local ecological partners to provide professional personal services to the owners, and build a large integrated ecology where there is a supply when there is a demand, and there is a solution when there is a problem. Only in this way can we win by surprise.
Yun Fengcheng hopes that they will use this kind of change to reintegrate into the future digital intelligence ecology with a larger pattern and a more open attitude, so as to move Kate Weiye's career to a higher level and eventually become a domestic and even global industry. A giant, truly realize the "digital great cause" of the entire team and the entire group.