In the past two decades, with the deepening of reform and opening up, as well as China’s demographic dividend and other factors, a large number of HIGH-market TO-C Internet giants have been born in China. The 2C sector has developed rapidly, while the 2B sector has been tepid. In the past two years, under the background of c-end traffic saturation and b-end digital transformation, more and more Chinese technology companies have slowly extended their tentacles to B-end. “To B or not To B, the result is still To B” has become an important topic discussed in the industry. As a typical TO B field, cloud computing has always been a hot spot for the big players. Over the past decade, cloud computing infrastructure has grown rapidly, the IaaS space has become highly competitive and relatively stable. How to enhance enterprise services in the field of cloud computing has become a big challenge for the giants. Overseas, SaaS companies such as Salesforce and Workday are emerging, while traditional enterprise service giants such as Oracle and SAP are also actively transforming to the SaaS model. Today, SaaS has been successful in almost every area of the US enterprise services market. However, most SaaS enterprises in China are still struggling to make ends meet.

Ali cloud does not do SaaS, but will continue to open PaaS layer capabilities

With the fierce competition in IaaS field, if only IaaS layer is made, the final customers can only choose the manufacturer through the resource price, and this layer is only a simple cost saving calculation for enterprises: The products and services provided by various manufacturers are increasingly similar, and enterprise customers cannot choose according to differentiated value, nor can they help enterprises improve efficiency and speed up business innovation and iteration. PaaS can help enterprises and partners develop, customize, and integrate business systems more efficiently when there is a strong demand for customized products and services. Improved efficiency means lower barriers to business system development, lower costs for people and systems, and, most importantly, faster iteration. A more agile business can help an enterprise better adapt to and lead business changes and become stronger and bigger. Therefore, it is important to build the capability of the PaaS layer, and PaaS will also enable SaaS to build more possibilities. In this context, after cloud computing has gone through the large-scale IaaS investment phase since 2019, leading enterprises have started to accelerate their layout in PaaS.

In March this year, Ali Cloud officially released the “do not do SaaS, advocate to be integrated” ecological strategy, a firm commitment to let partners to do more and better SaaS, the enterprise service space to the business field and enterprise have a deep understanding of partners. At the same time, the SaaS accelerator was released as a concrete landing of ali Cloud SaaS ecological strategy. SaaS accelerator is the business platform and technology platform of SaaS ecosystem. Its objective is very simple, which is to make partners do SaaS better, sell SaaS and serve enterprises well. SaaS accelerator business platform includes bazaar and Ali Cloud heart selection two modes, to help partners to use Ali’s channel, brand, capital and other advantages, accelerate SaaS business sales and services, obtain more customers, increase business income and customer stickiness, across the gap of SaaS business growth, become SaaS unicorn. The technology platform can help ISVs complete the development, cloud, customization and integration of SaaS products. This means that Ali Cloud will make use of its core advantages, focus on the maturity, stability and connectivity of IaaS layer and PaaS layer, and provide partners with perfect cloud infrastructure, cloud platform and data processing system. On top of this, Ali Cloud opens its technical capabilities and opens the creation of SaaS to high-quality ecological partners. Since the release of the SaaS Accelerator program, Ali Cloud has been adhering to this concept and thinking, focusing on developing the SaaS market for partners, accelerating SaaS business development and product construction.

Both SaaS and PaaS ultimately help enterprises solve a problem: how to meet the constantly evolving and changing business needs of enterprises through the efficient construction and modification of business systems. The partner’s field of Know-How, coupled with the support of Alibaba Cloud’s business and technology side, may be an effective solution to help enterprises realize digital transformation and meet business demands.

Enterprise: PaaS or SaaS, research or purchase

In the era of Cloud computing 2.0, the requirements of more and more enterprise customers are no longer limited to a single IaaS, but integrated IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services that integrate ecological synergy and industry customization requirements. As for how to Build an enterprise’s business system, an enterprise can choose to Build its own business system (Build) based on PaaS or Buy or customize SaaS (Buy) from the original requirements.

For large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, different enterprise scale and capacity also determine that enterprises will have different choices for self-construction or purchase. In summary, there will be “large enterprises build SaaS”, “large enterprises buy/customize SaaS”, “small and medium enterprises build SaaS”, “small and medium enterprises buy/customize SaaS” these four different construction modes. Ali Cloud hopes to provide corresponding methods and paths for different scenarios with a more open attitude to solve the pain points and difficulties of enterprise customers.

For large enterprises, self-built business system means high cost input and personnel management difficulty. The more complex the business process, the more difficult the construction, the longer the cycle, the more investment required; Secondly, the iteration speed of self-built business systems depends on the bandwidth of its own IT personnel. Excellent business developers are scarce resources in the talent market, and self-built business systems often cannot keep pace with the rapid development of enterprise demands. Therefore, if large enterprises have two choices, one is to use appropriate architecture and cloud services, such as the mid-Taiwan business architecture and technical architecture of Ali Cloud, to complete the construction of ENTERPRISE PaaS, on this basis, reduce the difficulty of business system development and maintenance, and improve the efficiency of development; Another way is to obtain SaaS with guaranteed product quality and service through Ali Cloud. At the same time, Ali Cloud will also open the platform capabilities and tools APaaS (Application PaaS) to help enterprises reduce the development threshold, improve development efficiency and solve the problem of slow customization iteration.

For small and medium enterprises, it may not be able to build a SaaS, do not need the diversity of PaaS itself, they more care about is how to quickly build applications, and this, APaaS just can perfect solution, including buying after the custom can solve the problem of low efficiency, and even some ability strong growth companies use the APaaS, You can build your own SaaS directly.

The majority of small and medium businesses still need to know: where can I buy SaaS that is both appropriate for the enterprise usage scenario and quality assurance? Now there are many domestic SaaS companies, but the quality is uneven, Ali Cloud selection may be one of the solutions. As an important part of SaaS accelerator, ali is selected by ali cloud cloud heart to choose “quality optimal, the optimal service, high-quality goods of word of mouth” software, cloud market official proprietary brand endorsement, to provide quality cloud software services, more secure, more convenient, the core is to control the quality from the product’s supply chain, meet the demand of enterprise one-stop application. At present, the category of SaaS is also expanding, it is reported that ali Cloud will also announce the third batch of SaaS at the end of September hangzhou Cloud Conference.

ISV: Different types lead to the same destination

There is no doubt about the future of the SaaS market. As a result of the rich diversity of SaaS products, the multi-layer depth of SaaS ecosystem, it is impossible to appear the situation of giant all-eat. Only form a good cooperative relationship, can divide this huge cake. Ali Cloud is also actively seeking cooperation models with different types of ISVs. Aliyun provides non-intrusive, non-exclusive capabilities for both large and small isVs, allowing partners to choose freely.

First, for traditional management software vendors, Aliyun’s SaaS strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. With the deepening of integration, Siemens, SAP, Kingdee and other international and domestic top ISVs are also deepening their cooperation with Ali Cloud. Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM software service provider, has also announced that it will strategically cooperate with Ali Cloud to provide services and support to enterprise customers. In the SaaS market, the combination of strong players is the best choice.

Second, for SaaS innovation vendors, they often face difficulties in construction, customization, lack of platform, lack of business opportunities. Ali Cloud SaaS accelerator can provide these vendors with full link solutions for application development, integration, cloud, sales, to solve their pain points and problems. Specifically, SaaS accelerator will focus on cloud market and solve the problem of scale and commercialization of partners. PaaS technology as the core, to provide convenient development tools for cooperative enterprises to meet the speed of customized service development; In the form of the “combination punch” of cloud toolkit service above, Alibaba cloud transfer technology is provided to ecological partners to ensure the security, convenience and efficiency of the cloud on partner applications, and significantly improve the user experience of customer applications.

Third, for channel partners with customer groups, alibaba Cloud can be used to provide business generation capabilities to quickly build products and industry solutions required by customer groups. In particular, partners with industry knowledge, due to the depth of the industry and their expertise, their value cannot be ignored. At present, Ali Cloud has established a total distributor, regional distributors and other channels, a variety of models of the system. The company has achieved multi-level and multi-directional coverage of national enterprise customers.

Fourth, for system integrators, Ali Cloud undoubtedly provides them with a rich and diverse product matrix, which can help them meet customer customization needs, improve customization efficiency, reduce integration costs and so on. Examples include ApaaS — 0 code/low code development platforms in SaaS Accelerators, and full-domain integration solutions.

Some say the willingness of Chinese companies to pay for software, and for SaaS, is not very strong. But Aliyun believes that customers never pay for software or hardware, they pay for value. Only when the customer recognizes the value will payment occur naturally. And SaaS is the most direct and efficient form of a product to present business value to enterprise customers. Ali Cloud really cares about helping partners launch SaaS products, whether they can directly hit the pain points of enterprises, whether they can meet the needs of enterprise customers and further generate value in the case of meeting the needs of enterprise customers.

Ali Cloud SaaS strategy, namely SaaS accelerator released so far, has accumulated many successful cases. First, after the cooperation between Chang Jiatong and SaaS Accelerator, the successful SaaS, through the commercial operation of cloud market, its product revenue exceeded ten million in three months; Second, Alicyun and Howhi Technology jointly built a new product called Dangjian Cloud, which has covered 27 provinces and cities with over 4 million party members since its launch, helping Howhi expand its market scale. Third, Yunmeng network and SaaS accelerator cooperation, in the enterprise site market continues to expand, cooperation in a year and a half, Yunmeng network has obtained 50,000 new customers, enterprise annual income has reached 100 million, which is the first SaaS accelerator revenue unicorn. Fourth, Champion Interactive cooperated with SaaS accelerator to provide small programs for various segments of the industry. It has acquired 5,000 customers, most of which come from third-tier, fourth-tier and fifth-tier cities, successfully capturing the sinking market. Fifth, in terms of industry depth, Yum! Software and SaaS Accelerator’s RPA cooperation, a total of 188 processes have been realized, these process automation scenarios have covered more than 85% of the retail industry scenarios; Through our partnership with SaaS accelerators, product development cycles have been reduced from six months to one month, project delivery times have been reduced by 2/3, and r&d costs have been reduced by 1/10. The personalized needs of hospitals have been met and the digital transformation of traditional medical industry has been greatly promoted.