When the technology industry encountered headwinds, the to B industry with cloud computing as its core showed a trend of growth against the trend. The financial reports of leading Internet companies such as Alibaba , Tencent , Baidu all showed cloud computing Becoming a growth driver, , Huawei, , ByteDance and other companies are also continuing to increase their cloud computing business.
Cloud computing has a history of nearly 20 years of development. In the past few years, cloud computing centered on computing resources. Today, cloud computing carries more technologies, capabilities and services. In fact, it has become the main carrier of digital and intelligent solutions. Under such changes, the strategies of cloud computing vendors are also changing.
At the 202 Partner Conference on July 13, Alibaba Cloud made a clear statement: insists on giving priority to partners, abides by boundaries, and lets partners take the lead - Alibaba Cloud took a small step back.
Cloud computing has become “thick”
The value of cloud computing has changed dramatically. Cloud vendors no longer just provide standardized computing resource services as before, but have dived deeper into the industry to provide more comprehensive solutions.
The first stage of the cloud is "resource-driven" and is essentially an elastic, flexible and inclusive computing infrastructure. This is because the core purpose of enterprises initially moving to the cloud is to avoid building their own data centers, save computing costs, and meet business flexibility.
Later, as more and more enterprises moved to the cloud to a certain stage, the need to rely on the cloud to achieve digitalization became increasingly urgent; in recent years, technologies such as AI, IoT, and digital twins have become mature, and enterprises have new ideas for intelligent transformation. requirements. As cloud computing continues to adapt to customer needs, it is gradually no longer resource-based and IT-based, but has become value-driven. The core purpose of enterprises migrating to the cloud has also become to integrate dispersed data and then deeply mine and apply the data to achieve digital and intelligent transformation, and ultimately achieve the goals of cost reduction, efficiency improvement and business innovation. The original core of migrating to the cloud was to "reduce computing costs". The goal becomes “one of the goals” and not the most important.
In the past two years, under the influence of multiple factors such as policy, epidemic situation, technology, and economy, enterprises' digital transformation and intelligent upgrades are accelerating. At the 2020 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: After this "epidemic", the digitalization process that originally took 3 to 5 years will be accelerated within the next year. Now this has been verified. Applications such as remote working, online concerts, and food delivery are all the rage. "Everything can be online." The whole society has experienced a digital enlightenment, and all walks of life are accelerating digital and intelligent transformation.
Under this trend, enterprises need more scenario-oriented digital and intelligent solutions. The cloud is no longer just cloud computing, but a platform that carries digital and intelligent solutions on the cloud. The cloud is "thickening", providing more levels of digital and intelligent capabilities in addition to computing infrastructure capabilities; the cloud is "unbounded" and is no longer as distinct as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, but has become a more integrated service. CaaS is "cloud as a service". No matter what kind of cloud it was at the beginning, it is becoming "a kind of cloud" today. As Huo Jia, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's Industry Solution Sales Department, said: Today's cloud computing is no longer the cloud IT defined by and Amazon back then. What customers need is no longer atomized technology, but technology that can solve specific business problems. plan.
As a result, cloud computing manufacturers are becoming more focused on industries and scenarios.
At the Huawei Partner and Developer Conference 2022 in June this year, Huawei Cloud announced that it had established 20 corps, including the coal mine and government affairs corps, in the past two or three years. Huawei Cloud CEO Zhang Pingan released 15 innovative services, including aPaaS services in five industries: industry, government affairs, heating, coal mining, and education.
On July 12, Tencent Cloud and the Smart Industry Group (CSIG) established a government and enterprise business line to continue to delve into government affairs, industry, energy, cultural tourism, agriculture, real estate, sports, operators and other fields, and will launch in 2021 The three major strategies of “rooting in the industry, deepening regional development, and improving efficiency” proposed in May.
Both Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud are strengthening the "focus" on vertical industry development, which is what Alibaba Cloud has been doing for many years. However, in addition to relying on its own strength, Alibaba Cloud is paying more and more attention to the partner ecosystem. At the 202 Partner Conference on July 13, Alibaba Cloud made a clear statement: insists on giving priority to partners, and also proposed three core propositions of the ecosystem: a clear division of labor cooperation model, a genuine rights and interests system, and a long-term and stable development policy.
Coincidentally, at the AWS re:invent 2021 summit held at the end of last year, Amazon AWS also placed partners at the core. It launched a new five-category partner cooperation model "to simplify partner participation and expand partner participation." ”
In the new stage, cloud computing “partners come first”
AWS and Alibaba Cloud are ranked as the top global cloud computing “3A” (AWS, Azure and Aliyun). camp, why do they both attach great importance to the partner ecosystem?
Previously, AWS CEO Selipsky said bluntly: "Cloud applications are increasingly becoming mainstream and becoming the needs of specific industries and environments. The importance of partners will continue to increase, and the partner ecosystem will only continue to expand." Alibaba Cloud even more It clearly stated that we should "let partners go ahead."
In fact, since the earliest distribution, no cloud computing vendor has been working alone. However, everyone has different emphasis on partner ecology and development strategies. The actions of Alibaba Cloud and AWS show that partners have become more important in the new stage of cloud-heavy development. The reasons are as follows:
1. Solutions must be scenario-based. The
solution is oriented to practical problems in massive scenarios across thousands of industries. Even the same application, such as customer relationship management , digital factory, and intelligent quality inspection, will appear completely different when applied to different scenarios in different industries and companies. needs, and to meet the diverse and ever-changing digital needs of customers, cloud computing companies cannot do without the support of partners.
The more subdivided and complex the scenario, the greater the role of partners. For example, ISV partners and consulting partners in Alibaba Cloud’s partner ecosystem. They either have a deeper understanding of application scenarios such as new retail, or they have some technologies that they are good at. And product strength, in short, it means having some capabilities that cloud computing vendors do not have, or being better at certain things. In response to this, Alibaba Cloud's idea is to "co-create" with its partners, and work together to improve their respective products and services and better improve solutions in the process of jointly serving customers.
In 2021, Alibaba Cloud and the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry jointly released the "Automotive Digital Factory" industry solution. Alibaba Cloud has core technologies such as cloud computing and data intelligence, while the Ninth Institute of Mechanical Engineering has a better understanding of the automobile manufacturing industry. It is known as the "Cradle of China's Automobile Factory Design" and focuses on automobile factory construction and overall automotive engineering solutions, serving dozens of car factory. Alibaba Cloud and the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry jointly assisted FAW Hongqi New Energy Factory in building a digital factory, which uses data intelligence to perform predictive maintenance on equipment, monitor machine health in real time, reduce the probability of failure, and avoid failures that affect factory production efficiency. During the continuous in-depth cooperation, the relationship between the two became closer and closer, and finally jointly created the "Automotive Digital Factory" industry solution, which provides extremely fast data collection, digital twin factory and other capabilities, and can expand quality prediction, equipment predictive maintenance and Intelligent applications such as energy intelligent management and control.
And like Alibaba Cloud, it cooperates with "industry experts" or "local snakes" such as the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry, and goes deep into the industry to better serve the real digital and intelligent needs of customers in business scenarios, which will be the cloud computing solution scenario. the inevitable trend of change.
2. The solution must be integrated.
Today’s customers’ demand for the cloud is no longer for single points such as computing, storage, network, and security, but for overall solutions to enterprises or digital solutions for specific scenarios. Such solutions must be highly integrated, not atomic. technology, products or services. To provide a complete set of solutions, it is impossible for any cloud computing vendor or even any enterprise to provide all products and services. "Integration" of products and services from different vendors is the only solution.
For cloud computing vendors, partners can either be integrated or have some integration capabilities. What Alibaba Cloud wants to be is not an integrator, but an "integrated party". Alibaba Cloud proposed the "being integrated" strategy as early as 2018, and has stated many times since then that it will continue to attach importance to "being integrated". This year, for the first time, it established a separate team to support industry SI and ISV partners, specifically responsible for the implementation and development of "integrated" businesses, and has clear quantitative requirements for partners' revenue proportion. In addition, Alibaba Cloud also has cloud-native integrated strategy, low-code products, global integration solutions and other initiatives, allowing different types of partners to better integrate their own products, technologies and services.
How is Alibaba Cloud "integrated"? Its cooperation with China's leading ERP vendor UFIDA is an example. Gartner data shows that UFIDA's ERP SaaS business ranked first in market share in the Asia-Pacific region in 2020. It had previously integrated one of the best traditional commercial database products in the industry. As UFIDA transitioned to a SaaS cloud model, traditional databases became increasingly stretched. Later, it jointly explored cloud business with Alibaba Cloud. The latter has a cloud-native database system and has the ability and willingness to in-depth co-create with UFIDA. The two first cooperated to integrate the core business of " Chanjet ", a subsidiary of UFIDA that specializes in finance, taxation and business cloud services for small and micro enterprises, into the Alibaba Cloud database, which reduced the system service response time by 40% and improved the concurrency capability of the business system. More than 4 times. At the 2021 Alibaba Cloud Partner Conference, UFIDA's flagship product NC Cloud and Alibaba Cloud's self-developed database PolarDB completed mutual certification, providing large government and enterprise customers with a highly flexible and highly available domestic ERP solution to accelerate the digital transformation of government and enterprises. .
The "integration" of cloud computing is not simply that it can be "packaged" into solutions, but should be designed for "integration" at the product planning level, such as Alibaba Cloud's low-code capabilities and cloud nail integration. capabilities and product standardization capabilities. At the same time, cloud computing must form comprehensive integrated capabilities in the dimensions of technology, products, and services, and co-create with customers during the integration process to better meet customers' digital and intelligent needs in a one-stop manner. Among the many cloud computing vendors now, Alibaba Cloud started earlier and went further on the road of "being integrated", and it also has the ability to be better integrated by its partners.
3. The solution must be scalable.
In the past few years, there have been many digital and intelligent solutions in the industry, but they were all exploring typical cases in typical scenarios of typical industries. For example, Alibaba Cloud and its partners have "crossed the river by feeling for the stones" and implemented many solutions to achieve The incubation from "0 to 1" and the maturity "from 1 to 3".
Nowadays, digitalization has entered the deep water area, industrial intelligence has exploded on a large scale, and cloud-borne digital technology has become the new infrastructure of society. In the stage of large-scale popularization of digital technology, in order for digital solutions to achieve scale from "3 to 10 to 100", partners need to work together to create solutions. On the one hand, it is impossible for any company to take care of the implementation of N projects at the same time. To ensure the "quality" of the solution implementation process and actually help customers solve problems in various scenarios, partners need to provide personal services. Even follows the service throughout the life cycle of the project; on the other hand, time waits for no one. Cloud vendors have standardized their products enough to support integration, so they can be used by different types of partners to implement large-scale implementation, accelerating the process of social digitization and faster at the same time. To expand market share, create customer value more, bigger and faster, and obtain corresponding business returns.
Retreating behind partners is a kind of progress
It is not surprising that Alibaba Cloud was the first to propose "letting partners take the lead". Previously, Alibaba Cloud has proposed three major strategies: "Deepening the Foundation", "Strengthening the Middle Platform" and "Strengthening the Ecosystem". The first two answer the question of what Alibaba Cloud wants to do: cloud computing, AI and underlying databases, "Deepening" the basics such as OS and chips, and constantly "thickening" the middle platform such as Cloud Ding Integration; "strengthening the ecosystem" answers what Alibaba Cloud does not do: In addition to the basics and middle platform, Alibaba Cloud leaves the rest to its partners .
Strengthening the status of partners and giving them more benefit transfers is what Alibaba Cloud has been doing. In May this year, Alibaba Cloud adjusted its ecological strategy, clarifying: first, clarify the ecological service interface and set up a dedicated team to support different types of partners; second, work more closely with industry ISVs to enrich industry solutions; third, firmly "be "Integration" strategy puts forward clear quantitative requirements for partners' revenue proportion. The Alibaba Cloud Ecological Development Department is also directly managed by Alibaba Cloud Global Sales President Cai Yinghua, which reflects Alibaba Cloud's increasing emphasis on ecology.
At the recent 2022 Alibaba Cloud Partner Conference, Alibaba Cloud made it clear that it would insist on giving priority to partners. Specifically, Alibaba Cloud has three dimensions to ensure the implementation of this:
1. A cooperation model with a clear division of labor, that is, insisting on doing only what should be done, and leaving what is not done to partners.
In 2022, Alibaba Cloud established different ecological teams to serve different types of partners such as distribution partners, integration partners, consulting partners, solution ISV partners, and product ISV partners. Unlike in the past, where partners were asked to adapt to Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud now serves partners as well as customers, adapting partners for product co-creation, technical support, and service integration. For large companies, it is more difficult to choose what not to do than what to do. Alibaba Cloud insists on not doing what partners do well, as Cai Yinghua said: "The more complex the partner system is, the more important it is to have a clear division of labor and clear boundaries. Alibaba Cloud Cloud must abide by its boundaries and let its partners take the lead. "
2. A genuine rights and interests system that truly benefits partners is not a relationship between eating soup and eating meat.
In partnerships under the traditional distribution model, the cloud computing platform is responsible for technology, products and services, including solutions, but the value provided by partners is relatively limited. For example, distributors only have channel value. In such a shallow partnership, the cloud computing platform eats the meat and the partners eat the soup. In the new stage, Alibaba Cloud has proposed a new proposition of "genuine rights and interests system". Tsai Yinghua vividly said, "I hope that while Alibaba Cloud earns 1 yuan, partners can earn 2 yuan or 3 yuan." Specifically, Alibaba Cloud will increase resource sharing with leading customers and provide cooperation models such as "investing 1 billion in special funds in the next three years to jointly serve 300 cities across the country with distribution partners" and "recommending integration partners in Alibaba Cloud-led projects". , helping partners generate revenue.
The revenue growth of partners is not only the ecological benefit of Alibaba Cloud, but also the partners working with Alibaba Cloud to create greater value for customers and obtain corresponding returns. In other words: the cake has become bigger. Because of this, the more profits Alibaba Cloud offers, the more it will grow.
3. Long-term and stable development policies create a certain ecological environment for partners, allowing them to invest confidently and boldly.
Alibaba Cloud is more closely tied to its partners. Partners can better serve customers in the process of co-creating with Alibaba Cloud and deeply integrating Alibaba Cloud. This process inevitably requires increased investment. How to make partners feel more confident and bold to move forward with Alibaba Cloud? The consistency, stability and forward-looking nature of platform policies are important. In response to this, Tsai Yinghua said that Alibaba Cloud must first ensure that the policy is clear, stable and forward-looking, and will not make high-frequency changes after launching the policy. "However, on the basis of ensuring the continuity of the policy, Alibaba Cloud will also introduce third-party satisfaction surveys to promptly optimize cooperation models, rights and policies.At the same time, Alibaba Cloud's strategy and development direction will be transparently communicated to partners as soon as possible, so that partners can make adjustments and layout in advance. "
Judging from Alibaba Cloud's strategy for the partner ecosystem at the 2022 Partner Conference, Alibaba Cloud insists on giving priority to partners, and letting partners take the lead is not just talk. For Alibaba Cloud, it has to retreat behind its partners to build infrastructure and Platform capabilities allow partners to better leverage their advantages in industry knowledge, scenario accumulation, product systems, and service capabilities. The result will only accelerate the digitalization process of the entire society, and Alibaba Cloud's core business will naturally grow.
In the long term, if partners take a step forward to further strengthen the ecosystem, Alibaba Cloud will also achieve greater growth. Cai Yinghua revealed, "In the last fiscal year, the business scale brought by Alibaba Cloud partners reached 18.5 billion, which has increased in four years. More than 7 times. "It believes that the partner business still has huge growth potential, and the revenue proportion will be further increased, and is expected to exceed 30% this year. Alibaba's Q1 financial report shows that Alibaba Cloud's total annual revenue before and after the elimination of cross-segment transactions was respectively 100.18 billion yuan and 74.568 billion yuan, and achieved annual profit (1.146 billion yuan) for the first time in 13 years. It is the only cloud service provider in China to achieve breakeven. The number of Alibaba Cloud paying customers exceeds 4 million, including 62% of A shares is listed Company, a considerable part of this is due to various partners, and the contributions of partners will only be greater in the future.
