Under the financial cloud, Tencent Cloud has gone three difficult roads at the same time
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public number “Technology to the Order” (ID: xiangling0815), the author has ringed.
In the Q3 financial report just released by Tencent, cloud services are undoubtedly the most eye-catching. The quarterly report disclosed that its quarterly revenue was 4.7 billion yuan, an increase of 80%.
$4.7 billion, in terms of figures, the quarter’s revenue has exceeded half of the 2018 annual revenue.
On the one hand, Tencent Cloud is leading the growth rate among head cloud computing vendors. On the other hand, in terms of absolute value, the gap between it and Alibaba Cloud has also been greatly reduced.
Disclosure of cloud service revenue alone shows Tencent’s confidence in implementing C2B strategy one year later. From the perspective of specific business, in the past Tencent cloud service, financial cloud has undoubtedly realized some kind of Tencent’s first. Break through.”
From the corner of the financial cloud, we may also see the reasons and process of the rapid growth of Tencent’s cloud service revenue. It is obviously not smooth sailing.
First, the financial cloud – a “hard bone” that Tencent picked up harder
Time returned to 3 months ago.
At 6 pm on August 16, 2019, the first commercial bank of Zhangjiagang was closed down. After 48 hours, Zhangjiagang completed the database cutover and finally ran the bank’s core system on the new database.
The original traditional bank is not new to the transformation of modern financial technology. However, Zhangjiagang’s upgrade has two special features: replacement of the core system and the “domestic” of this replacement. .
The bank’s information system is very complex, but it can be summarized as core system, peripheral system, the core system performs all operations related to “money”, and the peripheral system is our daily contact. Applications such as mobile banking, loans, online banking, ATM, etc., each part is independent, and the business is finally calculated and cleared on the core system.
In the past, the transformation of traditional banks was often concentrated on the peripheral system. The core system was difficult to be touched because of the whole system.The upgrade of Zhangjiagang Bank was carried out directly on the core system. The Sybase database used by it has faced the bottleneck of the old architecture, and it has been unable to meet the user request volume during peak hours.
The upgrade plan adopted by Zhangjiagang Bank changed the situation that domestic banks used foreign products in the past, and adopted the product from Tencent Financial Cloud, which is a distributed TDSQL database solution.
If it is not for those who have long been concerned about the development of financial technology, it will be quite unexpected that Tencent Cloud will make financial technology the core system of the bank. After all, from 2018 to 2019, from Tencent’s no dreams to “Escape from the greenhouse Tencent” to “Who is killing Tencent”, Tencent “explosive text” continues, accompanied by, and Tencent, the parent company of ToC, can doubt the ToB.
Now, Tencent C2B has been transformed for a year, at least, the financial cloud has not only done this, but also achieved a deeper level at one time, achieving a “breakthrough” relative to the industry’s expectations. This process is obviously not easy.
The financial cloud is a very difficult hardcore for the entire cloud computing field. For Tencent, from To C to To B, the negative effects of old habits and patterns make it When you look at this “hard bone”, you will feel harder than others. Tencent will face more questions than others.
1, everyone is difficult: using the cloud to transform traditional finance, too “hard core”
Because of the original, the combination of Internet finance, insurance and cloud business is very smooth, and even can be set up on the cloud from the beginning. Therefore, we have seen that cloud companies often like to do Internet finance and insurance cases.
But “traditional finance” is not so good.
If the Internet financial model + cloud computing is “high-rise building on the ground”, then traditional finance has a history of heavy burdens due to the accumulation of old systems and the maturity of the model, and its transformation process is like “rebuilding while living.” Faced with numerous compatibility adaptation issues.
In the banking sector, the core system is more like changing the engine to the high-speed flight at high altitudes – a slight delay will cause the entire business to be interrupted or even paralyzed.
Thus, traditional financial companies are more difficult on the cloud and have higher requirements for technology and integrated solutions.
2, Tencent is harder in the early days: “Newcomers enter”, “Tenseness does not match”
Objectively speaking, as a latecomer to the industry, Tencent Financial Cloud does not have an advantage in terms of market popularity and experience, and the giant brand cannot bring more value to Tencent.
When Tencent began to intervene heavily in the financial sector last year, the public’s past doubts also appeared to be “not unreasonable.”
The most typical thing is that the long-term To C business turned around to do To B, facing the problem of adaptability.
On the C side, Tencent is a rule-maker, but in the To B business, for example, to provide financial institutions with technological transformation, customers often only consider raising their actual needs, and will not consider the implementation difficulties behind them. Do, do not pull down, anyway, the original system can also be used, can not find other homes.
One interesting thing is that Tencent employees sometimes can’t turn around. When product managers face the demand brought back by sales, they don’t think about how to “execute” and “satisfy”, but to customers. Need to comment on the needs of the head, thinking about whether customers can change themselves first.
In addition to awareness issues, the internal communication methods and process efficiency affect the development of financial cloud business. A C-side requirement can be studied for a long time, and the B-end customer needs only a few days to limit things. The internal system must follow on.
Before, since the media people “Semi-Feng Xianren” once commented, cross-industry operation is equivalent to re-starting business, To B to To C’s cross-model operation is equivalent to reincarnation, Tencent wants ToB, wants to penetrate Traditional financial markets are harder than others.
But, in turn, the harder the bones, the higher the barriers to competition that can be formed.
Second, under the financial cloud, Tencent Cloud has three easy roads at the same time
In any case, from the case of Zhangjiagang, it can be seen that Tencent, which was harder in the early days of the financial cloud, did succeed.
From the objective results, referring to the various cases in the past year, Tencent Cloud relies on three roads at the same time, they all have fundamental changes in business logic, changed the past business methodology, abandoned To C The “hotbed” under the dominance of the times has turned into the real needs of traditional finance from different angles, and concentrated on meeting it.
1. Making a benchmark – traditional finance is very realistic, and there are good cases to believe in you
Alibaba Cloud’s original “Feng Huang Tengda” relied mainly on the winning bid 12306 and some large-scale government cooperation lists. The industry’s popularity has come up and the market has followed.
In the traditional financial market, customers are more cautious and have more confidence in existing actual cases.
Tencent cloud tipsHard bones, you have to smash the hardest corner first, and the rest is natural.
In April 2019, China Construction Bank signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent. The two sides must jointly build a financial technology innovation platform. Before that, Tencent Cloud fully built a match in just over 40 days. The public-cloud standard financial-grade ecological cloud platform “Jianxing Cloud” currently supports the operation of CCB’s own business and a number of scientific and technological capabilities output projects.
In the industry, this is a “super large single”, almost a sign of “successful people”, and the benchmark value of “CCB Cloud” determines that this is not the end, just the beginning.
In March 2019, the People’s Insurance Group of China and Tencent signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Beijing. The two sides declared that they should “provide a comprehensive, differentiated and professional financial and insurance service based on the digital transformation of PICC.”
A person close to the cooperation revealed that the reason why PICC chose Tencent is to take advantage of the operational experience of the cooperation case between Tencent and CCB, as well as the mature technical solutions precipitated in the process. Obviously, this kind of technical experience is far more precious than the service of general Internet insurance and financial customers. This is also the key to Tencent’s emergence from its competitors.
Public information shows that in recent years, Ping An, another giant that is also in the insurance business, has rapidly developed its innovative business, and its performance and market value have risen rapidly. For PICC, there is no doubt that such a competent partner is needed to stably undertake more financial and innovative businesses through cloud technology.
From a numerical perspective, Tencent Cloud has served more than 6,000 financial customers, including more than 150 banks, more than 40 insurance companies, and more than 20 securities companies, but from the market development process, from 0 to 1 The benchmark determines the speed of expansion from 1 to 100 to 10,000. Tencent Financial Cloud is not a big fat man, but a single button to do it, constantly stacking endorsements for itself, speeding up the expansion process.
2. Create a label – Finance is too special, there are more things than the order itself.
When the stock market is good, everyone is happy, but there are also problems, such as trading systems.
For example, an exchange needs to provide IT access services to brokers, and the original IDC model will always be inflexible. More importantly, when users need more value-added capabilities, the traditional IDC model is even more stretched.
To this end, as one of China’s two major securities trading markets, Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s Shenzhen Zhengtong has cooperated with Tencent Financial Cloud to build a compliant, credible, secure and stable industry cloud for the securities industry. Complete IaaS, basic PaaS, industry PaaS and SaaS full-stack cloud services and financial technology capabilities.
Therefore, this financial cloud has acquired the technical capabilities of Tencent since its birth.It also has the natural compliance of the “Endorsement” of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, which is very suitable for the needs of the brokerage industry.
It is not difficult to see that this is also a strategy for Tencent Financial Cloud to combine industry thinking, and it is also the result of Tencent’s return to meet the real needs of To B customers.
3, return value – financial “customer” will be more understandable
Zhang Wenzeng, chief architect of Tencent Cloud TDSQL, said, “The difficulty of transforming the database of the core system is no different from doing a heart replacement surgery.” This is true, but only the “surgery fee” is not too expensive. The new heart can support for a longer period of time, and such surgery only makes sense.
The transformation of traditional finance, one looks at compliance, the second is urgency, and the third is economic.
Zhangjiagang’s original practical Sybase, you can’t say that it’s not good, just “not good enough now”, which is equivalent to a city road plan. Many years ago, the four lanes were wide enough and even extravagant, but now it’s very stingy.
To replace Sybase, the new database is cheaper on the one hand, at least lower than the cost of Sybase’s operating cost + “blocking”, on the other hand, it must be enough for a long time in the future, it does not appear to be cramped. .
Tencent seems to be clear about this. The specific data is not known, but Zhang Wen said, “The hardware cost of Zhangjiagang Bank is less than 1000w, and the overall cost is reduced by more than 75% (compared to other commercial banks using mainframes, Minicomputer mode)”.
In the actual measurement, the TDSQL database load is kept below 10%, and the balance can meet the business development needs of Zhangjiagang Bank in the next five to ten years. This database is different from the traditional Sybase by logic. If you need to “expand”, There is no need to “de-rebuild”, but only “plug-in” horizontal expansion.
In retrospect, whether it is traditional financial adaptation, core satisfaction, or realistic economic considerations, the threshold is extremely high, customer needs are complex, diverse and almost negligible or The content of the unsettled content, the satisfaction of each kind of demand must consume a lot of energy, and the “hard bones” are deserved.
Third, the direction is right, but the team in “genetic transformation” has to keep up.
In one sentence, the main reason why Tencent cannot be ToB in the industry is that the ToC “gene” is too strong.
To transform genes, despite changing the overall business methodology, but the company’s genes are the way of thinking between management and employees’ minds. From the practice of financial clouds, it’s important to have a team. Adapt to the role change from Party A to Party B, and abandon the second generation of thinking.
According to Tencent CSIG employeesMy own point of view, the most talked about when doing C-end products is the product experience, doing something to impress users, now these exchanges are less, “not seeing customers, just on the way to see customers, even seeing customers with them. “Customers”, and this is actually the daily life of To B-type companies, CSIG employees have been working in full accordance with the requirements of corporate services.
So, it is not difficult to understand that Tencent employees can be crying by customers, which is impossible when they are “Party A” in the C-side business.
When the middle-level employees of “Dachang” began to sing “Let’s put down my knees”, to some extent, it wasn’t the Tencent team that laid down the body, overcoming many of their habits of going to C, and the ToB gene gradually formed.
It can be seen that the scale of Tencent Financial Cloud customers continues to expand. Tencent’s efforts to overcome the high threshold have allowed Tencent to naturally gain competitive barriers, while internal data revealed that Tencent Government Cloud has grown 25 times in 2019. Under the industry’s doubts, the entire Tencent cloud is developing rapidly in speed and scale. Some brokerages predict that financial technology and enterprise services will soon become Tencent’s new pillars.
Behind the strong business capabilities, the Toss industry Internet, To B gene has been formed, but this is just a good start, Tencent C2B strategy is landing, there are more challenges in the future.
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