Читать книгу The Digital War - Winston Ma - Страница 37

Regarding China's new infrastructure and enterprises' digital transformation, Alibaba Group and its Alibaba Cloud are a perfect example. During the mobile revolution, all Chinese companies started to digitalize their business data and internal systems, and they are increasingly migrating operations and data to the cloud infrastructure (until recently, most of them still rely on local computing in their own data centers). Though Alibaba is mostly known for its e-commerce empire and Singles Day, it has become the first company in the world to run all core business systems on its own public cloud platform. Moreover, its fast-growing cloud computing business further supports other Chinese businesses' cloud-migration journey.

For background, Cloud technology (also known as “cloud computing”) means that servers, data storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics are hosted on the internet and stored on large, privately owned data centers. The cloud provider enables end users to “rent” and remotely access IT resources from cloud providers on a pay-per-use basis, which provides an efficient alternative to the local hosting and operation of IT resources. Businesses subscribe to cloud services and pay either a monthly or annual fee, just like buying electricity from a power grid. This fee is determined by the amount of data and number of users a business requires – making it easier for a company to scale its operations up and down. Overall, cloud computing provides both improved system scalability and cost savings over traditional IT infrastructure.

Figure 1.6 Alibaba's IT infrastructure goes internal

As Alibaba's e-commerce businesses have enjoyed explosive growth in recent years, an upgrade of its own internal systems was much needed. Rather than continuing to procure expensive equipment and services from Oracle, IBM, and EMC, Alibaba began replacing its existing IT infrastructure with in-house systems and migration to the cloud. Consequently, Alibaba Cloud was formed to provide cloud services to Alibaba's business network. Today, Alibaba Cloud is also Alibaba Group's cloud computing business for external corporate customers, offering a complete suite of services such as database, storage, network virtualization services, Big Data analytics, elastic computing, large scale computing, machine learning, and IoT services.

Alibaba Cloud has played a major role in educating the domestic market about the benefits of cloud computing, and it maintains its leadership position by developing solutions that enable the digital transformation of businesses across industries. During the last quarter of 2019, it reached two important milestones. First, the cloud computing business for the first time generated over 10 billion RMB of revenue (about US$1.5 billion) in a single quarter. Second, ahead of the 11.11 global Shopping Festival in 2019 (see the details in Chapter 2), Alibaba Cloud enabled the migration of the core systems of Alibaba e-commerce businesses onto the public cloud. This internal migration is a major milestone that not only generates greater operating efficiencies for Alibaba, but also encourages more companies to adopt its public cloud infrastructure.

According to Alibaba, the performance, reliability, and agility of the core ecommerce platform increased drastically after completely moving onto its public cloud. (“Alibaba is like a high-speed jet that is capable of upgrading its engine during the course of flight”, one Alibaba executive said.) The next step for the company is to share Alibaba experience with its customers. As such, the investment and adoption of the cloud in China are growing rapidly. According to Canalys' statistics in March 2020, Alibaba Group is China's largest provider of public cloud services, taking almost half of the market. (See Figure 1.7. Tencent and Baidu, two major internet companies, are also sizable cloud service providers.) According to Gartner's April 2020 report, Alibaba Group is the world's third largest and Asia Pacific's largest Infrastructure as a service provider by revenue in 2019.

Figure 1.7 Alibaba Cloud leads the Chinese market

Data Source: Canalys, March 2020.

As the Alibaba Cloud case illustrates, Chinese internet companies have turned themselves into tech companies, and they subsequently help companies from all sectors of the economy to digitally transform. Across just about every industry sector, Chinese companies are investing heavily in research and development of the latest digital technology. The consensus is that digital revolution is more than simply advancing e-commerce through mobile platforms. The more profound value creation is to find incremental consumption demand and new business models, where traditional industries use new set of digital tools to run key aspects of their business.

In other words, digital transformation is more about “digital thinking” than “internet adding”. The companies will become “smarter” by fusing institutional human knowledge with machine learning, and their increased efficiencies, faster decision making, and cost savings will all lead to better customer experiences.

For example, the traditional retail industry has been completely remodeled, thanks to the largest mobile e-retailing market in the world. Retailers are forced to move away from the out-of-date perception that e-commerce is merely another sales channel for their products, as it is critical for customers to get the same products, services, and shopping experience in every channel where they choose to make purchases. To meet the demand of tech-savvy customers, retailers must provide a “seamless omni-channel shopping experience” by integrating their online and offline channels, instead of having separate systems to sell products online and offline. Hence, the trend of “new retail”, where the boundaries between online and offline are disappearing.

During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, new digital tools have proven to be a lifeline for China's small retailers as the pandemic disrupts business models and consumer behavior. Small merchants—including many with little or no previous online presence—have flocked to live-streaming to boost sales at a time when consumer habits are changing faster than ever. The video streaming has the advantage of enabling live interaction—consumers can send questions and comments that appear on the screen in real time, and sellers can explain and showcase their products in a personal way. In this context, new retail is more about generating demand by exciting people and creating an experience. (The detailed “new retail” cases are discussed in related chapters in Part Two.)

For instance, Chinese shoe retailer Red Dragonfly – which closed almost all of its 4000 physical stores due to the coronavirus pandemic—has leveraged video streaming platforms to move its operations online. The store clerks are trained to run regular live streams to reach, virtually, shoppers still wary of confined spaces and to answer customers' queries online much as they would deal with in-store visitors. Foreign brands too have joined in the scramble to engage homebound Chinese consumers. Luxury product maker Louis Vuitton hosted a live-streaming sale in March 2020—the first time since the brand entered the Chinese market 30 years ago. Global automakers such as BMW have hired professional livestream hosts to introduce their various car models.

For every business sector, the transition from an industrial economy that favored mass production and scale (which is “product driven”) to a digital economy that favors user connectivity, data, and their personal preferences (which is “user driven”) is challenging the very nature of the “core competence” long held by the sector and its leading companies. What's promising is that the tremendous revolution in e-commerce and retailing could be similarly applied to other industries when they embrace the digital transformation:

 Responsive to market demands. New applications are driven by the needs of the market, aiming to solve the “pain points” of existing services and practices.

 Keeping agile for new product development. Companies adapt their offerings quickly based on the “local needs” of Chinese consumers.

 Deep integration of online to offline businesses. Online experience is not enough (a shocking concept after many years of mobile e-commerce boom) and must be complemented with offline services.

 Emphasize a platform instead of single product offering or a specific vertical business. An ecosystem offering multiple connected products and services is more resilient.

For example, the Chinese insurance market is witnessing a remarkable pace of innovation, which started with the basic “internet +” before undergoing a shakeup of the industry. The insurance companies have moved through four phases in their digital evolution (see Figure 1.8), resulting in more direct engagement with customers and more tailored products for them. Furthermore, smart technologies are now revolutionizing the core operations of insurers, such as damage assessment for car accidents. The four phases are as follows:

Figure 1.8 From “Internet +” to data-driven digital economy

The first phase involves setting up online channels to reach both customers and insurance agents and automating back-end processes, including underwriting and claim processing. The second phase involves creating digital services to help customers with related offline activities, such as making a doctor's appointment through a mobile app. Through the first two steps, companies increase the number of customer interactions and strengthen their connection to customers. The third phase then involves consolidating customers' online and offline data to provide more personalized solutions based on the improved understanding of customers.

The rewards are significant for issuers with successful digital implementations. Not only can they engage directly with customers to provide seamless interactions on products and services, but also gain access to comprehensive customer profiling information to win in long-term competitions on customization. According to Tencent's statistics in 2018, the online insurance purchase in China had an 18-fold increase in the past five years, covering a total number of 220 million insurers.

The fourth and latest phase is the most exciting, which involves using smart technology and data analytics to revolutionize the core insurance business. For example, AI has been successfully put into vehicle insurance. Alibaba's financial arm, Ant Group, has developed Ding Sun Bao (Damage Assessment Tool), which aims to standardize damage assessment and make it more objective, reducing the potential for human adjusters on the scene to be influenced by the drivers involved. This digital tool is already adopted by large insurers, including China Taiping, China Continent Insurance, Sunshine Insurance Group, and AXA Tianping.

Ding Sun Bao can remotely collect photos of external vehicle damage, analyze them using AI-driven, deep-learning image recognition technology, reconstruct the scene of the accident, and assess the damage. One advantage is it makes damage assessment more objective, reducing the risk that claim handlers on the scene could be influenced by drivers involved in an accident; hence, there is a higher degree of accuracy in damage assessment. Another advantage is that through machine learning, it can process claims within a few seconds, much faster than human adjusters alone could handle.

At the first launch of DingSunBao in June 2017, Ant Group set up a challenge between “six experienced human claims adjusters” and its AI program. Each team evaluated 12 cases, during which DingSunBao took six seconds to assess the damage and set claim amounts, whereas human adjusters took 6 minutes and 48 seconds to reach their conclusions. Both judged that one of the 12 cases required further investigation. In May 2018, Ant Group launched version 2.0 of its DingSunBao app, which was upgraded into a video-based AI application.

With the upgraded version, car owners can use their smartphones to capture video clips of their cars for submission. Vehicle damage information is displayed automatically, including where and how to repair the vehicle and how much the car owner can claim from insurers, saving time in filing claims and offering transparency on what's likely to be covered. According to Alibaba, this new version's secret sauce includes 46 patented technologies, such as simultaneous localization and mapping, a mobile deep-learning model, damage detection with video streaming, a result display with augmented reality, and others. More industry transformation is coming as Ant Group is now using blockchain technology as the new infrastructure of insurance claims processing.

In 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak gave a digital transformation lesson to almost every industry. From a technology perspective, the outbreak has given a push to many new technologies such as drones and robots, as authorities seek to better detect and respond to the disease. Autonomous robots have replaced human cleaners at segregated wards. In rural areas, local authorities are using drones equipped with loudspeakers to alert citizens seen in open areas without face masks. In particular, it accelerates Chinese companies' shift to the cloud as enterprises try out cloud initiatives to facilitate remote working and remote interactions. For companies managing their internet infrastructures, making adjustments to computing needs on the fly is expensive and complicated. Cloud computing makes it easier.

On the other hand, many pandemic-driven new business practices will remain part of daily life. For example, live-streaming is now an important shopping channel, with or without the “home stay” order, and the digital platforms are developing enhanced services for livestream hosts with new digital technologies, such as 5G and AR- (Augmented Reality-) powered features. With a strong sense of urgency, all companies are rushing to learn how new 5G iABCD digital technologies can be integrated into their businesses to unlock value from nontraditional angles. The digital transformation of China is accelerating.