Xiao Feng still clearly remembers that in the fall of 2020, he and the No. 1 team of the production and research department of Weimob jointly raised a wine glass and established a military order in the afternoon.
“At that time, we actually faced two challenges. One was the difficulty of the project itself. To create a new commercial operating system, while meeting the multi-dimensional needs of Weimeng itself, Weimeng customers, especially large customers and third-party ecological partners; the other was , There is absolutely no reference for this matter in the domestic and foreign industries.” Xiao Feng recalled, “I was in a state of anxiety and excitement. The anxiety was because the prediction would be very difficult, and the excitement meant that the technology was challenging enough.”
Xiao Feng is the vice president of technology at the R&D center of Weimob Group, and one of the main witnesses to the birth of Weimob WOS system.
At the end of 2019, the number of paying merchants for Weimob’s SaaS products reached 79,546, and this number has exceeded 100,000 within two years. These merchants cover various formats such as retail, catering, hotels, and tourism. With the promotion of Weimeng’s strategy of mass customerization, the size and depth of business of Weimeng’s service customers are gradually increasing, and it is faced with the “business innovation ability, product iteration speed, and R&D efficiency improvement” caused by customers’ digital business needs. , Personalized customization” and other demands have also soared.
At the same time, if we take a longer view and look at the digital transformation process of the retail industry, especially the group-based physical retail, when the digital business has changed from an option to a must for the enterprise, and from an innovative business to a strategic business, whether the enterprise digital system has Dimensions such as “flexibility, scalability, and innovation” are becoming the evolutionary direction of digital business. At this time, from the perspective of the CEO and CIO of the enterprise, I very much hope that digital business can play a game of chess, that is, I hope that the digital business of the entire enterprise can be integrated as much as possible and data fusion should be realized, so as to realize digital intelligence management with integrated data.
Therefore, facing the industry dimension and industry trend, comprehensively considering the multi-dimensional and forward-looking demands of Chinese enterprises to digitally upgrade in the decentralized business scenario, has become the key consideration of Weimob when conceiving the WOS system.
Of course, from the perspective of Weimob’s decision-makers, the goal is not only to create a commercial operating system that meets the above propositions, but also to be quite “leading” in terms of capabilities. Therefore, three more items were added to the proposition, that is, for customers and the industry, WOS must be: “high efficiency”, “low cost”, and “leading the industry within 5 to 10 years”.
1. Preparations before the birth of WOS
Customer demands that are not “better satisfied” are market opportunities. And once this situation is the trend of the entire industry, the market imagination is huge. Weimeng finally succeeded in creating WOS. In the past few years, the value of decentralized commerce has been continuously verified by the market, which is one of the core driving forces. Of course, Weimob’s in-depth service in the “smart business” track for many years is also the key to the accumulation of a large number of technical capabilities, product capabilities and service experience.
For example, take the retail industry, which is the most advantageous industry of Weimeng, as an example. In the process of serving retail customers for a long time, Weimeng found that customers have multiple pain points in digital transformation, especially in the fields of transactions, channels, membership, data and marketing. Especially with the deepening of digital transformation, many businesses have found that the initial digital tools and products cannot fully meet business needs, and their demands for “an overall digital base and rich application ecology” have become increasingly prominent. This is obviously different from the traditional service providers who only focus on a single SaaS product or a patchwork of solutions, and their understanding of the digitalization of the retail industry. And these “deep” and “forward-looking” demands have become the real pain points that Weimob needs to break through.
However, no matter how full the ideal is, there are also practical issues that need to be considered. For Weimob, launching WOS research and development means developing a new system under the original business system, which is a typical “dual-track system” of production and research. Secondly, under the background of the epidemic, the enterprise service market has also been affected to some extent. Weimeng must maintain at least a stable and upward overall enterprise business level, so as to allocate enough funds and manpower to support this huge R&D plan.
Weimeng has invested a lot of cost in WOS development, which can be summed up in three things:
The first thing: heavy investment. In order to create this set of infrastructure that meets digital business innovation, Weimob does not discount research and development, and insists on heavy investment and more investment. The determination can be seen from a figure in Weimob’s 2021 annual report: 775 million yuan in research and development funds. This accounted for 28.9% of Weimeng’s total revenue that year, not only in the SaaS industry, but also in the entire technology industry.
The second thing: considerable autonomy in personnel rights, and relative freedom in recruiting and employing people. During the implementation of the WOS project, the top management of Weimob fully delegated power, providing a great space for the first position of the production and research team to play.
Recalling “experiencing a large-scale recruitment every week, and flying to Hangzhou every week to select talents”, Xiao Feng still bluntly said that it was hard work. Initially, Weimob did not have enough manpower to invest in the WOS project. In this regard, the production and research team focused on Hangzhou, which has the strongest e-commerce gene, and set up a R&D center for the WOS project in the local area, so as to quickly recruit people familiar with the e-commerce industry. Production and research talents.
But when people come, the challenges are just beginning. According to the vision of Weimob management, WOS should not only solve the existing problems, but also ensure the future business development. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to build an organic and reasonable technical team.
After much deliberation, Weimob finally adopted the team model of “mixed newcomers and seniors” and controlled the ratio of the two parties at 4:6. Newcomers are mainly responsible for model design and are responsible for early exploration; while seniors are iterating their business, they are mainly involved in model design. Calibrate and test the feasibility of the business architecture, and be responsible for outputting industry Know-How.
The third piece: confidence and patience. As the first WOS commercial operating system in the industry, there is no reference for the advancement of the WOS project, and the leader of the technical team even needs to spend a lot of energy on helping the internal team digest the project framework and concepts. From the design of the first version of the commodity trading model to the final launch of the system, there are many challenges and difficulties along the way. However, the entire Weimeng management team has given the technical team “unlimited” confidence and patience.
In Xiao Feng’s memory, even when the project was very, very difficult, the Weimeng management’s determination to WOS has never changed.
2. If you want to fight a tough battle with your product, you have to develop a solid foundation
On October 27, 2022, after more than two years, the Weimob WOS system was finally launched successfully. In the past, the team spent nights fighting to solve many “impossible” problems, which became the best footnote for the upgrade of Weimob’s entire production and research system in the past two years with the help of WOS development.
The first problem that WOS overcomes is how to “gracefully” connect various SaaS systems.
In the digital economy era, enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation. However, in order to meet the digital needs of different businesses, enterprises often purchase multiple sets of systems, and thus face problems such as “there are many tools but the efficiency does not increase but decreases, it is difficult to quickly respond to business changes, multi-channel operation user data is not collected, data assets are difficult to accumulate and data isolated islands” and other business pain points. In order to effectively tap the value of data, enterprises urgently need to open up various systems and form a systematic capability and overall solution that is “strongly integrated, scalable, and highly flexible” to feed back business growth in the long run.
At this stage, between systems, the most common method is “hard connection”, but this will make the interface and business coupling between the two systems very deep, require a lot of people, and easily affect the stability of the system. In the view of Weimob’s production and research team, this is quite “inelegant”, has no technical content, and is a hard work.
In order to achieve “elegant” connection, the WOS system has built a technical base including “a PaaS platform for digital capability sharing and a shared platform for digital ecological innovation”.
At the same time, WOS cuts the products into the smallest particles, and the products can be easily plugged and connected like Lego blocks, and a self-developed capability platform “iPaaS” is used to smooth the gap between the two systems. The differences between the two solutions achieve standardized docking, allowing merchants to quickly combine them into a set of solutions according to their needs.
For example, when Weimeng’s mall system is connected to an ERP system of a merchant, the code of Weimeng’s system will change accordingly, which will affect the stability of other merchant systems in the same system.
With iPaaS, when two systems are connected, WOS will build a connector, which is not coupled with the systems of both parties. In the case of complete decoupling between systems, even if there is a problem with system docking, it will only affect this connector. For merchants, it will only affect a certain interface of the system, and will not bring large-scale impact to the WOS operating system. , easier to maintain the stability of the entire WOS system.
The second problem to overcome is the migration of data from the old system to the new system.
Weimeng has nearly 100,000 merchants. The old system has accumulated more than 200,000 database tables, including more than 30 business domains. Migrating all these data from the old system to the new WOS system needs to be accurate and comprehensive.
This process involves the underlying model mapping of both parties, with a total of more than a thousand models. At the same time, in order to adapt to the online business needs of multi-organization and multi-role merchants, WOS transforms the original fixed business node organization into virtual nodes that can be arbitrarily defined, spliced, and extended, while the old system does not have these highly abstract virtual nodes . The two systems are also undergoing iterative changes at any time, and the mapping scripts also change accordingly. These differences also increase the difficulty of mapping.
The above problems make migration more difficult. In order to solve these problems, the Weimob R&D team has developed an automatic scheduling system to automatically promote data migration, and solve many problems such as data errors and data rollbacks during the migration process through R&D personnel.
Despite the large amount of migration data, the deep participation of production and research personnel, and the difficulty of dual-system mapping, the entire production and research team successfully completed the data migration before the official release of WOS. Unknowingly, during the long-term data migration process, the Weimeng R&D team has also accumulated migration experience and mature system tools, and has also tempered the team’s data processing capabilities.
In addition to system connection and data migration, improving the high concurrency capability of the WOS system has become the third problem that must be overcome.
The transaction peak value must exceed 100,000 TPS, and the QPS must exceed 1 million. This is the goal set by Weimob for the WOS system, which is higher than the industry average.
Why set such high goals? Xiao Feng explained that because the digitalization process of offline retailers is getting faster and faster, the requirements for the system are getting higher and higher, especially those big brand merchants, such as Jiangnan Buyi and Jiumuwang chain brands, they often have a lot of holiday promotions , will also participate in the promotion of various platforms. At this node, especially when multiple systems are opened up, the brand will gather traffic from multiple channels, and the curve of sudden increase in traffic will be more obvious, and the upper limit of traffic carried by the WOS system will inevitably be higher. Require.
In order to overcome this difficulty, Weimob WOS allows all business applications to achieve horizontal expansion. At the same time, combined with high-performance and scalable container application management capabilities, when encountering a sudden increase in brand traffic, the system can achieve rapid and automatic expansion, so that Ensure the normal development of merchant business.
3. What value does WOS provide?
Investing a lot of time and resources, we can’t help but wonder whether Weimob’s new commercial operating system WOS has achieved its original goal? What are the specific values?
Judging from the results, WOS has created a technical base for the digitalization of the service industry in the new business environment. In such a framework, WOS provides a SaaS integration platform and a PaaS capability open platform, and becomes an innovative ecology that benefits merchants, Weimob, and ISVs.
The SaaS integration platform provides merchants with full-link, full-scenario, integrated SaaS products and innovative applications. The platform allows merchants to freely purchase and combine various SaaS products according to their own business scenarios and needs to form their own set of solutions. Focusing on business needs, Weimob WOS proposes a 7+X product matrix, in which “7” refers to “mall, CRM, Qiwei assistant, CDP, traffic, shopping guide, data” Weimob’s seven core self-developed SaaS products, which can meet The vast majority of enterprises routine digital business operation needs. In addition to the 7 core products, Weimob WOS handed over “X” to third-party ecological partners to meet the products and solutions required by enterprises with the help of ecological capabilities. As of September 2022, there will be more than 2,000 applications and services on Weimob Cloud Market, providing merchants with a variety of product choices.
The PaaS platform in the WOS system covers A-PaaS, B-PaaS, iPaaS, D-PaaS, iDaaS, AI services, T-PaaS and other platforms, and opens Weimeng’s underlying technical capabilities and middle-end industry capabilities to ecological partners and scene capabilities.
Huang Junwei, chief technology officer of Weimob Group, said that at present, WOS mainly focuses on serving the commercial marketing field. Merchants are more willing to operate on the decentralized platform, and have richer operating methods. They need the help of ecology and underlying technology. After the WOS platform is launched, merchants or ISVs with professional R&D capabilities can integrate and develop some personalized plug-ins, applications and solutions through the PaaS platform. For merchants who lack professional development capabilities, they can use the ISV service certified by the PaaS platform to carry out secondary development based on the merchant’s needs on the WOS system to meet their individual needs.
Finally, in the longer term, by opening up Weimeng’s SaaS and PaaS layer capabilities, Weimeng’s digital ecological innovation system is thus established. In fact, in the WOS ecosystem, Weimob itself is also a merchant and developer, co-constructing, co-existing and prospering with merchants and ISVs.
It is these core capabilities that allow Weimeng to open its own products and capabilities, and allow merchants and ISVs to participate in R&D, which greatly improves industry efficiency and Weimeng’s ecological capabilities. Weimeng can free itself from the complex research and development needs, focus on building its own basic capabilities and ecological capabilities, and promote ecological strategies.
We can use two data to quantify this value presentation as follows:
For example, if you need to build a new industry product (such as: knowledge payment, maternal and child mall, etc.), based on B-PaaS+iPaaS, developers only need to focus on the business implementation itself, and do not need to pay attention to the underlying transaction, payment, data and other capabilities. No need to pay attention to the high concurrency, stability, security, etc. of the underlying system, which can save 50%-70% of development time;
And if you need personalized customization of existing applications, based on iPaaS, API and SPI, you can easily realize low-code development, which can save about half of the development time.
postscript
Three sentences.
first sentence. In the past ten years, Weimob has helped merchants develop digital SaaS systems in the commercial sector, making listed companies once the envy of their peers. However, the domestic SaaS industry ecology is not yet complete and the market is not yet mature. WOS clearly intends to speed up this process.
second sentence. From the perspective of past development, Weimob belongs to a relatively “low-key” and “pragmatic” enterprise in China’s SaaS field. However, from the perspective of WOS, it is not only limited to itself and the present, but also takes the initiative to carry out technological layout from the perspective of “industry” and “future”, which belongs to a very imaginative active evolution of Weimob.
third sentence. WOS belongs to China’s leading SaaS company, which is actually quite an “alternative” and bold attempt. Its core logic is to realize the “road waiting for cars” on the track of decentralized commerce (the digital business layout of enterprises continues to move from 40 to 60, or even 100, and WOS can be compatible with 120 or even 160). Non-traditional SaaS companies have always followed customer needs.
So, from Leifeng.com’s point of view, business still needs imagination, doesn’t it?
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