This article is from the public number: I think I ’m in the pot (ID: angelplusdevil) , author: GN, the original title of “witness one platform series: the rise and opportunities platform”
When everyone feels like each year is the best of the next ten years, opportunities are rising.
Contents
1 Speaking from Facebook
1.1 Earnings alert
1.2 “Platform” and “Aggregator”
2 Platform 2.0, the rise of “cloud” giants
2.1 AWS stands up
2.2 “PaaS Fleet” by Salesforce
2.3 Parsing PaaS
3 Basic characteristics of enterprise-level platforms
3.1 For developers and empowered users
3.2 Pay more attention to the capacity building of iPaaS layer
3.3 Achievements with the upper SaaS and the lower IaaS
4 Rising opportunities
4.1 Open Source 2.0
4.2 Cloud Native (Cloud-native)
4.3 AI empowerment
4.4 New SaaS Opportunities
5 Concluding remarks
01 Speaking from Facebook
1.1 Earnings Alert
I have a classmate at Facebook. Her job is to help Mark find early companies that are worthy of attention and evaluate whether corresponding measures should be taken. Behind this is a full-scale tracking and continuous analysis of the market. Acquisition has been an important strategy for Facebook’s expansion, andAgram and WhatsApp were called milestones after the company entered a rapid growth path until the “Cambridge Analysis” event in 2018.
This crisis forced CEO Mark Zukerburg to begin strategic adjustments. He immediately announced that he had hired a content review team of 20,000 to clean up unhealthy speech and false content. We must know that the total number of American journalists was less than 30,000 at that time. In March 2019 on his personal homepage, he publicly declared “The future is private. (Everything will be more private in the future) “. Data security and user privacy technology investment, and reform of the advertising-oriented business model, some even think that Facebook has begun to “learn” from WeChat.
Along with the controversy, the company’s development has gradually been on the right track since the end of 2018, the stock price has regained momentum, and the pressure of public opinion has gradually subsided. Until the end of January this year, the company released its fourth quarter financial report for fiscal year 2019. The report “accidentally” showed that both revenue and profit growth rates had declined. Among them, revenue growth was below 30% for the fourth consecutive quarter and fell to the lowest after listing. , And the absolute value of cost has reached the highest after listing.
At the beginning, I did n’t worry too much about this financial report. In the long run, as long as the total number of users and activity of all its products is steadily increasing. ( Whatsapp recently announced that the number of active users worldwide has exceeded 2 billion, which has quadrupled in five years) , network effects will definitely attract more and more advertisers, and payment and e-commerce services will sooner or later be like “WeChat” Landing and finding a way to monetize, the performance breakthrough is naturally expected.
But the day when the financial report came out, it triggered the biggest drop in stock prices since the middle of last year. Everyone’s argument was nothing more than two: the growing anxiety about the uncertainty of the new business model and the questioning of continued high investment costs. Simple understanding. That is-I don’t think the current reform will make more money, and I can’t see any return on previous investment in security!
1.2 “Platform” and “Aggregator”
Ben Thompson immediately posted an article “Facebook ’s Platform Opportunity (Facebook’s flatTaiwan opportunities) “, the core points are as follows:
First of all, according to the revenue structure, Facebook is still an “aggregator” rather than a “platform”. The essence of aggregators is to use network effects to gather users and third parties (basically advertisers). The demand between the two parties is one-way. Advertisers want to find matching users but users do not expect to see ads. Closed business loop, and the beneficiary is ultimately only the aggregator itself;
According to this idea, the original Google was also an aggregator. Today, the company has successfully completed the transition from aggregator to platform, the main reasons are:
An open Android ecosystem has been established; users and websites have a two-way demand (discovery and being discovered); the platform has established a connected user through an advertising alliance (similar to Baidu’s “Internet Alliance”) and its product matrix such as Youtube. , The open ecosystem of external websites / apps and advertisers, advertisers can flexibly place ads on any platform within the alliance according to the search behavior of users on the platform, and the platform shares the benefits of the site and the benign development;
Therefore, although Facebook also has a product with a similar mechanism called Facebook Audience Network (FAN), it has missed the best time to help the company become a platform because of various factors. In the face of the dual pressures of public opinion and business growth, reviving FAN is a good choice from the perspective of PR, competition, and market ceiling.
In summary, the most fundamental difference between “platform” and “aggregator” is:
The platform facilitates interaction between two or more parties, encourages multi-party business exchanges and value exchanges, and achieves a sustainable win-win situation;
The aggregator regulates the relationship between users and third-party customers, monopolizes the commercial value of users or traffic as much as possible, and maximizes their own interests.
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(Aggregator vs Platform)
In this sense, Google ’s horror is that it is both the most monopoly “aggregator” and the largest system platform on the mobile end. However, companies that have been building platforms from the very beginning seem to prove their greatness from the top market cap charts. This is Microsoft in the PC era and Apple in the mobile era.
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The birth of Microsoft not only brought personal computers into millions of households, but also opened a glorious era of office software, nurturing listed companies such as Adobe and Autodesk, including their own son, Office; Apple and later Google joined forces to spawn the Internet Especially the global prosperity of the mobile Internet, from news and information, games to social, e-commerce, to the hot local life, sharing economy and so on in recent years.
At the same time, aggregators have quietly appeared in these segments. With the help of infinitely decreasing marginal costs and hot capital hot money, they quickly began to fight. Now the time window is getting shorter and shorter, and often only one or two survive in the end. By. Whoever has more users can attract the best quality service providers and “golden masters”, and then gain the greatest degree of control, and eventually form a market dominated by the Matthew effect.
Thus, the platform giant born in the 1970sRestricting the user’s virtual network, it has inevitably cultivated a group of greedy aggregators. However, in an enterprise-level market with strict business rules, users focus on efficiency and value, and the network effect is gradually ineffective, which provides new development ideas and growth space for enterprise-level products.
02 Platform 2.0: The rise of the “cloud” giant
2.1 AWS stands up
In the summer of 2003, executives and management of an e-commerce company’s development team discussed fiercely at the CEO’s home. They were deciding whether they should build a collection of storage, computing, and networking that can be used for rapid internal development of various applications. As one infrastructure.
Then they started writing their core strengths on the whiteboard: The first column lists all the services provided to consumers on this e-commerce platform; the second column lists All kinds of technical support for sellers and suppliers on the platform, including how to help them sell goods faster, faster online transactions, etc .; when they think of infrastructure, they quickly added a third column next to it: Focusing on developers and enterprise customers.
This company is called Amazon, and the AWS cloud service was born three years later. In an interview with Intelligencer’s current CEO Andy Jassy in 2018, I was impressed by a paragraph:
“The team has gone through a lot of debates, such as this is too different from what Amazon is doing now, why do n’t we first try to provide a storage service and see if users will use it before deciding whether they should continue to provide Other services. But in the end the team firmly believes: we either build a complete platform or do nothing. “
With the launch of the new-generation product EC2 in 2009, this is the first time that the industry has fully opened infrastructure services to public users, allowing developers to build any business based on the Linux or Windows environment on the platform and follow the business’s The size is flexible and you can pay without having to worry about the tedious operation and maintenance work behind it. Infrastructure becomes a complete end-to-end service-IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service) , which has ignited the cloud computing market ever since.
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2.2 “PaaS Fleet” by Salesforce
The clock is dialed back to 1999. Several engineers from Oracle established a software company that provides users with a pay-as-you-go model. Since AWS was not yet available, they built the underlying facilities and launched them the following year. Based on this new business model of customer relationship management (CRM) software, this model was later called SaaS (Software as a Service) , this company is Salesforce.
Until the launch of AWS in 2006, Salesforce gradually moved its business to the AWS cloud. In addition to bringing its own business to AWS, there were more than 30,000 enterprise-level users using Salesforce products. Subsequently, the company started to upgrade the platform business around the marketing scenario.
In 2005, the open platform App Exchange was launched, allowing developers to publish personalized marketing solutions based on this platform and sell them to other users. Forbes Magazine calls it “iTunes for Business Software”;
The Apex language was released in 2006 one after another—allowing developers to develop programs based on this standardized language and calling most of Salesforce ’s APIs, and Visualforce technology—allowing programmers to design their own UIs;
Force.com, which officially released the integration and optimization of the above functions in 2008, is a platform that allows users and developers to freely develop, publish, and sell applications and gain revenue.
With this “developers” -centric ecosystem growing, Salesforce has grown from a pure CRM SaaS service provider to a technology-based platform that empowers developers and customers around marketing scenarios. The well-known PaaS (Platform as a Service) .
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(Salesforced’s Business Road Map)
2.3 Parsing PaaS
Gartner defined PaaS as middleware between IaaS and SaaS in a 2010 report. It includes more than ten types of middleware technologies, such as application servers, database management, enterprise service bus, and gateway services. Finally, according to the user’s usage pattern, (use pattern) can be classified into two categories, aPaaS (Application PaaS, application platform services) and iPaaS (Infrastructure PaaS, infrastructure platform services) :
aPaaS: Help developers to quickly deploy new applications or data sets by providing multi-language development tools, standard programming models, internal orchestration integration, and massive data management, such as Salesforce’s Force.com, Google’s App Engine, etc .;
iPaaS: A simple understanding is to provide an end-to-end deployment solution from local to cloud, multiple applications, and data sets, including API docking, multi-protocol and file data integration, such as Informatica, Oracle Cloud Platform, etc;
The 2011 report further believes that giants trying to satisfy users with multiple usage models through multiple PaaS products will be expected by 2015. They will first be born in large companies that previously provided private deployment and application integration products. For example, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. At that time, there may be three or four giants with more than 50% of the PaaS market, and the rest will be divided by small and medium manufacturers around a single middleware technology and industry or regional attributes, and the competition will be very fierce.
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(Gartner PaaS Road Map, 2011)
Looking back at Salesforce ’s road map for business, it basically meets Gartner’s judgment that year:
Support more usage models and business scenarios through aPaaS:
Acquired Heroku in 2010, which is a platform that provides developers with multiple programming language environments on the cloud;
Lightning, a low-code development tool platform, was officially launched in 2014, and a plug-in Flow Action was added in 2019 to allow non-IT personnel to automate business processes in a codeless manner, thereby further reducing the barriers to writing programs and increasing them Productivity and efficiency;
From AppExchange to Force.com, plus Heroku, and finally the integrated Lightning platform is designed to help all types of users quickly and quickly deal with business needs encountered in their work.
Support standards, flexible deployment, and integrated management through iPaaS:
Joined with the established middleware vendor Tibco to create an enterprise application integration (Enterprise Application Integration) cloud service, allowing users to seamlessly connect with their internal systems such as ERP, finance, customer service and even other CRM software to achieve Business flow automation;
In 2018, announced the largest transaction in history-the acquisition of MuleSoft, a listed company that provides full-lifecycle API management and iPaaS services, for $ 6.5 billion. Immediately after the completion of the transaction, Integration Cloud, a new generation of products that incorporates MuleSoft’s core technology, is launched to help customers integrate local and cloud, heterogeneous data and applications in the most efficient and standardized way.
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CEO Marc Benioff said in announcing the acquisition of Mulesoft: “Every digital transformation startsand ends with the customer. (Each digital transformation starts with customers and ends with customers) “, we can see from the previous development path , Salesforce has established a product-oriented ecosystem through self-research and mergers and acquisitions in the past few years, and the focus of investment in these years will be on new technologies such as AI and integration capabilities with the underlying infrastructure.
Gartner once said, “By 2020, integration will account for more than 50% of the time and cost of building an enterprise digital platform.” Salesforce did the right thing at the right time-committed to providing customers with products , Development platform, AI technology, and the “end-to-end solution” of the underlying integration toolset, which Salesforce itself refers to as “customer success platform “. This is also the “Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Platform (Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Platform) “To interpret the externalized understanding of PaaS.
03 Basic characteristics of enterprise-level platforms
Salesforce is just a microcosm of an excellent enterprise-level platform. Combining the previous analysis of “aggregators” and “platforms”, I believe that the next successful enterprise-level platform will have at least the following characteristics:
3.1 For developers and empowering users
It has a standard multi-language, low-code / no-code standard development kit for developers and ordinary users at the same time, and provides a platform that supports complete processes such as development, testing, launch, operation and maintenance, and even communication and collaboration. Users can flexibly and quickly solve problems faced in business scenarios.
Look at why “low code” and “no code” have been affected by the domestic primary market in the past year.Attention, we should go back to the original intention and history of the PaaS platform that has grown up to do related applications, in order to understand the implications and opportunities for the Chinese market;
3.2 Pay more attention to the capacity building of the iPaaS layer
95% of the Fortune 100 companies are using at least one application published from Salesforce’s AppExchange, so when Salesforce released the Integration Cloud, the primary purpose was to help customers more easily use the Salesforce cloud product they are using (marketing, sales, commerce, etc.) , applications on AppExchange and other internal systems for effective communication and data sharing, the purpose is to continuously improve the underlying Support for hybrid cloud architecture, data and protocol heterogeneity, stream processing and security;
3.3 mutual achievement with upper SaaS and lower IaaS
The “achievement” here can be compared to Veeva, which has grown from Salesforce’s Force.com platform and is independent. It is a SaaS company that started from CRM in the life sciences. The full-process digital solution can be called the “Microsoft” in the life sciences industry. With a current market value of more than 23 billion U.S. dollars, Veeva is rightly “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Second, as mentioned earlier, early AWS and Salesforce supported each other, and the cloud business has become the main growth driver for both companies. Even now, when Salesforce expands its global footprint, every new continent such as Canada and Australia chooses AWS for cloud deployment.
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04 Rising Opportunities
Gartner predicted last year: By 2022, the global PaaS market will double from 2018, reaching more than 34 billion U.S. dollars. At present, nearly 50% of PaaS and the products provided above are only available on the cloud. (cloud-only) . Now is undoubtedly the best time for cloud computing and PaaS platforms. I see the following four opportunities that cannot be ignored:
4.1 Open Source 2.0
In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub at a high price of US $ 7.5 billion. Cloud construction and embrace open source are the two measures that impressed me most about Microsoft’s development in the past few years. As long as GitHub continues to be the world ’s largest “same-sex dating” community, Then there will be continuous open source software being hosted and possibly placed on Microsoft’s cloud service Azure, don’t forget the phrase “Software is eating the world. (Software is eating the world) “;
Looking forward a few years, not only Cloudera, MongoDB, and Elastic have been successfully listed, but also RedHat ($ 34 billion was acquired by IBM), Mulesoft, and GitHub are selling at high prices, as A16Z published on its official website last year. According to the article, open source software has entered the 2.0 era— “The SaaS & Open Core Era (SaaS and Open Core Era) “, value-added code is closed. Source, service hosting and other business models have been verified.
I think that most of the current products are only for the general field and infrastructure services, and the future growth momentum is likely to come from providing end-to-end solutions for vertical industries with high ceilings;
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(A16Z: 75% of open source companies and 80% of financing events have occurred after 2005)
The giant ’s attitude towards open source is also one of its motivations. Microsoft once called Linux “cancer”, but the new CEO immediately announced that “.Net” was open source. After that, his enthusiasm for open source was obvious to all.
“As software has eaten the world, open source is eating software. (As software eats the world, open source is eating software) “
This is the result of the “promotion” of the popularity of cloud computing, the developer culture of PaaS, and the self-propagating nature of SaaS.
4.2 Cloud Native (Cloud-native)
Cloud native is both an architecture and an organizational culture. In the future, in the process of digital transformation, companies will inevitably gradually transfer more products and even core systems to the cloud. The goal is to achieve agility, reliability and high flexibility while ensuring that Isolation and security;
Whether it is a SaaS, PaaS platform or a traditional enterprise, they will pay more attention to the investment in the underlying infrastructure, including containerized deployment, microservice design, DevOps Development and operation and maintenance) and AIOps (intelligent operation and maintenance) and continuous delivery capabilities. Here the third-party company that originally provided the related products is because after the customer goes to the cloud, product architecture design, new technology adoption and business models may change, which gives emerging companies opportunities for development.
From a one-time deployment to a hosted service and self-service model, from a traditional turnkey solution to providing users with tools such as open compatibility, low code and AI assistance. Looking at the development and transformation of ServiceNow, 8 years after listing, it can still maintain a revenue growth of more than 30%, and its business boundaries continue to expand, with a market value of more than 67 billion U.S. dollars.
4.3 AI Empowerment
“AI is eating everything (AI is eating everything) “, this is my most intuitive feeling for AI in the past two years. The following figure is the 2019 AI trend forecast released by CB Insights last year. In the “Necessary (required) ” quadrant, the “open source framework” and “edge “Computing” is listed. The technology giants have a clear and complete layout of AI as a basic service capability.
If you really want to say that Facebook has begun platform exploration, I think it started with the launch of the open source deep learning framework PyTorch three years ago. Just a few days ago, PyTorch 3D was heavily open sourced to help researchers and engineers more easily. Handle 3D image rendering. The social giant is sending a clear and friendly signal to the outside world. It is not only intended to break Google ’s TensorFlow monopoly in this field, but also to lay out the future in a systematic way, just like the underlying logic of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub;
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(CB Insights: AI Trends 2019)
It can also be found in the picture above that only “Face Recognition” is in a position that is more “accepted by the market.” There is a large part here that I believe is special to China.National conditions. Although the market for “autonomous driving”, “medical imaging and diagnosis”, and “crop monitoring” is visible to the naked eye, the actual landing situation is still unsatisfactory.
As more general algorithms and models are adopted and opened by the academic community, and more data is collected and analyzed by industry and edge devices, an integrated metadata, model, algorithm, learning framework, and deployment operation and maintenance A middleware-like platform, whether native to the company’s IT department or provided by a third-party company.
And if a third-party company opens this product as a platform, I believe it will promote more developers and industry insiders to penetrate into more segmented scenarios from the bottom up. This is also in line with previous judgments on the basic characteristics of PaaS and cloud-native opportunities.
4.4 New Opportunities for SaaS
Standing on the shoulders of giants: When more than 50% of infrastructure is deployed in the cloud, when these IaaS and PaaS companies provide more support and protection for developers and open source software, SaaS product architecture and business models It may change again from the underlying design, use the platform and make yourself a platform.
In the previous article, “Slack and Zoom Attack All,” we saw that Slack has become the entry point for coordinated scheduling of internal and external resources within the enterprise. The App Directory and developer platform have begun to take shape, which is more similar to Salesforce. Low-code tools and process automation applications are also starting to be available on the platform. The type of resources that an enterprise needs should have no ceiling. Therefore, Microsoft’s continued investment in the cloud and the acquisition of GitHub have laid the foundation for the next brilliant decade.
After reading the book “Super Software”, I even wonder if all commercial software based on traditional architecture design and development and need to be deployed locally will have the opportunity to redo it?
Openness and self-help with AI: To give us one of the most familiar examples, Baidu finally launched the Apollo program in 2017: an open autonomous driving platform that attracts major automakers, suppliers, driverless companies, and travel services. Companies are settling in to promote autonomous landing.
Although it is still too early to actually land, this outbreak has clearly shown the irreplaceable value of small robots and logistics trolleys in closed or semi-closed environments. According toAccording to media reports, the scenarios of true large-scale use in the epidemic area are still very limited, and the problems arise in the ease of use of product operations and flexible remote support. And aren’t AI, SaaS, and platforms established to better solve these problems?
Embracing IoT and industry: IoT Analytics, a well-known research institution, has predicted that the number of active IoT devices worldwide will reach 10 billion by 2020 and 22 billion by 2025, which will double in the next five years . A recent survey conducted by GE found that 70% of companies that have a field service (field service) scenario have (mainly equipment manufacturing and industry) The managers do not know when the equipment they are responsible for will fail or require proper maintenance and upgrade.
In the AI trend chart of CB Insights, predictive maintenance (predictive maintenance) is only the factory from design and development, production and processing, Quality detection is a part of the whole process of operation, maintenance and after-sales. The so-called “Internet of Things Platforms” worldwide have risen from 450 in 2017 to more than 600, half of which are in the industrial or manufacturing sector. The IoT world is likely to be more prosperous in the future than the virtual world that now connects and serves people.
05 Conclusion
“That ’s a crock of shit. This is n’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it ’s a platform.” “p.”
—— Bill Gates
This is not flatstation. The platform is-when the total economic value created by all users exceeds the value created by the company providing the platform, the platform is born.
—— Bill Gates
This is the answer when Bill Gates was asked how to evaluate the Facebook platform after Facebook completed a round of financing with a valuation of US $ 15 billion. The important point came, at the time, in this round, the social giant invested $ 240 million in the company-it was Microsoft!
In any case, this explanation of “platform” is believed to be worthy of repeated taste by all entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and investors.
Finally, I will share with you a recent project “Wuhan2020: Wuhan New Coronavirus Epidemic Prevention Open Source Information Collection Platform”. This open source project, launched on GitHub on January 25 this year, took only 6 days to build six major groups, including the general group, technical group, information group, coordination group, publicity group and risk control group, and quickly completed the website. Online, please poke details: https://wh.opensource-service.cn/#/.
The tool for communication and collaboration of the development team with more than 700 people is Slack, and the document collaborative editing is graphite. This is not only a public welfare project, but also a technology and social experiment, involving large-scale cross-group and regional collaboration and communication, whether tools and platforms can support the sudden and sudden increase in demand, open source communities and public welfare organizations. Cooperation and motivation, etc.
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(Wuhan2020: The Power of Collaboration)
The thing that touched me the most: A truly great platform, its ultimate value will far exceed the business itself, and it will gradually show up in social, humanistic and public affairs.
Thank you for your help and inspiration:
-Broadband Capital: “Industrial Internet Investment Strategy and Thinking”;
-How to join the wuhan2020 open source project to win this war without smoke? “: Https://blog.csdn.net/Datawhale/article/details/104132382
-“Open Source: From Community to Commercialization”, https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/commercializing-open-source/; < / p>
-CB Insights: “Artificial Intelligence Trends 2019”;
-Gartner: “The Key Trends in PaaS and Platform Architecture, 2019”, “Top Emerging Trends in Cloud-Native Infrastructure”;
-All Stratechery articles.
This article is from the public number: I think I ’m here (ID: angelplusdevil) author: GN