Alibaba's "fiscal year" starts in April and ends in March of the next year. Therefore, in March every year, there is always news about personnel changes and structural adjustments in Alibaba.
Recently, DingTalk under Alibaba Cloud's intelligent unit has been making frequent moves. Ku Wei, a former China Unicom operator executive and general manager of Alibaba Cloud IOT, has been appointed COO of DingTalk, responsible for DingTalk's key customer strategy and promoting DingTalk's commercialization process. At the same time, DingTalk also completed the wholly-owned acquisition of the real-time audio and video PaaS company "Paile Cloud". Zhao Jiayu, the founder of Paile Cloud, led his team to join DingTalk and took the No. 1 position in the audio and video business department.
On March 22, 2022, DingTalk released version 6.5 and DingTalk Flash Club version 2.0, and also updated the brand-upgraded Slogan, LOGO and brand film. DingTalk has proposed a new brand proposition of "making progress happen". Compared with the previous proposition of "making work and study easier", which was clear and direct, the new slogan seems to be more "down to earth".
In other words, for enterprises, DingTalk’s previous value proposition was “cost reduction”, but its current proposition is “value appreciation”.
The brand is more "pragmatic", but DingTalk's strategy is more "pragmatic" than before. If DingTalk’s previous success stems from long-termism, persistence regardless of costs, gains and losses, then now and in the future, it seems to be more “more” as it anchors its business direction in digitalization, coexists with ecological openness, and even tests commercialization. pragmatic”.
From the perspective of Alibaba's business puzzle, DingTalk plays a more important strategic role in Alibaba's new fiscal year, and is also undertaking more commercialization tasks accordingly.
Last month, Ali released its Q3 financial report for fiscal year 2022. Behind the numbers, Ali is also actively leading the switch of growth momentum. The switching of Alibaba's growth momentum certainly includes the issue of second growth curves such as cloud computing.
In July last year, Alibaba CEO Zhang Yong mentioned in an internal email: Alibaba clearly proposed to become a company driven by both consumer Internet and industrial Internet.
The role played by DingTalk is Alibaba’s leading company in entering the industrial Internet.
In fact, the revenue of sectors including Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk increased by 20% year-on-year to 19.539 billion in the last quarter. If there are no accidents, it will exceed the 20 billion mark in the new quarter. More importantly, customers from non-Internet industries account for more than 52% of this revenue component.
In September 2020, Alibaba Cloud Ding integration strategy was implemented. Judging from Alibaba Cloud's revenue diversification and growth, the promotion of Cloud Ding integration is quite foreseeable. Whether it is Alibaba Cloud or DingTalk, it is one of Alibaba's firm pursuits and the technical foundation for its business infrastructure strategy.
In August last year, the number of DingTalk users exceeded 500 million, and the number of various organizations including enterprises and schools exceeded 19 million. It only took 9 months for DingTalk to go from 400 million to 500 million. Such rapid growth is related to the digital needs of the real economy. Almost all industries including education, government affairs, medical care, manufacturing, and retail are digitizing.
DingTalk has been established for 7 years and is one of the earliest companies in the collaborative office field in China. Strictly speaking, DingTalk is a late-maturing product, and it took so long to gain traction in digitalization. For companies that adhere to long-termism, the most important thing is the forward-looking and stable strategy. In the past seven years, DingTalk has persisted in seeking scale in the field of digital collaborative office. What DingTalk insists on now and in the future is to respond to the real needs of thousands of industries for organizational digitization and business digitization. However, the problems it has to solve on its own are How to improve value based on scale.
After the number of users exceeded 500 million, DingTalk is no longer a simple product, but a complex and huge ecosystem. This is why DingTalk has previously emphasized “low-code development”. From scale to value, DingTalk needs ecological prosperity, which also means that it must clarify what it must do and what must be done by the ecosystem.
The answer given by DingTalk is: only do one thing, PaaS.
DingTalk's PaaS transformation means that DingTalk only produces basic capabilities and basic products, and opens these capabilities and products to the ecosystem. The “low-code development” proposed by DingTalk last year is the first step in its PaaS strategy. In the process of promoting organizational digitization and business digitization, DingTalk cannot work alone. It needs more suppliers who better understand the actual needs and scenario differences of enterprises and organizations.
As a kind of APaaS (Application PaaS), low-code can provide universal application development capabilities and is the "vanguard" of PaaS. In the past year or so, a large number of applications that meet personalized needs have been developed on DingTalk. As of the end of December 2021, the number of DingTalk applications has increased by 5.56 times. The number of low-code applications on DingTalk has exceeded 2.4 million, and the number of all developers on DingTalk has exceeded 1.9 million.
Low-code solves the problem of mass creation of applications. However, with the advancement of business digitization, the problem of interconnection between applications has gradually become prominent. In order to meet the needs of in-depth business digitization in thousands of industries, DingTalk further proposed on the basis of low-code We want to build BPaaS (Business PaaS) and take a step further on the road to PaaS.
DingTalk's PaaS transformation is also a further implementation of the cloud-DingTalk integration strategy. BPaaS is built on the prosperous DingTalk ecosystem under the "cloud-DingTalk integration" strategy, and provides cloud capabilities to enterprises more simply through DingTalk.
It should be said that the integration of Cloud and DingTalk is one of the core changes of DingTalk in the past two years, and it is also the most important strategic shift. PaaS defines what DingTalk should do and what it cannot do. The introduction of BPaaS means that DingTalk's ecological operations have begun intensive farming.
PaaS is an inevitable choice for DingTalk to serve all walks of life, and BPaaS is also an inevitable choice for providing in-depth value services and intensive operations. APaaS is for the breadth of the service industry, while BPaaS focuses on its depth. To use DingTalk’s own proposition, it is a must-answer question for “promoting value” and “providing good service”.
Zhang Yong said at the Alibaba financial analyst meeting that the process of China's industrial digitalization has just begun, and Alibaba will be committed to serving the real economy and the industrial digitalization process in all walks of life for a long time. This is also the biggest opportunity and foundation for Alibaba’s long-term, healthy and sustainable development.
It took DingTalk 7 years to grow from a collaborative office tool to an enterprise digital portal. What it needs to do next is to persist in long-termism. However, what it needs to do is not only make work and study easier, but also make work and study easier. “Make progress happen.” This sentence also applies to Alibaba, which is switching growth momentum.