Alibaba Cloud releases BizWorks, a mid-stage product of its business, and the development of mid-stage enters the next stage

On October 19, the 2021 Yunqi Conference officially opened. The Yunqi Conference, which has been held for many years, has become a gluttonous event for the domestic technology industry to display cutting-edge scientific and technological achievements and industry elites to exchange cutting-edge scientific and technological ideas. With the theme of "Frontier·Exploration·Imagination", this year’s conference includes 100+ cutting-edge technology forums, 450+ domestic and foreign top scientific research institutions and digital intelligence industry manufacturers gathering together, in the 40,000 square meter "cloud habitat digital valley", in various fields Experts from all create new ideas in the digital age. From different perspectives, everyone expounds their views on the entire digital world and their understanding of the future digital technology from various scientific and technological practices.

Following the main forum in the morning, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Alibaba released the self-developed 5-nanometer CPU chip "Yitian 710" to further promote Alibaba Cloud's strategy of "building a deep foundation". The afternoon forum was followed by Xie Chunliang, general manager of the business intelligence department. Pound released BizWorks, a business mid-stage product, which can be seen as another new move by Alibaba Cloud following the "cloud and nail integration" in the strategy of "making a thick mid-range platform".

"Deep the foundation, strengthen the middle and Taiwan, strengthen the ecology, and provide good services" is the first time Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Zhang Jianfeng released Alibaba Cloud's new strategic thinking for the future at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in May this year.

According to the introduction of BizWorks on Alibaba Cloud's official website, BizWorks is a digital transformation workbench that helps customers build and operate enterprise-level business centers efficiently and with high quality. BizWorks is an integrated digital platform for R&D and operation based on Alibaba's many years of practice in China and Taiwan. Products mainly include business modeling platform, integrated application construction and operation platform, business testing and exercise platform, business operation and governance platform. The product capabilities provided by BizWorks are generally suitable for medium and large enterprises/organizations to build a business center and expect to achieve continuous governance scenarios for the IT assets of the center.

According to Xie Chunliang’s introduction at the conference, some of the tools provided by BizWorks have played a huge role in the delivery of more than 200 mid-office projects in which Alibaba Cloud has been deeply involved in the past few years. According to previous project delivery and benchmarking projects According to the statistics in the case, the efficiency of constructing and delivering middle-stage projects based on BizWorks has doubled, and it has effectively improved the continuous operation capability of the middle-stage business.

What is Zhongtai

The China-Taiwan strategy was first proposed internally by Alibaba in 2015. It aims to build a more innovative and flexible business and enterprise architecture innovation mechanism of "large and medium-sized stations and small front desks" in line with the DT era. It is also to achieve rapid business matching the needs of enterprises in the digital age. Innovative organization and management model.

The first time the outside world came into contact with and perceived the concept of China and Taiwan was the new book "The Road to Enterprise IT Architecture Transformation-Alibaba's China and Taiwan Strategy and Architecture Practices" by Zhong Hua (Famous Guqian), the chief architect of Alibaba's middleware at the time. "It was disclosed for the first time that the book introduced the shared service center business behind Alibaba's China-Taiwan strategy and the new enterprise architecture model that adopted the distributed service-oriented technology architecture.

The industry's continuous exploration and development of Zhongtai

Alibaba’s China-Taiwan concept and new enterprise architecture model effectively solve the pain points of data islands caused by traditional enterprise architecture, with numerous internal chimneys, waste caused by repeated construction of enterprise information systems, and low efficiency of enterprise operations. It solves how to solve the problem of poor scalability and maintainability caused by the centralized monolithic architecture through the distributed service-oriented technical architecture model, which leads to the huge pain point that the traditional technical architecture is difficult to support the business development in the new business environment.

These pain points may not have been so painful in the past, but the surging digital age has generally magnified this pain point. In the digital age, digital technology almost needs to be placed in the position of the primary production factor of enterprises. Traditional enterprise architecture not only cannot support the development of the digital age, it is already in a state of hindering business development. Compared with digital native enterprises, traditional enterprises urgently need new enterprise architecture methodology and new engineering methods that can be implemented in terms of digital transformation.

These big industry problems have led to the idea of Alibaba's China-Taiwan architecture, which soon produced a huge response in various industries in the society. Different roles in the IT industry chain began to try to understand from their own perspectives, explored and tried to build a digital middle station suitable for the industry, which gave birth to the entire digital middle station industry.

Quoting information from some business reports, once the Chinese digital middle-station market is proposed, its growth momentum is very obvious, and the industry scale is expanding rapidly. In 2018, the scale of China's digital mid-market was 2.22 billion yuan. By 2020, the total market size of the mid- and Taiwanese market has grown to 9.01 billion yuan. It is expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate of 60% in the next five years. A scale of nearly 100 billion.

In the past two years, the business scale and financing scale of software suppliers that have invested in the industry’s early exploration of mid-Taiwan solutions in the past two years have been increasing. At the same time, the industry’s practice value of mid-Taiwan solutions in the digital transformation of enterprises, the extension and connotation of China-Taiwan concepts The breadth and degree of digging, the maturity of China-Taiwan project management, the systematization and standardization of China-Taiwan project construction methodology, and the actual landing efficiency and success rate of China-Taiwan projects have been greatly improved.

A group of companies with strategic foresight and strategic determination that insisted on investing in the strategic construction of Zhongtai in the early stage have begun to reap substantial returns from Zhongtaizhong. According to some digital transformation business reports, this group of companies has obvious advantages in terms of business innovation and operational efficiency, the organization's digital integration capabilities, or the speed of new application construction and production. Sometimes, the built-in middle office has begun to play a huge role. The value of digital support.

Business development in Taiwan has entered a new stage

A few years ago, Alibaba released the DataWorks platform product for the data center, which ignited the upsurge in the construction of the data center in the industry. However, the technology platform and tools used to build the business center were not released together, which led to the subsequent development of the industry. In practice, the digital transformation of "all business data, all data business" has been in a "lame duck" state. Unfortunately, the precipitation and analysis of all business data must ultimately feed back and serve the core business of the enterprise. Data and algorithm capabilities can only be integrated into the existing business processes and business scenarios of the enterprise through the business center to form the final digital value closed loop.

Compared with the data assets of the data center, the construction of the business center involves ever-changing business scenarios, the huge differences in business scenarios in various industries, and the technical challenges of online OLTP digital business systems compared to analytical OLAP systems Sexuality determines that the exploration and creation of the platform's tool platform in the business is more challenging.

In the past 6 years, the industry has greatly improved its understanding of the construction of mid-office solutions in the business and the supporting products, technologies, and tools in the process of landing. The development of the business center has once again reached a critical point. The BizWorks released by Alibaba Cloud this time is the performance of this critical breakthrough.

In this sense, the release of BizWorks is undoubtedly a prelude to the development of China and Taiwan into the next more in-depth stage! A real prelude to the construction of a double middle platform with the support of tools with high efficiency and high quality!

Enterprise Architecture Methodology in the Digital Era

In the mid-1990s, the International Open Standards Organization promoted the construction of the enterprise architecture (Enterprise Architecture) standard framework TOGAF. TOGAF contains a set of processes and methods for designing enterprise architecture from a high level to design, plan, implement and manage enterprises Information technology architecture.

TOGAF divides the modeling of enterprise architecture into four architecture areas: business architecture, application architecture, data architecture, and technical architecture. The architectural goals of each field are shown in the following table:

In addition to the architecture products, TOGAF also issued recommendations on the process of implementing and migrating to this enterprise architecture:

TOGAF has been born for almost 30 years, and its influence on the macro level of enterprise information construction is still far-reaching, and its guiding value for the formulation of enterprise architecture strategies and tactics still exists, but in distributed, cloud computing, and big data Today, when various engineering cultures, technologies and tools such as, microservices, DevOps and so on have been greatly developed, how TOGAF implements the modern digital enterprise architecture at the meso level requires innovation and breakthroughs.

As for the China-Taiwan architecture proposed by Alibaba in 2015 and its own large-scale implementation, the China-Taiwan architecture program that has been practiced and verified by more Internet and leading companies in various industries is undoubtedly a TOGAF enterprise in the digital age. The most reliable technical path and best practice for architecture landing.

It can be said that the development of China-Taiwan architecture is no longer entirely owned by Ali. Although Ali's influence in the field of China-Taiwan is still huge, Ali's continuous internal evolution and gains and losses in China-Taiwan are only a microcosm of the exploration of China-Taiwan architecture industry. .

Zhongtai has gathered the wisdom of many manufacturers and industry pioneers in the industry. Everyone started from different starting points, and ended up with the same goal by different routes. Just like ThoughtWorks, a well-known international consulting company, started from modern engineering methods such as agile, microservices, and DDD, and from the actual needs of enterprise digital transformation, it also deduced the enterprise architecture methodology that is in line with the development of modern enterprises, and its core is Zhongtai At the beginning of this year, ThoughtWorks released a white paper on modern enterprise architecture, proposing MEAF, a modern enterprise architecture methodology based on China and Taiwan.

Those interested can see:
https://www.thoughtworks.com/cn/books/modern-enterprise-architecture-white-paper

About the fourth-generation ERP and PBC enterprise application architecture

Composable Enterprise

Facing the digital business era, Gartner, an authoritative technology trend research organization, has keenly sensed that the characteristics of "Composable Enterprise" and "Composable Commerce" that enterprises will have in the future are becoming more and more obvious.

Its core insight is that in the digital business era, in order to win market competition, companies must deliver digital business innovations faster, which determines how companies must continue to accumulate reusable digital assets. "Business Capabilities" build agile Composable capabilities to support the ability to quickly build new businesses. The PBC as a basic business capability may come from ERP vendors, industry ISVs, and enterprises themselves and upstream and downstream links.

As business needs change, organizations must be able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. To do this, organizations must understand and implement the “composable enterprise.

A composable enterprise is an organization that delivers business outcomes and adapts to the pace of business change. It does this through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities (PBCs). PBCs are application building blocks that have been purchased or developed.

Digital commerce platforms are experiencing ongoing modularization in a cloud-native, multiexperience world. Application leaders responsible for digital commerce should prepare for a “composable” approach using packaged business capabilities to move toward future-proof digital commerce experiences.

Fourth generation ERP

As the core business system supporting the enterprise in the past information age, ERP has sounded the clarion call for postmodern ERP and the evolution to the fourth generation of ERP in 2020. Compared with the past ERP, which is centered on enterprise management processes and focused on solidified business software packages, the fourth generation of ERP focuses more on helping companies build enterprise-level business capabilities that can quickly respond to business innovation and build flexible and agile business capabilities.

Compared with contemporary ERP, the integrated digital system, the ultimate end-user experience driven by AI algorithms and data, and the responsiveness for business agility, the fourth-generation ERP will become the core element of business competition.

PBC application architecture

What is PBC? According to Gartner's definition, PBC is a pre-modularized, business-semantic, reusable and scalable atomic business capability. The rapid assembly and orchestration of PBC for business scenarios will become a super magic weapon for enterprises to win the competition.

The new application architecture method in the Composable Enterprise era is the PBC application architecture model. According to Gartner’s analysis, the PBC enterprise application architecture model has a variety of methods and models that can be implemented. The enterprise application architecture model based on the Zhongtai methodology is one of the important directions. In the past, domestic parties have explored the China-Taiwan architecture, and the domestically pioneered China-Taiwan application architecture has also been included in Gartner's vision for the first time as one of the implementation methods of PBC's enterprise architecture model.

The core of the business center is the modeling and structuring of enterprise business assets

The core of the Zhongtai methodology is how to structure the expression of reusable enterprise business assets, which includes the structured expression of business scenarios and requirements itself, as well as the structured expression of the process of modeling and analysis.

The modeling of most of the business assets in the digital age strongly relies on the structuring of the underlying technology assets. This proposition spans business and technology, application and engineering, organization and project management, demand engineering and analysis models, and application technology. Realizing... has its natural complexity.

Alibaba also started from the establishment of the sharing business department in 2009. During the production and operation of the shared middle station for more than 10 years, generations of business experts, product managers, technical architects, continuous research and development practice, trial and error, refinement, Upgrade and precipitation have formed the entire systematic tool platform ecosystem serving the entire Alibaba Group.

In order to verify that the China-Taiwan methodology can not only adapt to Ali’s complex business forms, Alibaba Cloud’s related teams have been deeply involved in the construction of more than 200 China-Taiwan projects in all walks of life, reflecting on the summary and abstracting the abstract, and gradually found the different applications. With the industry’s standardized business methodology and supporting tool platforms, BizWorks is just the visible part of the iceberg on the surface of this little-known story behind it.

Alibaba’s practice in mid-stage business for so many years, if only one word is allowed to express the core concept of mid-stage in the end, it is "commercial capability." Commercial capability is the conceptual expression of mid-stage business assets, taken from several years. The translation of the former internal self-created concept into English actually coincides with Gartner's definition of PBC. From a philosophical point of view, this may indicate that in this world, on the road to the real future, as long as the spirit and attitude of seeking truth from facts are used to solve practical problems, they will always end up with the same goal.

Alibaba's business center is continuously built, iterated and precipitated around the flywheel of the life cycle of business capabilities. The following is the most famous Alibaba internal business capability 12 technical features clock chart:

The middle stage of the business is continuously operated

What is the biggest misunderstanding of the outside world about China and Taiwan in the past few years? Then the first place is likely to be "built" by China Taiwan.

wrong! In fact, this is the biggest misunderstanding of Zhongtai. According to Alibaba's practical experience in the past 10 years, Zhongtai was not designed and constructed. Zhongtai is constantly operating. Every capability of Zhongtai is not designed by a certain product manager or technical architect, but is constantly nourished, iterated and precipitated in the process of daily continuous business and technical operations.

This process requires the support of powerful data-based middle-stage operation tools and middle-stage operation methodology, as well as the support of organizational tactical execution and tactical discipline. This is also 2 important aspects that are often overlooked in the process of building a middle office for external enterprises:

The supporting role behind the middle and Taiwan operating tools

Think about the following question. Are the business capabilities of your middle office visible at a glance, intuitive and clear? Are these mid-office business capabilities easily discovered by front-end business lines? How to determine the direction of the newly constructed and abstract mid-office capabilities? How mature are these capabilities? What is the degree of reuse and health of these middle-station capabilities? Does its online service quality match the attributes and importance of the front office business? How effective is the engineering process for the business requirements of the front desk and the middle desk? ...

These problems require the support of operating tools.

China and Taiwan need strong organizational execution and tactical discipline protection, as well as overall governance and standardization. The underlying organizational culture is indispensable

Just like before the industry's vigorous DevOps transformation, the departmental walls of the development department and the operation and maintenance department looked so indestructible. But now the industry no longer has any doubts that DevOps can be achieved. Because in the development of society, the kind of higher organizational efficiency will eventually be proved by history that that is the direction of the future. Even if there are twists and turns in the process, there is restoration, but the historical trend is often vast and can not be violated, otherwise it will be crushed and abandoned.

As a corporate CEO, you may often be confused, why can’t every business department see the obvious improvement in overall corporate operating efficiency, such as eliminating duplication, integrating business capabilities, and data streaming through the middle and Taiwanese integration. The princes of the square business line just turned a blind eye?

CEOs don’t lie to yourself anymore. This is your own responsibility. In this world, through the innovation of digital technology to improve the overall optimization of the operational efficiency of enterprises, what are the disruptive concepts and technologies that can be naturally implemented without a little effort of? Can agile and lean engineering management ideas? Are distributed and microservices okay? Is DevOps OK?

Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said, "Digital transformation is a top-level project." Digital transformation requires your organization to have strategic determination, tactical discipline, and supporting cultural organization guarantees. This is how digital transformation is the best path for digital transformation. The landing is still like this.

China and Taiwan are gradually evolving, not a panacea, not a one-shot deal. Ali has experienced a change from the concept of "big middle stage, small front desk" to "thick middle stage, thin front desk". Moving forward in the doubts of many people who don't know the truth is the most obvious footnote of this experience.

The cloud-native era of the technology explosion

The future is here! But the future is really complicated! Compared with the CTO and CIO 15 years ago, the pressure on these two roles today is unprecedented!

There is no doubt that the world is changing faster. The pace of innovation and market competition is becoming more and more intense. How to achieve ultra-fast business growth has become the main theme of business competition. I still remember that shared bicycles became popular all over the country a few years ago, and Didi changed within a few years. Thanks to our taxi-hailing method, Tencent has achieved “eating chickens” for all the people in three shifts. Now the time it takes for the company's valuation to go from 0 to 10 billion is getting shorter and shorter, but the average lifespan of the company is based on S&P data. From the 60 years in the 1960s to the 15 years today, everything indicates that the speed and intensity of innovation and competition are increasing.

On the other hand, the agility and effectiveness of technical infrastructure are becoming more and more important in the elements of business success. The transformation of cloud computing in the resource and service delivery mode has brought about a revolutionary improvement in the efficiency of technical application. A more agile infrastructure (starting a business does not need to buy machines and find computer room hosting, from the previous half-year preparation cycle to the hour-level creation of a full set of services on the cloud), and at the application architecture level, the flexibility brought by the microservice architecture model Flexibility, resilience, rapid combination and aggregation of atomic services to innovate, which provides conditions for rapid business innovation and trial and error. It has been proven by more and more application platforms to be effective. The agility of technical infrastructure contributes to the agility and agility of business. The competitive advantage of business provides the foundation.

The cloud-native era is really the era of the big explosion of new technologies. According to historical experience, it usually takes at least 3 years for the integration of new technologies and industries, but in recent years there have been emergences such as the Internet, mobilization, social networking, cloud computing, big data, and AI At least 10 technologies such as 5G, IoT, blockchain, etc. How can so many technologies be used properly, used in their own right, used just right, and can be integrated into a digital middle platform to empower business development? CTO/CIO is under great pressure, and an integrated digital platform has become a big issue.

It can be said that in the cloud-native era, CTO/CIO has entered a "best era" in which technology becomes the primary factor of production, but also a "worst era" in which it is difficult to control so many high-threshold technologies.

BizWorks is a new engineering platform that lowers the threshold of cloud use

BizWorks is a tool platform that helps companies quickly and efficiently build business centers. It is an efficient engineering platform in the cloud-native era. Helping digitally transformed customers lower the threshold for cloud use is one of the core value propositions that BizWorks adheres to.

Concluding remarks

Everything in the past is a prologue!

It has been six years since China and Taiwan, and all past explorations always advance the next exploration.

This new prelude opened by the release of BizWorks reveals that since then, as one of the best paths for digital transformation, the dual-center architecture has entered a new stage in which both have tool platforms and standardized construction system methodology.

But there is no doubt that compared to the long digital transformation cycle, this is only a small step forward in history!

In the face of the grand proposition of the digital economy being unveiled by the major political bodies, the release of BizWorks products is not even a drop in the ocean, but like all the participants in the China-Taiwan exploration, everyone is constantly looking for more efficient companies. The architectural model, from this perspective, no matter whether various explorations are successful or failing, whether standing on the shoulders of predecessors, or standing on the shoulders of others in the future, everyone is participating in history, creating history, and witnessing history!