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WeLink does not have the ability to compete in the corporate office, but it is still a “dangerous” application.

Text | Li Zhenliang

Edit | Su Jianxun

On December 26, Huawei Cloud released WeLink to government and enterprise customers. Huawei positioned it as a smart work platform, but it is actually an office application similar to Nailing.

As early as 2015, Huawei, which had not yet entered the cloud computing, explicitly proposed “up and down without touching applications and data.” In his internal speech, Ren Zhengfei positioned Huawei as a pipe operating system and an ICT service provider. He did not compete with partners for profit, and Huawei was not sure to win two wars at the same time. In 2017, after Huawei entered the cloud computing, it also continued this criterion.

However, the emergence of WeLink turned out to be a violation of Huawei Cloud ’s commitment to “do not touch applications”. In this regard, Xue Hao, Vice President of Huawei Cloud and Vice President of Connectivity and Associate Business, explained to 36 media and other media that:

“I’m not very good at defining SaaS. From Huawei’s perspective, we think WeLink is a smart office platform. We don’t actually do many applications, and the applications come from our partners. “

WeLink cut into the battlefield of nailing and corporate WeChat, and it looks like the Three Kingdoms War of corporate collaborative office services is about to begin. But, Huawei Cloud released WeLink, is it really trying to compete with the latter for share?

Know that Dingding already has 10 million enterprise users and more than 200 million individual users, followed by WeChat, there are also 2.5 million enterprise users, 60 million individual users, : //36kr.com/p/5278894 “target =” _ blank “> Wechat has also undergone a major upgrade recently , which has opened up a group chat and circle of friends with WeChat to enhance the company ’s ability for C-end consumers Means of operation. In addition, applications such as byte jumping Lark are also eyeing this market.

The pattern of dual strength and dual strength of enterprise WeChat has been determined. Not only will Huawei be too late, but it will also lack application experience. How will it penetrate this market?

WeLink was born for Huawei Cloud, not to grab the corporate office market

WeLink is similar in functionality to Dingding and WeChat. However, Huawei’s WeLink is not intended to be a pure SaaS application, or to serve internal social and office tools. It was born for the expansion of Huawei’s cloud services.

Xue Hao, Vice President of Huawei Cloud and Vice President of Connectivity and Xietong Business, said in an interview that Huawei has two hopes for Nailing:

First, if customers who only bought Huawei (other) products and services before can form a deeper connection with us and use our WeLink platform capabilities to complete its digital transformation;

Second, if you have heard of but have not used Huawei products, can you know Huawei through WeLink and use our Huawei cloud.

This shows that on the one hand, WeLink is used to strengthen Huawei’s original ICT ecosystem and enhance user stickiness. On the other hand, Huawei hopes that WeLink will be a cut in expanding the cloud computing market. Internet enterprises have basically completed the cloud. The new opportunity for cloud computing lies in the digital transformation of traditional enterprises. However, it is difficult to persuade traditional enterprises to accept intelligent transformation and purchase various cloud services, so that internal employees can work efficiently together. It is a demand for various enterprises. WeLink is such a sharp edge to open a breakthrough.

Xue Hao introduced the reasons for launching WeLink: “Huawei has many enterprise customers, and now more than half of the world’s top 500 companies use Huawei products and services, especially in China with a large number of government and enterprise customers. We find that the needs of these enterprise customers and government customers have not been fully met, and a large number of enterprise customers are hoping that Huawei can bring their own transformation practices and digital office experience to everyone.

On January 1, 2017, WeLink 1.0 was launched inside Huawei, providing conference, messaging, email, to-do approval, and knowledge sharing functions. In less than one year, Huawei has connected all 700 applications to WeLink . Huawei was originally a traditional enterprise. After completing its transformation, Huawei first exported its capabilities to the outside world.

This is very different from the origin of Dingding and WeChat.

Although Nail was later integrated into Aliyun, Nail was not born for Ali Cloud. Ali initially wanted to be a To C socialist and curbed Tencent WeChat. However, the hatching eggs gave birth to ducks, and Yinchaoyang strayed into the social path of To B, so he launched Nailin in December 2014.

The relationship between enterprise WeChat and Tencent Cloud is more independent, and it still belongs to two business units. Social is the lifeblood of Tencent. Tencent will strive to occupy all the possibilities of social fields, and it is more logical to be a WeChat company. In the case of the initial scale, Tencent launched this product in April 2016 to quickly catch up.

In contrast, If Huawei does not do cloud computing, it is likely that WeLink will not be launched at all. To make such a SaaS application alone, with reference to the development history of Nauding, there is currently no visible profit model. Moreover, WeLInk and other services of Huawei-telecommunications equipment, mobile phones and other services also lack the necessary correlation.

WeLink only needs to exist when Huawei expands the cloud computing market and needs a nail-like application that acts as a shield to consolidate old users and harvest new customers.

A clear difference can also be seen from the business models of the two. nails is to become the entry-level application in the corporate office scene. Ningding provides a large number of free applications, and basic services such as time and attendance punch-in, approval, journal, nail mail are free. And these basic services of WeLink also need to subscribe by the number of users. This business model is not conducive to large-scale promotion, indicating that WeLink does not intend to compete with the number of users. WeLink’s goal is not in the corporate office market.

According to Xue Hao, Huawei Cloud started in 2017 and currently ranks fourth in the Chinese market. In the Chinese cloud computing market, Ali Cloud, which ranks first, and Tencent Cloud, which ranks next, have a nail-like application in front of them. Whether it is for the purpose of attacking, harvesting new users, or to build a higher moat, To prevent the loss of old users, they should have their own collaborative office platform.

Where is the living space of WeLink?

There are already nails and corporate WeChat in the market. Both have seized the lead in market share. Where is the living space of WeLink?

These products bear their own marks. Ali’s 100,000 employees are mainly distributed in China, and Ali has regarded SMEs as its main target customers since its e-commerce business. At the beginning of the design, DingDao was also designed to solve the communication and collaboration problems of small and medium-sized enterprises, which is more suitable for face-to-face meetings.

WeLink is very different. Huawei was born to solve the problem of communication and collaboration within the enterprise. Huawei has more than 190,000 employees, including tens of thousands of employees working overseas, in more than 170 countries. WeLink has a large number of employees and is scattered in different regions. To meet such collaboration needs, WeLink has focused on Huawei ’s multinational, cross-With the characteristics of regional communication and collaboration, remote meetings have become a high-frequency need.

WeLink is launched to the outside world, and it is mainly targeted at large government and enterprise customers. Xue Hao introduced that Huawei is No.1 in government cloud, big data, desktop cloud, and conference cloud services. Huawei already has a large number of government and enterprise customer resources, and these customers will be targeted by WeLink.

As a long-term customer of Huawei, ChinaSoft International is also the first company to adopt WeLink. According to Cao Yan, senior vice president of ChinaSoft International, the reason why WeLink was chosen was because employees and customers are scattered around the world: ChinaSoft has thousands of customers all over the world, with more than 60,000 employees, and has More than 70 offices and offices in 13 cities overseas. Such corporate characteristics make them more willing to choose WeLink.

Compared to small and medium-sized enterprises, traditional large enterprises already have more complete applications in many aspects, such as attendance systems, approval processes, and so on. Therefore, WeLink only provides the platform. Customers’ original applications, whether it is OA system, mailbox system, punch card and other software systems, and even hardware devices such as cameras, can directly access WeLink without the need for a new stove, which greatly reduces the cost of transformation .

In addition, large government and enterprise customers pay more attention to corporate data security and pursue a balance between efficiency and security. WeLink is designed according to this idea. On the one hand, WeLink uses an enterprise-to-tenant approach. Information between tenants is completely isolated and cannot be shared outside the enterprise. On the other hand, in the end test, all information files are first encrypted when used and accessed, and can only be opened after a secure storage space is implemented locally on the phone, and they will be erased automatically after the access is complete. Encryption protection is performed from the cloud side to the end side to ensure that corporate information is only transferred internally.

Xue Hao said: “Some small and medium-sized enterprises, it feels very convenient to use social tools to achieve my business; we also see a lot of very large enterprises, you let him use, CIO first disagree, there are safe Consider. Huawei Cloud WeLink is thinking from the perspective of the enterprise, and achieving a balance between convenience, security, and efficiency improvement.

WeLink brings Huawei’s strong background and provides similar services. It is easy for Lenovo to think whether Huawei has the same ambitions and seized the entrance to the office scene. Indeed, Huawei wants to use it to break through those difficulties in cloud computing. Traditional enterprises, and traditional enterprise transformation brings trillion-level opportunities to cloud computing. Compared to this, the corporate office market is only a fraction.

(Header picture from Huawei)