Dialogue: Decrypting the top-level design and underlying logic of Alibaba Cloud

Dozens of questions, 10,000-character long article, Xing Dian, the new president of Alibaba Cloud, came forward for the first time after taking office and had an exclusive and in-depth discussion with TMTpost about Alibaba Cloud's judgment on the future of cloud computing, an in-depth interpretation of the future Alibaba Cloud ecological strategy, and revealed the secrets of Alibaba's technical committee and The original thinking of Ali Zhongtai thought. Reprinted from Titanium Media, author: Liu Xiangming. The title is "Titanium Media Exclusive Dialogue: The Most Detailed Deciphering of Alibaba Cloud's Top-Level Design and Bottom-Level Logic". Share with everyone.


Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence

Titanium Media Note: Zhang Jianfeng’s Alibaba career has been stepping on the boundary between technology and business. In a sense, it can be seen as a microcosm of the shift in Alibaba’s strategic focus. Before that, he successively managed Taobao Technology Architecture Department, B2C Development Department and Taobao Product Technology Development Department, as well as Juhuasuan Business Department, Local Living Business Department, 1688 Business Department and Tmall Business Department. In 2015, he also served as President of Ali China Retail Business Group.

In November 2018, Zhang Jianfeng, who is still serving as the chief technology officer of Alibaba Group and also in charge of Dharma Academy, was appointed as the president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group.

The cloud computing market is developing rapidly. According to the data given by the research institute Canalys, the global cloud computing market exceeded US$80 billion in 2018, reaching US$80.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 46.5%. The rapid development of the market has also brought about rapid changes in the cloud ecological environment. Technology, customer needs, and partnerships are constantly evolving along with the expansion of scale and the deepening of applications.

These past experiences of Zhang Jianfeng have brought him great benefits in understanding the relationship between technology and business in this fast-changing cloud ecological environment, and thinking about problems from the perspective of partners.

In this rapidly developing market, Alibaba Cloud ranks among the top three in the world and the first in China. "Alibaba Cloud's market share in China's public cloud market is the sum of the second to eighth place." On March 21, 2019, Zhang Jianfeng, a new post, described this when he made his first public appearance at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Beijing. Alibaba Cloud's market position.

Only the trader can truly feel that the rapid development and huge scale bring not only the scenery, but also the huge pressure. After taking office, Zhang Jianfeng organized the management to discuss several core issues: First, how does Alibaba Cloud grow healthily? Second, what does the future of cloud look like? Third, what are the core capabilities of Alibaba Cloud, what to do and what not to do?

His speech on March 21 can be seen as the result of the four-month discussion. Compared with the series of things that Alibaba Cloud will do in the future, everyone should pay more attention to what Alibaba Cloud does not do. In the past ten years, Alibaba Cloud has released a total of 162 products and 4,610 new functions. With the huge size of Alibaba Cloud, clearing its boundaries is always the most important topic. This involves thinking about one's own positioning and capabilities, and more importantly, how to view the relationship between oneself and the ecological environment that one has created.

At the end of his speech at the conference, Zhang Jianfeng clarified the two new ecological positions of Alibaba Cloud - being integrated and not doing SaaS by himself.

The release of these two positions, if interpreted from the Jin Yong martial arts culture that pervades Ali, is quite similar to Xu Zhu’s approach to cracking the Zhenlong chess game in “Dragon Babu”—Alibaba Cloud, as a platform, gave up some initiative and practicality, and instead let You have more room to maneuver.

As we all know, with the irreversible trend of enterprises migrating to the cloud, more and more enterprise-level customer needs are superimposed on the cloud, which has posed a huge challenge to Alibaba Cloud's delivery capabilities. The concept of being integrated is proposed, leaving most of the development space and initiative to ecological partners, while Alibaba Cloud itself focuses on the excellence of the core capabilities of the cloud ecosystem.

But behind this seemingly win-win design, there are still many challenges. How can the platform encapsulate its own capabilities into mature products and accept the test and nitpicking of partners? Technology and organization, what adjustments should be made for such changes?

These are the top-level architecture designs for Alibaba Cloud's future development, but behind all these designs are the bottom-level and most profound thinking about the industry and itself.

After the meeting, Zhang Jianfeng accepted an exclusive interview with Liu Xiangming, co-founder of Titanium Media, and had an in-depth discussion on the future of cloud computing, Alibaba Cloud's strategic choices, and the impact of cloud on enterprises.

About the future of cloud computing
A platform company with 10,000 people is a very large platform-based company. As big as Taobao does, it has a scale of several thousand people. If the number of people in a company is linearly related to the business, it may be doing too much of what it is not good at.

TMTPost: You are concerned about the changes in the focus of cloud computing competition. It seems that everyone is still more concerned about price?

Xingdian: The price is the primary competition, and finally returns to the core value. The value should be reflected from two ends, one is the technical side and the other is the application side. The cloud was all about infrastructure at the beginning, but since the first day of cloud, Alibaba has done more than just the current cloud. The original idea was to be a data processing platform, which was also related to the disconnection between data processing capabilities and business at that time. Relationships, because it was ten years ago, very few companies were intelligence-based, data-based, and mostly process-based.

After doing it for a while, I realized that this is not enough. In order to succeed in China, we must have infrastructure.

Of course, the process we did was quite tortuous. At first, we wanted to do data processing on an open source system, but later found out that it was not right and had to do our own research. Alibaba not only built a cloud infrastructure system, but also a data processing system. (Note: it is now called MaxCompute, but it was called ODPS at the time). This is unique, including domestic and foreign.

Of course, this process is a bit far, so in retrospect, the IaaS layer must be done well. The competition at the bottom must be the maturity, stability and price of infrastructure, but the competition at the top must be artificial intelligence and so on.

TMTPost: You just talked about data processing, why not open source?

Xingdian: In fact, none of the open source software companies have ever faced such a large amount of data. Hadoop and Spark are a big step forward in terms of the processing power of databases. They use distributed and MapReduce methods, but their data volume is not as large as that of databases. Alibaba's data volume ratio is still very far behind.

The second is that the stability requirements of open source do not meet our requirements. So at that time, we built a 5K cluster for the first time, and it was impossible for open source to have more than 5,000 machines at that time. For the first time, we broke through the limitation of machines and could use a larger-scale cluster for processing. Third, we consider the cost, because the data volume is small and we don’t care about the cost. After the data volume is large, we will consider the cost more. Now our Alibaba business volume is increasing by more than 50% every year, but our cost cannot grow linearly.

We started large-scale mixed distribution last year (Note: a new technology that makes online processing and offline processing no longer have dedicated machines, but runs on the same cluster of machines, which can greatly save resources, and is very important for scheduling and deployment capabilities. The requirements are extremely high), we do not have dedicated offline machines to process big data, and we use online machines to do large-scale mixing. Double 11 is coming. The first hour is temporarily not processed for data analysis and all used to run applications. After the peak is over, all machines are scheduled to do data analysis. It is impossible for open source to do this.

I think it is difficult to design a very flexible, cost-effective, and stable processing platform in the field of big data if your company has no application.

TMTPost: Foreign cloud computing talks a lot about hybrid cloud. How do you see the impact of hybrid cloud on cloud computing in the future?

Xingdian: Hybrid cloud is still a very important development direction in the future. Many customers still have very rigid requirements for hybrid cloud, including some government and bank customers. They feel that their applications are manageable and controllable, or physical isolation is very important. important things. Judging from the current situation today, we use hardware for isolation on the public cloud. For example, we have a Shenlong server. It used to be the isolation of virtual machines. Now the isolation level is also increasing year by year. But the demand for hybrid cloud is not entirely due to technical reasons, but also due to ideas, so hybrid clouds will still exist widely for a long time.

TMTPost: What do you think of the background trend of cloud computing? This morning, you talked about Alibaba Cloud not doing SaaS. In fact, SaaS is a very important connection with cloud computing customers. In this case, will cloud computing vendors become forgotten in the future, just like the current power plants and tap water. factory.

Xingdian: Forgotten and irreplaceable, it is also something worth looking forward to. Just like air, I think it is a very good state, and it is not necessary to go to the front to contact customers. Because the real 2B must be involved in the customer's business process, otherwise it cannot be called 2B, at most it can only be called to custom. But the demand in this industry is too scattered. For example, SAP and Oracle have released a lot of ERP, and they still have hundreds of thousands of engineers, including their own partners. Of course, there are also more concentrated ones, such as Microsoft, because the needs of everyone in the office are relatively consistent, and the differences in other business areas are very large.

We position the cloud as a platform, not a software system, so there is no big difference in positioning between cloud and e-commerce. E-commerce is where countless brands and merchants sell their products on the platform, and they don't need to care about payment and transactions. Cloud will definitely be more professional in the future. Specialized division of labor is an important cornerstone of current civilization. We need to solve this problem when we want to be ecological. What is our specialty? We are good at doing large-scale systems, good at technological innovation, and have some views on the future evolution of technology.

Of course, we have rich business scenarios, let us do these things better than others, this is our advantage. However, the business of a large number of industries still requires professionals in the industry to do it. They also need to innovate, not simply using the cloud as an IaaS, but how to develop based on data and intelligence, so we need to complete the transformation with our partners.

On the other hand, China's IT development is very unbalanced. Some companies have not yet realized informatization, so they need to focus on dataization and intelligence. Some companies have weak IT capabilities, and they need our partners to provide some personal services, including implementation, Consultation and coaching, but Alibaba Cloud can't do it.

TMTPost: Just now you talked about the staff size of Oracle and SAP. Do you have expectations for the scale of Alibaba Cloud in your mind?

Crazy: Yes. I think a platform company with 10,000 people is a very large platform-based company. As big as Taobao, it has a scale of several thousand people. If the number of people in a company is linearly related to the business, it may be doing too much of what it is not good at.

TMTPost: I just talked about some artificial intelligence. Now it is very fast to do artificial intelligence and open source. What impact do you think it will have on cloud computing in the future?

Xingpin: Open source is making the cloud more and more standardized. Regardless of the above technical components of the Internet, including some main modules of the cloud, such as containers, etc., will become more and more standardized, which is beneficial to the development of the cloud. The first is that because open source is used by some developed large companies, their technology will be more stable. The most critical point is that a large number of development technology systems on the cloud will be more consistent, a large number of engineers will be familiar with this system, and it will be easier to turn their applications into part of the cloud. It is still very difficult for a company to formulate standards.

Titanium Media: Open source has basically been divided up by big manufacturers. What impact will it have on the open source market in the future? Will open source move towards charging in the future?

Xingdian: There is a bit of this trend now. The original open source may be free open source, and now some companies do paid services. But everyone is on the cloud, and the business model of those companies has changed, so they go to revise the open source agreement, which I think is against the trend and the trend. In the end, they will find that after a year or two, it must be a cloud company that will do the native cloud, or a big Internet company will launch a completely free open source. Big Internet companies don't care about this little money, they want to prosper the entire ecosystem.

TMTPost: On the last question of cloud computing, from a technical point of view, what technology do you care most about in cloud computing now?

Xingdian: The first one is that you just mentioned that the hybrid cloud is developing very fast, so we still do a lot of work. The second is security. If everyone goes to the cloud, security will become very critical. From a product point of view, databases are developing very fast. Everyone is thinking of replacing Oracle databases. However, it is still challenging to replace key core applications 1:1. Therefore, databases based on cloud natives are developing very fast. As a core capability, the database is currently developing very fast in China. Of course, there is also a bottom-level IaaS layer, such as containers and isolation. We are also pushing the Shenlong server to isolate the hardware layer. This development is also very fast.

Cloud used to be a relatively complete frame made by someone, but now each frame itself is evolving rapidly, and it is not completely static. Of course, the business model is also evolving. Microsoft is going down from SaaS, and aws belongs to another path.

About the future of Alibaba Cloud
TMTPost: Four months into your tenure, what have you done during this time?

Xingdian: It is mainly for discussion. Alibaba Cloud needs to achieve high growth and non-linear growth of personnel. This is what we discuss a lot. The second one discusses the future of the cloud and what kind of business form the cloud will be in the future. The third is what our core competence is, what we don't do, what we do, this is also discussed more. Under the premise of this discussion, how do we reach a consensus, how to adjust the organization, how to implement this KPI, and how to use tools to ensure this process.

TMTPost: Your speech today should be a presentation of the results of the discussion.

Xingdian: Yes, I think this is what we all agree on internally. Of course, there have also been some changes within the Alibaba Group. It is hoped that Alibaba Cloud Intelligence will become a unified export and customer interface for all technologies and products of the Alibaba economy. This may also be different from the original positioning, so now Financial Cloud, DingTalk, etc. considered as part of a whole.

I think Alibaba is also a company with the best combination of technology and business. Some companies have CTOs that change every day. Because there is no such soil, the technology of people from outside will not be able to integrate with the business after they come, and they will be abandoned by the organization.

Titanium Media: The outside world has always believed that technology is a shortcoming of Alibaba Cloud. What do you think?

Xingdian: Many people ask this question, what kind of company is Alibaba? Alibaba has always been a technology company, but the business has been so successful that people don't know whether it's a technology company or a commercial company.

Ali has done too many things, e-commerce, payment, logistics, entertainment, etc., so people think that Ali is a more business-oriented company. I have always believed that technology depends on business, and business depends on technology, and the proportion of each stage is different. Sometimes business pulls technology, technology pushes business, and there is no pure technology company in the world.

Alibaba is a very strange company, we are the scale of the Internet, the sophistication of the enterprise level, the level of financial accuracy. Take a small example - a search engine, when you search for a keyword, 5 pages, 10 pages, and 500 pages appear. Users don’t care, you lose half of the data, and people don’t think there is any problem. But Ali is different. As long as one item is lost, the seller will call immediately. The mistake that you make a penny in the transaction, people call 100%, and it is a very serious problem.

There isn't a company in the world that has to deal with all these things at the same time, plus it's complicated to bring you a Double 11 every year. In the case that the cost does not increase significantly, these three conditions must be met at the same time, and there must be a very high elasticity.

Therefore, Ali technology is very complicated no matter what. There are two types of technologies. One is to make single-point breakthroughs, such as voice, search, and algorithms. The second is dealing with complex processes. These are two equally difficult things.

People who deal with complex systems and build complex systems are even scarcer in the talent market today, because it takes a lot of experience to deal with such a system. This is the first thing.

The second thing Ali is a company with very strong engineering capabilities. Some companies can research, but cannot write a system, but Alibaba is different. Today, if you have something to do, we can definitely tell you how long it will take and how many days it will be online. Few companies in the world can achieve this. A confident.

The third view from the outside world may be that there are not enough breakthrough technologies. But Dharma Academy is now very advanced in many technologies, including voice. Like the voice system of the court, we use it. In addition, video processing, not to mention applications such as the city brain. Our own chips will be tape-out very soon, and will be available in August and September. At this level, it will be more three-dimensional and let everyone think what kind of company Alibaba is.

I think Alibaba is also a company with the best combination of technology and business. Some companies have CTOs that change every day. Because there is no such soil, the technology of people from outside will not be able to integrate with the business after they come, and they will be abandoned by the organization.

TMTPost: You just mentioned that business and technology are pulling each other. Who do you think is pulling Alibaba now?

Xingdian: At first, business ran faster than technology, and technology kept chasing business because business grew too fast. In the first two years, I think that technology drives business, especially after the rise of artificial intelligence, including our programmatic transactions, advertising platforms, thousands of people, recommendation, search, a lot of algorithms and AI, including customer service, etc. A lot of data intelligence is used in Drive business.

The same is true for the cloud. The cloud is a technological breakthrough that can bring about cost reduction and efficiency improvement. Cloud is more typical. Most of the dividends of the original e-commerce business in the past two years were brought about by technological breakthroughs. Because it is very difficult to break through the business model, everyone is smart today, and the competition threshold will be raised in the future, many of which are technical thresholds.

Alibaba's practice over the past few years, especially after China and Taiwan proposed, we can accumulate core capabilities faster and waste less. Then after our data center proposed, all the data was opened, which is also very efficient. This is a very important part of the company's success in the middle and Taiwan. Of course, it has something to do with organizational capabilities, but it doesn't mean that an idea will definitely be implemented. Some companies may not be able to push, and we also spent about two years to gradually integrate. As a middle stage, you have to prove yourself, you are better than others in technology, this is not so fast and easy.

About Ali's Middle Office
TMTPost: What do you think is the relationship between China and Taiwan and the organizational structure?

Xingdian: This is still very, very related, including organizational skills, trust relationships, and some assessments. There are many relationships here.

If you do a middle-office job, if you don’t do well, you will become an original commune. The commune is actually a Zhongtai system. You specialize in corn, and you specialize in rice, but why can’t everyone continue to do so? Zhongtai does not take care of all departments. It allows you to do this and does not let you do that. The technical ability and organizational ability cannot keep up with it, which is still inefficient. I am quite special. I am a middle office, and the original department has done it, and I can still affect a lot of people.

Second, we are still very down-to-earth, admitting what is good and what is not good, and not everything is done.

Third, Ali has made some innovations in the system. We have a technical committee, and many people are learning it now, but I don’t think they understand how we work.

There is a technical team under our technical committee, because we have a lot of experts in voice, video, and vision. If it was originally done by three departments, then the three departments should set up a team, and you should first solve the problems of unity and development. . If they can't solve it, I will come forward to solve it. Therefore, we advocate allowing engineers to use technical means to resolve technical differences and development.

Zhongtai is not only an organization, but also a concept, so if the technology of this Zhongtai is most suitable for AutoNavi, it should be placed in AutoNavi, but for AutoNavi, this technology must have a positioning, Be accountable to everyone, not just yourself. So some of the technology is in the middle stage, but not necessarily in the middle stage. For example, intelligent robot technology, that is in the customer service department, because he is closest to the scene. However, some central business technologies, either in the Dharma Institute or in the unified construction of the middle and Taiwan departments.

Ali has made some innovations in the system. We have a technical committee, and many people are learning it now, but I don’t think they understand how we work.

Titanium Media: The concept of intelligent cloud is different from the original IaaS. What new changes will it bring? Including organizational structure, KPIs, etc.

Xingdian: Organizational structure. Now all the technical departments of the CTO line are integrated with the technical departments of the cloud. For example, the original two database departments are now merged into one database department. The original two network departments, now merged into one network department.

Titanium Media: The KPI issue, I also talked to Sun Quan about it. What are your favorites right now?

Xingdian: I think the first one is scale, because this means competition in your industry, which must be very core. Second, we are still very concerned about the share of public cloud, because the foundation of cloud is the development of public cloud, of course, the development of hybrid cloud is also critical. The third is to advocate ecology. In terms of ecology, how competitive is Alibaba? Now we have thousands of major partners, and we hope to put a larger proportion of our main business on Alibaba Cloud.

Titanium Media: Will DingTalk have closer collaboration with Alibaba Cloud in the future? Is cloud collaboration an important strategy in the future?

Xingdian: We talked about data intelligence just now. Another big part is online work, including office collaboration. We want to rely on Dingding's ability to supplement this system. Now, the cloud is the two driving force, data + intelligence, and we will add a work synergy by next year. We believe that this work collaboration is the difference between Internet companies and other companies, because Internet companies use a lot of these new tools to do work collaboration, and traditional companies rarely use such tools. After the emergence of productivity tools like DingTalk, great changes have taken place. It used to be email, and now DingTalk is very efficient in real-time online work. The previous approval was also connected through its mechanism.

Further, like the text and the supply chain system, they are all connected through the DingTalk system, which is more brisk. The synergy of mobile phones is not very good, we hope to connect them in series through DingTalk. Then turn the ability of Dingding into a basic ability output of our partners. Here's one of our ideas.

Titanium Media: Is the value of Dingding to Alibaba Cloud similar to that of office365 to Microsoft Azure?

Xingdian: It's a bit similar, but it's still not so SaaS. DingTalk is mainly a platform for collaborative communication. We want the enterprise of the future to be both data-driven, intelligent, and collaborative online, which is one of our key future descriptions for our clients.

TMTPost: There is another interesting thing today: Project Fanxing - Mini Programs, what role does Mini Programs play in large deployments?

Xingdian: Small programs play a very important role, because more and more applications are now on the wireless side, whether digital government or applications in all walks of life. There are two forms of this application, one is to be an independent APP, and the other is to rely on a large traffic portal. We think that it is very difficult for most long-tail applications to make independent APPs by themselves, and may rely on large-scale traffic. traffic portals, such as WeChat and Ali.

There is a big difference between Ali and WeChat. We call it one cloud and multiple terminals. It can run not only on Alipay and Taobao, but also on AutoNavi, and maybe even on Weibo in the future. Just like Android, you can develop once and run everywhere, but WeChat is more like an iphone, where you develop and run here.

Our applet is an ecosystem, and we will provide a series of cloud-to-end tools so that developers can make it soon.

Titanium Media: Can you understand that Mini Programs are more like a terminal?

Xingdian: A lightweight end is a lightweight export for all walks of life.

Titanium Media: As far as I know, the Alipay applet is used as a framework.

Xingdian: Yes, because Alipay has more contacts and explorations in this area. That's one of our benefits, all at once.

About being integrated
TMTPost: The concept of "integration" you mentioned today is very new. How did you come up with this idea? Because Ali has always been a platform, is there a contradiction between the platform and being integrated?

Xingdian: It turns out that Ali is a platform. I have also worked as a middle platform for two years. I have been wondering what the difference between a middle platform and a platform is. As long as platforms such as Alibaba, Taobao, and Tmall are set up, customers can directly open a store and do not need to care about anything. However, I think Zhongtai is different. Zhongtai’s own products cannot directly generate value or directly. External services must become part of other people's products, so that other people's products can provide better services. This is what I understand in the middle stage.

Including data intelligence and artificial intelligence, these two things are definitely not platforms, but must become part of others. From this perspective, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence is both a platform and a middle platform, so we put forward the slogan "to be integrated". Just like Intel's CPU, it is also integrated and integrated into various computers, it is the same logic.

TMTPost: The “integrated” strategy will have a relatively large impact on Alibaba Cloud’s operations, including organizational management. This is actually the relationship between calling and being called, which is very different from before. Do you need to make any internal adjustments?

Xingdian: In fact, we were doing some general contractors ourselves, and we were also doing integration, integrating our technology. But we found that our delivery costs were very high. Some industries have no way, like City Brain, because this industry is an emerging industry with incremental applications. There were no players before. You have to do some show cases. We will do it in this industry, but after we do it, we will copy and promote it on a large scale. , we definitely need everyone to do it together.

Titanium Media: I think this step is still very clever. It has alleviated many of the original problems of Alibaba Cloud, including delivery capabilities, and turned the original centralized delivery into distributed delivery.

Xingdian: And a lot of partners are willing to do delivery, they're good at it.

Titanium Media: After the concept of integration is proposed, how will the entire ecosystem be built in the future?

Xingdian: To put it simply, if a partner can sign a contract, you sign it. If Alibaba Cloud has to sign it, we will sign together.

TMTpost: What changes will be made in the future ecological construction? Now after being integrated, the relationship is a bit messy.

Xingdian: The ecology must still be a division of labor and coordination. The traditional ecology is not as integrated as imagined, and they are also divided and cooperated. For example, when making an ERP system for a traditional enterprise, they also divide labor and collaborate, such as Deloitte for consulting, SAP for software, and Accenture for implementation. We do not destroy everyone's division of labor and cooperation, but our product technology becomes part of this system, which is such a logic.

Titanium Media: Originally, the traditional 2B ecosystem was still a relatively balanced ecosystem, because it was basically a large company later on. But in the Internet ecosystem, it is basically a big platform and then a bunch of small companies.

Xingdian: I personally think that large companies will definitely make more general systems, but if general systems are cloudized, like some large companies, they may be replaced. But the professional service ability is personalized, c2m. What does personalization mean? This means that for big brands, it needs to be fragmented. I think the cloud service will be the same in the future. There must be many subdivided professional service providers, rather than a large professional service provider serving many industries. I think this is a trend. Just like cosmetics, it's not about applying Dabao every day. It is very subdivided and there are many brands.

TMTPost: The idea of ​​creating this kind of ecology in the future will be different. What policies will be used to attract everyone?

Xingdian: It turns out that a simple ecology is the reseller's model, but today I think we hope that our partners will understand this industry and have a co-creation with the technology we have mastered. For example, we have a very good voice technology, we don't know what industry can use it. Partners master this technology and understand how customers should use it. For example, people can use it for attendance, or what kind of access control it can use.

Therefore, the ecological partners I prefer today are companies that have the ability to define the future of this industry and have the ability to innovate. They are the people we prioritize to cooperate with. The concept of the real head is whether the company is professional enough and whether it has insight into the future of the industry.

There are two things that KPMG said very well. They summed up this year's strategy into two sentences, one called discovery and the other called realization. We want to be as discoverable as our partners and have the ability to make it happen.

Titanium Media: What do you think of Alibaba Cloud's shortcomings now?

Xingdian: I think Alibaba Cloud's shortcomings are obvious. Although we are a cloud company, we lack 2B service capabilities, so we need to make up for it through the rapid development of the ecosystem. The second is from the accumulation of core technologies. After so many years of accumulation, we turned out to be a platform-based and product-based structure. The two are different. The platform has to be built by itself, so there is no need to separate out a single product. Others can It is very easy to use, and we can use it internally. Because the developer is inside the company, you can ask him directly, so he has built a very complex platform, but this complex platform is not a single product, it is very structured Therefore, we are also stepping up productization today. Productization includes rich documentation and manuals. In fact, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Titanium Media: Is there any indicator for being integrated? How do you measure?

Xingdian: We have several thousand partners. We hope that the number of partners with business must have very strict indicators, including their size. For our large-scale leading partners, everyone is not an indicator of income, including Deloitte and Accenture. We still hope to create a leading benchmark case, a case that is truly defined from the future of the industry. These are some of our common goals.

Titanium Media: This morning, I said that I don’t want to do SaaS, and consulting will be done very little, but consulting is very important. It means that you have close communication with customers, how will Alibaba Cloud maintain communication with customers in the future, and how will you understand customers in the future? need?