The "competition" and "cooperation" of the three major camps of the Industrial Internet

"Short-term cooperation, long-term competition." Regarding the relationship between the three major camps of the industrial Internet track, a scholar engaged in industrial Internet research gave this answer.

In 2018, the Industrial Internet was included in the government work report for the first time, and the construction of the Industrial Internet will gradually reach its peak in 2021.

Compared with European and American countries, although the development of my country's industrial Internet started late. However, in the past two years, under the influence of the epidemic, the pace of digital transformation of the industrial manufacturing industry has accelerated, which has immediately ignited the industrial Internet. At the same time, it has also attracted large and small technology companies to follow suit, mainly including Internet giants led by BAT. SaaS software providers based on UFIDA and Dingjie, and industrial manufacturing giants represented by Haier and XCMG.

On the industrial Internet track, people like to divide industrial Internet service providers into "first echelon, second echelon, and third echelon" from the perspective of enterprise scale, scientific research level, and entry time. The innate business attributes of the three major ladders have brought innate advantages to its layout, and they have continued to cultivate in their areas of expertise. So after the industrial Internet is hyped up, can the three major echelons rely on their own advantages to support the industrial Internet alone? The industry can be described as diverse.

Idealist: The cooperation between BAT and software vendors is to expand their own ecosystem, and the purpose is to successfully enter the industrial circuit.

Realism: The three camps are more of a competitive relationship, and their development ideas are different.

Radicals: Behind the cooperation is competition, and the competitive relationship will intensify. In the near future, the two sides of the cooperation are likely to become opposites.

BAT Internet giant just to ``snowball''?

Entering the industrial Internet, Internet giants face the bitterness of "interlacing as a mountain".

From the perspective of the industry, it is a matter of course for Internet giants to enter the industrial Internet. As the trident of the Internet, BAT has always been shrouded in a "top" halo. Tencent focuses on social networking, Alibaba focuses on e-commerce, and Baidu is deeply engaged in search. Most people think that BAT is omnipotent and can chew even if it is rare and hard, but for them, the Industrial Internet is a brand new track, and it is extremely difficult to do this game alone.

From the perspective of entry time, Baidu, Ali, and Tencent entered the industrial Internet in 2107, 2018, and 2019 respectively, and entered on different tracks. After investigating the market, Baidu chose to start with industrial AI quality inspection and developed Baidu AI QC Cloud, based on its own experience in finance and e-commerce, starting from the apparel industry, Alibaba has successively released products such as ET Industrial Brain, SupET, Feilong, Feixiang Industrial Internet Platform, and Rhino Factory.

As a latecomer, Tencent has been particularly active on the industrial Internet track in recent years. After the "930 Revolution" in 2018, Tencent formed a new business group-the Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group (CSIG), choosing to fully embrace the industry Internet; In 2019, Tencent Cloud released the WeMake smart manufacturing solution, and announced the "511" ecological partner program to join hands in the five links of the end-to-end value chain of "research, production, supply, sales, and service" 100 partners, creating more than 1,000 solutions and industrial apps.

In the past two years, Tencent has implemented the Eco-Partnership Program in depth by introducing resources from the Yunqi Base Qianfan Program, SaaS Accelerator, and Qingteng University, as well as with industrial manufacturing companies such as Foxconn and Sany Heavy Industries, Beiming Software, and Donghua Software. In-depth cooperation among other software vendors has launched deep-integrated solutions for vertical industries.

According to official data released by Tencent Cloud, there are currently more than 9,000 partners and more than 400 joint solutions have been launched in 30 industries.

Li Xiangqian, general manager of Tencent Industrial Cloud, explained: “Foxconn has rich experience in manufacturing ecology. The upstream and downstream of the industry and tens of thousands of suppliers can collectively share the dividends of the industrial Internet. Tencent combines small programs, corporate WeChat, and agile Development and other capabilities are opened up, and through the superposition of the two ecology, the effect of 1+1 is greater than 2 is truly realized."

Li Qiang also mentioned in previous interviews that focusing on the industrial Internet, Tencent still has a lot to learn from other companies. In addition, Chen Guangyu mentioned that at present, it has achieved good cooperative relations with leading companies, and will continue to deepen and gradually expand cooperation with mid-waist companies in the future.

According to Leifeng.com, the overall business growth of Tencent Cloud will be very fast in 2020, and the business growth rate in the ecological field will be even faster. This is precisely the performance of Tencent Cloud's continued openness and emphasis on the strength of partners. These achievements are mainly due to Tencent Cloud’s seven major initiatives: product co-creation, open and innovative cooperation models, stable and enriched policies and operational optimization, continuous improvement in service support, opening of more C-end resources, cloud incubation, and ecology Synergy.

Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent’s play styles coincide. At present, Baidu Smart Cloud has developed more than 50 types of smart solutions for cross-industry vertical scenarios with more than 30 partners, and successively cooperated with Baosteel, Geely, and China National Building Materials Leading manufacturing companies such as the group have reached cooperation. The research and development of Alibaba's industrial Internet platform is also done together with industry leaders.

Li Shuo, Vice President of Baidu, said: “In the process of advancing the implementation of the entire industrial Internet, Baidu has steadily worked with its partners to improve the digital level of industrial enterprises and industrial chains through a one-enterprise, one-tier, and one-chain-one-tier model. The value of measurement."

It seems that "cooperation" has become a magic weapon for BAT in the industrial Internet field for a while, but in fact, cooperation is also a better pavement for the "snowball" effect. Regardless of technology, ecology, or products, BAT chooses to cooperate with ecological partners to build, and the cooperation targets are mainly focused on industrial enterprises. After all, the industry know-how is a problem that BAT giants urgently need to solve.

Judging from the current progress and results of BAT, the strategy of win-win cooperation has worked. According to Wang Hongzhi of Harbin Institute of Technology, the cooperation strategy implemented by BAT is to expand its own ecology. Due to the big difference between the industrial Internet and the Internet, whether it can successfully enter the industrial track remains to be further studied.

The "conspiracy theory" behind the cooperation of traditional software vendors

As a new thing, the Industrial Internet not only attracts BAT, but also brings new opportunities to traditional software vendors 

In the industrial Internet track, traditional software vendors have been labeled as Internet enterprise ecological partners. This type of enterprise mainly provides SaaS services for manufacturing enterprises.

A person in charge of a traditional software transformation to become a SaaS service provider told Leifeng.com, “Driven by the development of informatization and digitalization, making SaaS products is the main theme of the future development of every traditional software company.” This also shows the transformation of traditional software vendors. The voice of the Industrial Internet.

At present, a new batch of successful industrial Internet manufacturers such as UFIDA, Dingjie, and Beiming have emerged in China. The most typical non-yongyou network is none other than a software manufacturer that focuses on ERP. It started with financial management software and then extended to industrial software such as MES production control software, PLM R&D and design software research and development, and in the industry The field continues to deepen, and the UFIDA Smart Industrial Internet Platform has been developed.

With the deepening of industrial digital transformation, UFIDA has also launched a series of in-depth cooperation with Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. At the Tencent Cloud Digital Ecology Conference some time ago, UFIDA, together with Tencent Cloud and Intel, jointly released the "U9 cloud intelligent manufacturing "Joint solution", which takes U9 cloud as the core, relies on Tencent Cloud, and optimizes the underlying computing power of Intel to realize the overall cloudification of the complex discrete manufacturing industry and meet the various complex businesses of growing manufacturing companies on the cloud. Scenes.

Software vendors such as UFIDA and Beiming, which started with ERP, are typical To B companies. In this process, they have accumulated diversified customer groups and service experience, and formed the advantages of software vendors to deploy the industrial Internet and cooperate with Internet giants. It is also mainly to make up for its own shortcomings. After all, traditional IT service providers such as Tencent and Ali have obvious advantages in algorithms, computing power, and data processing (IaaS).

According to Ye Xiulin, deputy general manager of UFIDA's Intelligent Manufacturing Division, UFIDA and Huawei Tencent have more cooperation, mainly because of the least overlap in business.

Like UFIDA, Beiming Software is also the head partner of Tencent Cloud. The two also have in-depth cooperation in industrial Internet, including brand output, technology empowerment, ecological integration product development, and corporate growth.

Wang Jinhong, chairman of Beiming Digital Technology and senior vice president of Beiming Software, said in an interview with Leifeng.com that the industrial Internet platform cannot fully provide the capabilities and resources required by the platform because one or two companies need to cooperate. More ecological partners can jointly build this kind of resources and capabilities to better help companies carry out digital transformation. "

In fact, whether it is an Internet giant or a traditional software manufacturer, what the new track brings to enterprises is the new dividends, and the most important thing for these enterprises to enter the game is to become the leaders in this field.

Relevant people stated that the industrial Internet track, especially in terms of platforms, is an obvious competitive relationship. Every company hopes to establish its own ecological partner and SaaS product system based on its PaaS platform, forming thousands to tens of thousands. Complementary advantages are the original intention of cooperation, and the ultimate goal is to expand their own ecology and broaden customer channels through cooperation.

A traditional manufacturing company alone, "difficult"

Traditional industrial manufacturing understands manufacturing better.

Compared with BAT and traditional software vendors, traditional manufacturing companies are the third echelon of the Industrial Internet, and they are also named the "unicorns" of the industry.

There is no doubt that my country, as a major industrial manufacturing country, is the industry with the strongest demand for digital transformation. However, due to its wide variety of industries, the complexity of the categories greatly increases the difficulty and complexity of transformation. Some experts have said that industrial digital transformation generally takes 3 to 5 years to complete. This means spending a lot of manpower, material and financial resources to do this, which discourages many manufacturing companies.

However, in the new era where everything needs to be transformed, in order not to fall behind, to smoothly ride the digital ride, and to achieve the goal of "reducing costs, increasing efficiency and improving quality" faster, manufacturing companies choose to build the industrial Internet by themselves.

Many people may ask such questions as "Traditional manufacturing companies only understand production, how can they do digitalization?" However, the reality has slapped this group of people, such as the Hanyun Industrial Internet Platform created by XCMG Hanyun and Haier Kaos The COSMOPlat industrial Internet platforms created are all incorporated into the national dual cross-platform. These are all successful cases of traditional enterprises transforming into industrial Internet.

Compared with the former two, the traditional manufacturing industry has the confidence to "know yourself and the enemy in a hundred battles". Its biggest advantage is that it has a wealth of industry know-how. They are very clear about the pain points of enterprise transformation? How to upgrade the production line for planning Layout? This is also unmatched by the first two types of companies in the short term, and for this, BAT and traditional software companies can only make up for it through long-term cooperation with ecological partners.

Wang Baoyou, chief engineer of the Industrial Internet Research Institute, said that Haier and Xu work as traditional manufacturing companies. Their products are incubated in the company’s digital transformation and their own development. They were born in the field of equipment automation and OT, and access to IT systems from the bottom up. They are in the OT field. More technical advantages.

Others believe that, in addition to industry know-how, the Industrial Internet emphasizes the deep integration of IT and OT. Obviously, in terms of IT, traditional manufacturing companies are far from being comparable to BAT and software vendors.

In response to this question, Zhang Qiliang, the founder of XCMG Hanyun, expressed to Leifeng.com (public account: Leifeng.com) that he also experienced failures when he started to do industrial Internet. Faced with technical deficiencies, he often cooperated with universities to achieve production. The integration of teaching and research realizes the input of high-end talents in the industry, thereby continuously expanding its scientific research team.

Unlike BAT and software vendors, most manufacturing industries start with their own digitization, and then promote successful experience to the outside, which also increases the persuasive power of the platform. It is understood that XCMG Hanyun Industrial Internet Platform, as China’s first independently developed industrial Internet platform, has been rated as dual cross-platform for two consecutive years, and has successfully empowered more than 80 industries and 20 industry sub-platforms and service companies. More than 20,000 companies.

Wang Baoyou said that the traditional manufacturing industry is transformed into the industrial Internet, and its service scenarios and business are relatively clear, and there is not much overlap with the current software industry platform, so there is not too much competition. However, with the deepening of development, the manufacturing industry is transforming into industry. Intra-enterprise competition on the Internet will become more intense.

An industry insider told Leifeng.com that technology is not something that traditional manufacturing companies can understand in a short time. Many companies think that dozens or even hundreds of people in their IT department can complete it, but it’s not true. It takes a long time. Technology accumulation.

If you divide for a long time, you must be together, and if you are together for a long time, you must divide

From the current point of view, the cooperation of the industrial Internet track is only the appearance, and competition is the fundamental. After all, in the immature industrial Internet era, cooperation is the only way to do well, but the future of the industrial Internet is like a thousand troops crossing a single-plank bridge, and the survival of the fittest is often very few.

Since the Internet is an emerging sector, whether it is an Internet giant with rich technical experience and resources, a software manufacturer with a slightly stronger technology attribute, or a traditional giant with rich industrial experience, the inherent attributes are advantages, but at present they are in the industrial track. The disadvantages drove the three camps to maintain a good cooperative relationship.

Wang Baoyou told Leifeng.com that under the digital tide, the three types of enterprises are more of a competitive relationship, and their development ideas are also different.

Traditional software companies hope to further transform and upgrade to informatization and digital business; manufacturing companies want to promote their own manufacturing informatization experience; Internet companies are more of a general platform. But this kind of competition is not necessarily a bad thing. In the long run, products and solutions that are more suitable for China's industrial digital transformation will emerge.

From the perspective of corporate development strategy, the three major camps will continue to increase the industrial Internet track, which will undoubtedly intensify corporate competition. But it has to be said that the independence behind the cooperation is the ultimate goal of every enterprise now. But from the current point of view, the three major gradients still have me in you and you in me. Will the future be divided or combined? It still needs time to further confirm.