The focus of the Industrial Internet has begun to shift from IT infrastructure to organizational management and business management of the enterprise’s internal value chain.
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account ” Bay Area box CLUB “(ID 🙂 , author: zgcgdg.
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Author | DONG
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As of March 3, the “remote office” model of most domestic companies has lasted for a month. In this month, regardless of the company, employees, or suppliers, they have experienced a “forced” full-scale entry into remote office. So, with more and more companies returning to work normally, will the days when user traffic and stock prices take off? !!
User terminal: Either you will be painful or you will make up for it
After the formal resume of work, from the perspective of various government and enterprise users, the number and frequency of remote office participation may decrease, but the digital deployment related to remote office will continue to strengthen. Among them, those who have benefited from the deployment in advance will definitely continue to improve their remote office tool stack; and those who have suffered this time will carefully prepare PLAN-B.
“Bay Area Box” has done a lot of in-depth interviews on digital transformation before, and has accumulated a lot of resources from central enterprises or large and medium-sized enterprises distributed in the real estate, energy, tobacco, automotive, retail, and financial industries. Although companies are large, the speed of digitalization (recent focus is remote office) is not the same.
So when the epidemic arrives and remote office is turned on, the performance of these two types of customers is completely different.
Users who have not deployed related products before are obviously a little blind. IT managers are rushing to panic and ask suppliers to do emergency deployment and product debugging in the circle of friends or communication groups. Under the epidemic, privatization is unlikely, and cloud-based products will be available first.
As for those who have already been deployed, they have begun to assemble the Jiugongge photos of telecommuting (such as video conferencing) without any hassle and posted them in the circle of friends, indicating that the IT department is very capable, the business department is calm and the leadership very satisfied.
Some people also said that after the SARS epidemic in 2003, relevant departments also requested the deployment of remote offices, but nowLook, it hasn’t spread. So infer, will there be a result after this epidemic? !!
In this regard, the conference tool manufacturer Hui Chang stated in a related survey that the SARS epidemic in 2003 was the first time that traditional private network video conferencing was made available to the public. Although the actual deployment is still limited to party and government agencies However, even so, in the following 5-8 years, the related industries have maintained a rapid compound annual growth rate.
In this context, the entire digital transformation is moving towards full depth, coupled with the blessings of 5G, cloud computing and other technologies, the scope and depth of its impact must be much larger, more companies and individual employees Users are also collectively aware of the necessity and feasibility of remote office work in the era of cloud computing and mobile Internet.
The executive of an IT department of a domestic real estate giant said in a circle of friends: “The changes brought about by this epidemic have enabled mobile office platforms such as remote conferences to be widely used in enterprises, and the focus of the industrial Internet has gradually begun from the IT foundation. The field of facilities is shifting to the organization and business management of the company’s internal value chain. This also means that the industrial Internet in the second half of the Chinese Internet has entered a new stage of development. It has evolved from ‘products’ to ‘peoples’, and then to ‘behaviors’. Define products, user behaviors define services. ”
This paragraph is not very long, but it points to the milestones brought by the urgent popularity of remote office.
In the past, users were pushed by the supplier’s strategy, but now, in turn, manufacturers are pushed forward by the user’s application scenario requirements.
So, when it comes to the topic of telecommuting (or digital work), there are at least two key points.
First, the improvement of the tool stack.
As the above-mentioned IT director said, today ’s IT infrastructure is no longer a problem (the complexity of privatization deployment must be greater), cloud computing has reduced the cost and difficulty of software deployment, and applications in enterprises today ( The rapid growth of the number of APP / software) is proof.
Okta cloud computing enterprise and identity management software company Okta found in a 2019 survey that the average number of applications deployed in large enterprises today has reached 129, which is almost double that of four years ago.
Today in Chinese companies, the numbers of various software and applications must be different from those of American users. Behind this gap is the unmet user needs.
Before, we saw in some articles or diagrams that remote office tools include cloud video, intelligent collaborative work platforms, cloud documents, and enterprise cloud disks. In fact, this product tool stack is still lacking.
According to “Bay Area Box BAYBOX” research specifically for digital work / remote work, we believe that a comprehensive remote office / digital work tool combination can be divided into at least the following five categories, 25 categories:
It can be seen from the table that the entire remote office / digital work tool stack includes at least five categories of personal affairs, document office, time management, teamwork and human affairs.
In order, the more forward, the more individual-centric, and the later, the more enterprise-centric. We will launch a special report in the future. There is a special article analysis and explanation for each type of tool, which will not be expanded here (if you need to contact us).
Some of the 25 types of tools are available at home and abroad, and there are no corresponding suppliers in China. There are still many market opportunities.
Second, the establishment of sound management concepts, operating systems and corporate culture.
Can remote office achieve the same efficiency (or even higher efficiency) than on-site office? Not only is it related to tools, but the supporting management philosophy, operating system and corporate culture are even more critical. This is the same as the overall digital strategy.
For example, if the employee’s home office, does the company’s related policies promote trust and appropriate authorization, instead of artificially imposing more restrictions because the employee is not seen?
In terms of employee recruitment, can this flexible off-site office be promoted as a brand advantage for enterprises? In the selection and retention of employees, do you consider the characteristics of employees suitable for remote work as an important factor?
In terms of leadership, is the leadership team taking various measures to actively improve the organization’s management capabilities and production efficiency in the remote office scenario? So wait.
In our case studies on telecommuting / digital work, these are key dimensions in the maturity model. In this regard, to a certain extent, domestic enterprises can be said to be blank.
Suppliers: Products strive for best-in-class products, and API strategies are integrated.
From February 3 to the present, the dramatic increase in the number of users of various vendors can be reflected in various aspects. For example, in the APP store, Nail, corporate WeChat, Tencent conferences and other free tools continue to dominate the rankings; for example, the major remote audio and video conferences are either crazy expansion, or services have been interrupted, and customers are frequently disconnected.
In terms of marketing, the industry has always said that 2B marketing has no effect on free trials, especially domestic customers are not interested. But in fact, let’s not say anything this time, the urgent customers can try a dozen similar products a day.
It should be said that for suppliers, the epidemic has made them experience a very rare, but super strong, product and marketing.Stress test. There are experiences and lessons in this, but it is worth remembering that the market capacity of remote office will be much larger than before, and the opportunities it contains are unprecedented.
Aaron Levie, CEO of US-based SaaS cloud computing company Box, wrote a column last year called “The New Era of Enterprise IT”.
Why does he think enterprise IT is now in a new era?
First of all, in terms of demand, he believes that, just as the consumer Internet has broken out in the past few years-mobility, faster network links, more online users, and the development of cloud computing-these are accelerating the development of enterprises Digital transformation.
Second, on the supply side, today’s enterprise software market is very different from the past. What’s different?
First, the market size has become larger and more and more players can be accommodated.
Levie believes that the overall market for cloud computing is large, but unlike the 1990s, corporate IT today is not controlled by a few vendors. Problems that have not been resolved in the past, and now more and more innovative companies have come up with more targeted solutions.
For example, in the remote audio and video market, with Polycom and Cisco / Webex in front, many people thought that this market had no chance. However, Eric Yuan from Shandong Tai’an created ZOOM in the United States. With extremely focused and simple user experience, he successfully launched an IPO in 2019 with a market value of more than $ 15 billion. This is a typical example of tapping new opportunities from so-called mature markets.
There are also examples of completely creating a new tool category. For example, Slack, which was also directly listed in 2019, has always declared that it will e-mail, and is believed to have reinvented real-time communication and workflow automation. And Atlassian, which provides a variety of collaboration tools, has a large number of users in the developer community, and its market value is more than $ 25 billion.
In other words, in the past, we usually used functional modules in certain product suites to achieve certain businesses (the typical example is Microsoft), but now, in many sub-sectors, a number of contentions have emerged as the “most similar “Best” IT tools have almost unlimited scale and potential. On the demand side, every team, department, business, and industry process is looking forward to digitalization (China calls the Industrial Internet). Suppliers need to see potential opportunities, pack up to keep up (for the specific classification table, see the previous digital work tool stack) Classification diagram).
Second, another difference is that in order to ensure that customers can benefit from today’s large cloud computing ecosystem, software / IT vendors understand that they must work together.
Without interoperability and integration, companies will only have fragmented work processes and various security holes. Today, a new generation of “API native companies” has an open culture and is always focused on the user experience.
Even traditional IT companies like Microsoft and IBM have recognized this structural shift. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a conversation with Wired Magazine, “(To the partners in the market) where we can cooperate, let us cooperate; where we compete, Let us compete. ”
So when we look at the world and the Chinese market, we will find that, on the one hand, global enterprise IT development has entered a new era, and new opportunities for cloud computing companies in the United States and Europe are facing similar Chinese companies On the other hand, the domestic and international economic situation has put forward new requirements for domestically produced core technologies, and at the same time, it has opened up a very large industrial ecological base for domestic enterprises. These two backgrounds stand out at the same time, and it is a very important dual industry cycle. To deal with the opportunities and challenges currently facing domestic enterprises, they must also make good use of this dual industry cycle.
Under this big market opportunity, different manufacturers have different positions and need to formulate different strategies.
For example, is there still a chance for the favorite traffic entrance in China? From the current point of view, it is clear that WeChat, Dingding, and even QQ have hundreds of millions of users and are born as a super tool portal.
So are there any opportunities other than these two or three? In fact, some people continue to seize this kind of entrance.
For example, Kingsoft WPS for documents. Open the current Jinshan WPS page, you will find that Jinshan seems to be integrating all kinds of office gadgets that can be integrated into it (such as WPS can also initiate network conferences).
Although today’s digital work has passed the era of being completely document-centric, document creation and sharing are still typical scenarios in the office. With the current number of billions of users on the PC and mobile terminals, Kingsoft WPS has become one of the user portals from 2C to 2B, and it can be established.
Of course, the super tools that can be called entrances are limited after all (100 million users are the basic threshold), rightFor more digital work / remote office providers, it is more important to be deep and specialized to build their own ecology in vertical fields. Well done, there is still plenty of room for survival.
For example, conference providers, in addition to standard conference scenarios, there are many vertical scenarios such as MCN live broadcast, online education, dual teacher education, medical treatment, party building, pan-social and entertainment.
For example, in the field of collaboration / collaboration, Zhiyuan Internet, which successfully landed on the science and technology board last year, has just held an ecological partner conference. His action is to pull in entry-level partners such as WeChat, Baidu AI, Huawei Cloud, and Jinshan Office The other handed in small partners such as small and medium-sized integrators, developers, and even users’ IT departments (some of which became independent information technology construction subsidiaries), while Zhiyuan Internet became a platform hub in the digital business scene of enterprises.
In general, telecommuting / digital work is a big track in the field of 2B, and hundreds of millions of users will enter the telecommuting scene. This is an industrial background, but for many players who are among them, it is more critical It is necessary to understand the internal value chain of the enterprise, which can help enterprises and employees solve problems and needs in more complex business scenarios. Otherwise, no matter how many users registered on the platform are inactive and do not pay, such cloud computing and SaaS are completely meaningless.