Those who get cloud computing get the world, while for Chinese cloud computing manufacturers, those who get finance get the world.

In the financial field, Aliyun started first. In the past few years, by attracting Internet financial customers and helping traditional financial institutions to launch Internet businesses, Aliyun has become the number one manufacturer in the financial cloud market, with a market share more than twice that of the second place manufacturer. The year-on-year growth rate reached 90%. In this financial cloud market with public cloud as the main form, it can be said that Aliyun has won.

Now, Aliyun has set its sights on the core information system market of traditional financial institutions. In 1986, China's Industrial and Commercial Bank of China signed the first order with IBM, which opened the prelude to the booming market. More than 30 years later, the scale of this market has reached 100 billion yuan, and foreign manufacturers such as IBM, Oracle Corp and EMC are the leading manufacturers in this market.

Ten years ago, BABA was also a heavy user of IOE architecture (IBM minicomputer, Oracle database, EMC high-end storage), but with the development of the business, this architecture not only could not support the business development, but also gobbled up the company's hard-won profits. To this end, BABA began independent research and development of cloud computing technology, and gradually transferred the core business to the cloud. Today, BABA's core business system is 100% in the cloud, fully enjoying the dividends brought by technology.

Today, the problems encountered by BABA 10 years ago are found in banks, insurance, securities and other financial institutions. Will you continue to spend a lot of money to expand IOE in the future, or will you choose to go to the cloud like BABA? Traditional financial institutions have also reached a critical moment of choice.

In February 2019, the highest level proposed to speed up the construction of financial market infrastructure and steadily promote the localization of key information infrastructure in the financial industry. This kind of guiding signal opens up a huge alternative space for domestic IT technology.

At present, banks and other financial institutions are actively carrying out cloud computing architecture planning, jointly establishing industry cloud platforms, and actively implementing architecture transformation. The entire financial IT market is ushering in a complete restructuring.

The opportunity of history is just around the corner. As the manufacturer who supported the first Yunshang Bank (Internet Merchant Bank), Yunshang Insurance (Zhongan Insurance) and Yunshang Fund (Tianhong Fund), Aliyun is gearing up to do a big job in the traditional financial information system market.

How on earth will Ali Yun continue to make efforts? [understanding Economics] A few days ago, he had an in-depth exchange with Liu Weiguang, vice president of BABA and president of Aliyun's new financial division, and he also told us all about Aliyun's new strategy in the financial field.

First, the combination of two swords: the new strategy of "Cloud + Fintech"

There is not enough time. Sometimes I discuss an important game strategy in the morning and wish to let the team carry out the promotion in the afternoon. When Liu Weiguang said this, the takeout lunch box at hand had not yet had time to pack. Since taking office as president of Ali Yun's new financial division, he said that what is most lacking now is time, and all fragmented time should be used. "my biggest opponent is time"!

In October 2019, Aliyun carried out a structural adjustment, and the former Financial Cloud Business Department was upgraded to a new Financial Business Department, under the responsibility of Liu Weiguang, former Vice President of Ant Financial Services Group, to fully integrate BABA's capabilities in digital economy, financial technology and financial services.

Liu Weiguang did not come from Ant Financial Services Group alone. In this organizational upgrade, some of Ant Financial Services Group's employees also joined the new financial department with him, bringing the number of directly related personnel to several hundred.

"this is the first time since I joined Aliyun that I have seen so many people in the financial business line. "A veteran employee of Aliyun said to [understand the economy] with a slight emotion.

The rapid growth of new financial employees is closely related to Ali Yun's strategic layout. This can be traced back to the Aliyun Beijing Summit held in March 2019. At this summit, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Aliyun Intelligence, announced that "Aliyun will increase strategic investment in the industry and focus on new retail, new finance and digital government."

The establishment of the new financial division is obviously a concrete embodiment of the landing of this strategy.

Liu Weiguang told [understand the economy]: from the BABA financial cloud at the beginning of its establishment to today's Aliyun New Finance, this is not a simple name change, but reflects more industry changes and changes in the focus of Aliyun's attention.

The first change is the change in the definition of cloud. A few years ago, the definition of cloud computing was relatively unified, mainly basic IT resources, but today's cloud, its definition and connotation has been very rich, to a large extent has been enriched into a full range of digital capabilities. Ten years ago, cloud computing was not connected with artificial intelligence, IOT, and financial technology. Today, more new technologies need to take off with the help of cloud computing, so today's "cloud" will have more and more connections with finance, instead of public and private clouds in a narrow sense.

The second change is the change of the center of gravity of the market that Ali Yun is concerned about. Before Liu Weiguang took charge of Aliyun New Finance, Xu Min (alias "Jiuhe") led BABA Financial Cloud for many years. Based on the environment and conditions at that time, Aliyun chose to start with Internet finance, the Internet application system of emerging markets and financial institutions, and thus led the entire financial cloud industry. But at the beginning of the second decade of cloud computing, all cloud computing giants are moving into traditional industries and enterprise markets dominated by IOE, so a broader financial cloud market has opened up. That is, the traditional financial fields, such as banking, securities and insurance, are accelerating the migration from the traditional IT model to cloud computing, which is a huge cake of hundreds of billions of yuan.

Liu Weiguang said that his task is very clear, race against the clock to win the war of the financial cloud, accelerate the connection speed between financial institutions and the cloud, so that the already No. 1 Aliyun has a bigger share in the financial cloud market.

The target is right there. However, in the face of changes in the market environment, technological upgrading, as well as the new competitive environment, Aliyun should have a new strategy and new positioning.

"in principle, it is not only to not forget the original idea of cloud computing, but also to combine Fintech, combined with the characteristics of the industry, but also to transcend the strategy. To this end, the new financial team led by Liu Weiguang put forward the "cloud + Fintech" strategy.

Ant's leading series of Fintech technology systems include financial intelligence, intelligent risk control, biometrics, multi-party security computing and so on. The so-called "Cloud + Fintech" is the integration of Ali Cloud computing infrastructure and big data series technologies with the technical capabilities of Ant Financial level PaaS application architecture.

To put it simply, let Ali Yun and Ant Financial Services Group's technology stack really get through and form a joint force. Previously, Aliyun and Ant Financial Services Group had their own financial technology service teams. The former's strengths lie in underlying cloud computing technology, mid-Taiwan and distributed architecture solutions, while the latter has deep accumulation in the field of Fintech and technical practices widely recognized by the financial industry.

"you can understand it this way. Today, there are two major product technology factories behind me: one is Aliyun, the other is Ant Financial Services Group. Liu Weiguang said that in addition to being in charge of Aliyun's new financial department, another responsibility is to mobilize Ant Financial Services Group's financial technology team to form a joint force between the two business teams to provide customers with a more comprehensive and in-depth product technology system, serve financial customers, create more new business value, and let technology accelerate the development of digital financial business.

Second, win on all battlefields

The change in the definition of cloud computing will lead to the expansion of the business boundary and scope of cloud computing, while the battlefield focus of financial cloud is also shifting. Liu Weiguang predicts that in the future, the financial sector will form four major battlefields: public cloud, industry cloud and hybrid cloud, and industrial financial cloud.

The first is the public cloud. The public cloud can attract small and medium-sized licensed financial institutions with medium and long tails to the cloud, and can achieve maximum return on investment, agile IT infrastructure, and adapt to the rapid development of their business. Moreover, as there are more and more services on the public cloud platform, there will be more service stickiness for small and medium-sized licensees. In this market, Aliyun has won and become the undisputed leader.

The second is the industry cloud of the future. Industry cloud will be a kind of public cloud within the scope of franchise, national special qualification and aimed at specific customer groups. It has very strong financial requirements for peer protection, security isolation, control and data privacy protection. Industry cloud can give full play to cloud computing capabilities, and can stack many industry application service capabilities, this kind of cloud can make more licensees more confident to move applications from the traditional data center to the cloud.

Finally, there is a hybrid cloud. Judging from the development trend of cloud computing around the world today, in the future, more large traditional enterprises and financial institutions will put some applications that need elastic scaling and high concurrency on the cloud, so as to complement each other with their own application capabilities in the data center, and really form a hybrid application situation to maximize the utilization of resources and maximize the return on investment. In the future, development and testing, disaster recovery backup and temporary computing resource requirements based on financial business requirements will all be the driving forces of the hybrid cloud market, including sharing open data services, which has huge imagination and potential. Hybrid clouds will have strong vitality for a long time in the future.

"what we see, others can see. So this is a race for time. Liu Weiguang told [understand Economics] that what Ali Yun needs to do is to win on all these battlefields.

If you are at the scene of the interview, you must be able to feel the firm tone of Liu Weiguang when he said this. However, it is obviously a big challenge to win on all battlefields.

If you look at the competition in today's financial cloud, you can draw the above conclusion. On the one hand, all cloud computing companies are entering the traditional financial market, which has always been a battlefield of highly white-hot competition; on the other hand, this market has been monopolized by foreign technology companies for more than 30 years. and has formed a mature technology system.

For Ali Yun, which is just 10 years old, this is obviously an uphill battle. However, in the face of the challenge, Liu Weiguang made no secret of his confidence and strength. "I'm talking about a new idea this morning, but I can't wait to find a hundred banks to push it together this afternoon. For me, the desire to fight is very, very strong. "

Third, what value does it bring to customers?

Momentum is important, but what really wins customers is hard power and what value it can bring to customers. On this point, Liu Weiguang has obviously thought very clearly.

"then what is customer value? "this is not only the ultimate torture of BABA, but also the value pursuit of every Ali.

Liu Weiguang joined Ant Financial Services Group at the end of 2017. he had been working in large international companies before, but the sales ideas of these big manufacturers were still at the level of selling software and hardware technology products. Liu Weiguang also did not know the true meaning of the customer value emphasized by BABA.

12306 of the project changed him. 12306 is the ticket purchase client of China's railway system. When the Spring Festival travel peak is reached every year, the system will have a poor customer experience under the impact of high concurrency. After several arguments, China Railway has adopted the technical scheme exported by Aliyun. Today, 12306 can smoothly support the spring tide of the Spring Festival, allowing more people to go home on time for the Spring Festival. At this moment, Liu Weiguang really felt that the value brought by technology lies not only in commerce, but also in customer value, not only for the Railway Corporation, but also for the hundreds of millions of people who have returned home for the Spring Festival.

After taking office as president of Aliyun's new financial division, Liu Weiguang gave the team a KPI. In the face of financial customers, once the project has won the bid, the business team should state clearly when filling in the project report that what technical products and services of Aliyun may bring to the customer? Not only technology and return on investment, but also business changes: trading volume and size; asset loss rate; risk control level; scale of financing loans; daily active users and monthly active users.

"only by paying attention to these contents from the beginning of the project, can we really type out Ali Yun's differentiation and brand, and truly reflect what it means to create customer value on the client side. When we really do this, I think it is not far from winning the trust of customers, and not far from the larger market. "said Liu Weiguang.

MPaaS, one of Aliyun's trump card technology products, has helped many banks build a new generation of super APP. At first, many sales staff believe that the customer value of mPaaS technology platform is to improve the efficiency of mobile App, no flicker, stable and smooth access. "this is not the customer value we want," Liu Weiguang shook his head. "the customer value provided by our technology should be based on sufficient stability and security. let mobile banking, direct sales banks and even credit cards active and trading volume and user stay time increase by 30%, 40%, or even 50%. "

"I come from traditional IT companies, those IT companies don't really care about customer value, they care more about whether they can sell their products, and they don't care about what products support financial institutions have changed. Liu Weiguang said frankly that if Aliyun wants to surpass these traditional IT companies, it must start with insight into customer value.

To some extent, the market data reflects the customer's attitude towards Aliyun. Aliyun ranks first in the market for financial cloud solutions in China, with a year-on-year growth rate of 90 per cent, according to market research firm IDC. At present, 59% of A-share listed companies are Aliyun customers.

In the financial sector, Aliyun's technology products cover 60% insurance companies, 50% securities companies, and hundreds of bank customers, including China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank Of China, Guangfa Bank, Huaxia Bank, China Minsheng Banking Corp, Bohai Bank, Nanjing Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Bank of Tianjin and other large joint-stock banks and large city commercial banks.

Although he is currently in a leading position, Ali Yun will never dare to underestimate the enemy. Cloud computing and traditional technology platforms have a common feature: high stickiness, once you choose the basic technology platform of a service provider, it is difficult to change in a short time. Therefore, the battlefield of large institutions in the financial industry, the smoke of war will never stop, but the large troops involved in the war are changing with the times.

In the future, the confrontation between new-school forces and established foreign companies in large financial institutions will bring a different landscape.

Fourth, knock down the big machine and take off the "pearl on the crown"

"I would like to bet my career on moving down the IBM machine. Are you Ali Yun willing to bet with me? ". This is what a head of a large financial institution said to Liu Weiguang in the fall of 2018, and he is still impressed.

"this is the opportunity we've been waiting for," Liu Weiguang nodded.

In the past few years, the voice of IOE in the financial system has been very loud. The so-called IOE is the server of IBM, the database of Oracle and the high-end storage of EMC. The system combination of these three manufacturers is called IOE. This architecture is standard for many telecom and commercial bank core systems in China.

"going to IOE" was first put forward by BABA in China, and directly influenced and led the reform of the new generation of IT infrastructure. Today, BABA has implemented his own IOE with a set of mature distributed cloud architecture, and continues to provide these technical products to serve the system upgrading of financial institutions.

Take China Minsheng Banking Corp's direct selling banking business as an example. The business initially uses a typical IOE architecture, and the server is two IBM780 minicomputers. The initial hardware investment of this system is more than 80 million, and the annual maintenance cost is 20 to 30 million. On the other hand, the distributed technology platform provided by Aliyun has reduced the cost of IT to 1/10, and the performance and stability of the system have been improved by an order of magnitude: the time of each transaction has been reduced from 120ms to less than 50ms, and the peak number of transactions per second has increased from 7800 to 30,000. Customer experience and service quality have been greatly improved.

Nowadays, there is no technical problem with going to IOE in the financial field, and what Aliyun needs to wait for is just a policy wind. Technically, what excites Ali Yun now is how to push the higher wall above the IOE architecture-the IBM mainframe.

Among the many battlefields of financial cloud computing, Liu Weiguang pays special attention to the matter of "toppling the IBM machine".

Big machine, that is, IBM integrates operating system, computing and storage resources and database technology into a mainframe computer to provide services for sophisticated customers with huge data volume and trading volume. The super banks and stock exchanges all over the world are such customers.

IBM mainframe is the product of technology in the 1970s, and the technical architecture has been going on for nearly 50 years today. At that time, the computing capacity of single computer was insufficient, and the expansion of mainframe computing and the integrated optimization of software and hardware were the most advanced design ideas at that time. But today, the advantages of computing power explosion, demand explosion and mainframe closure have been far from being able to meet the computing needs. Today, the mainstream architecture is vertical decoupling and layering, hardware and operating system decoupling, application and data decoupling, layering, and horizontal expansion with distributed architecture.

At present, there are more than 20 IBM machines in China, all in the financial field, distributed in China's top large banks, as well as the national financial transaction central system. The maintenance cost of one mainframe is as high as hundreds of millions of yuan a year, which is also one of the products with the highest profit margin of IBM.

Although the mainframe has good performance and stable technical system, the cost of transformation and maintenance of the mainframe is very high, so when new business occurs, banks usually do not carry out transformation and upgrading in the mainframe, but choose to add a "plug-in system" outside the mainframe, which results in the current structure of one mainframe + N plug-in system in the bank. For example, a joint-stock bank may have about 800 "plug-in systems", while the largest commercial banks may have more than a thousand plug-in systems.

But today, with the high integration of online and offline business in the financial industry, the deepening of the demand for intelligent management, the strong demand for data center, and driven by the ability to develop agile business, the architecture of the mainframe has become an obstacle to the innovation of large banks. rising costs are also compressing the overall profits of banks.

First, the external business systems of the mainframe are gradually integrated to form a business capability center, and a new private cloud platform based on financial-level distributed architecture is built. The business center is directly deployed on it, and the new application development and deployment are all on the new distributed cloud platform. Then unify the data platform to form a data center, which is the preparation work for Aliyun to challenge the big machine. The next step is to work with customers to design a path for applications on the mainframe to gradually move down to the cloud platform; this creates a way to get the elephant out of the refrigerator.

In the field of business and technology Taiwan construction, Aliyun has helped financial institutions greatly enhance the pace of innovation. With the help of Ali Yun, Guangdong Nongxin upgraded the system architecture. By abstracting various capability components in Zhongtai, the deployment cycle of Guangdong Nongxin new system has changed from monthly calculation to day-to-day calculation, the agile speed has reached dozens of times before, and technology has continuously supported the rapid development of the business. it also becomes the engine of business innovation. In 2019, almost all the rural credit cooperatives in the country visited Nongxin in Guangdong Province.

For Chinese financial practitioners, this is a no man's land that no one has ever set foot in before. There is still a lot of work to do.

The reason why customers recognize multinational companies like IBM is that they have excellent technology and products. Liu Weiguang knows very well that when any enterprise has no way to control the minds of its users, if it wants to move forward in no man's land, it is necessary to firmly grasp the background of the technological platform revolution and the advent of the digital financial era, and make the best of technology, products and services.

In his view, today, IBM, Oracle Corp, and EMC are no longer teachers of the information construction of China's financial industry, and it is basically impossible for Chinese people to go abroad to find mature technology. At this time, they have to explore the road on their own and rely on their own precipitation and accumulated technology to make new technical standards.

Today, in terms of financial services and the use of financial technology, China has been at the forefront of the world, and its own emerging creativity is our teacher. On this road of continuous innovation, knocking down the big machine must be a benchmarking thing.

"whoever successfully knocks down the IBM mainframe first will be able to walk away from the market. Overthrowing the mainframe means that distributed technology can really be used in the core trading system of high concurrency and high availability of large financial institutions, which means that the" cloud "must be able to support all application scenarios! Liu Weiguang said decisively to [understand the economy].

Anyone who has played go knows that the master often falls into a long exam when he wins or loses, and then kills Tai long with a fatal move. For example, in the North American cloud computing market, the big order of the joint defense system of the US Department of Defense is the decisive battle between Amazon.Com Inc and Microsoft Corp. At home, due to the favorable policy and industrial environment, the financial cloud may have entered the eve of the decisive battle.

From the CBRC's clear proposal that all important information systems facing Internet scenarios are migrated to cloud computing architecture platforms, to the technical architecture specifications and security technical requirements of cloud computing platforms in the financial sector proposed by the central bank, and then to the release of financial science and technology development plans, financial institutions' concerns about cloud computing applications are gradually being eliminated.

It can be said that today, banks, insurance and other companies have accepted cloud computing ideologically. It is only a matter of time before these large organizations connect to the cloud in the future. When cloud computing meets traditional large financial institutions, and when cloud computing technology meets established foreign technology platforms, a good show has just begun.

In this magnificent wave of industry innovation, at the beginning of the second decade of cloud computing, Ali Yun, as a bellwether, has unveiled its sword.