Wen Rong: Making Software Using the Internet

The most basic and common application of information technology in an enterprise is office automation (OA), and many companies have invested a lot of resources but have never implemented this seemingly simple application.

According to Wen Rong, CEO of Beijing Yiqitong Information Technology Co., Ltd. (e-IPO), the OA system is a tool that everyone in the enterprise must use every day. Therefore, it must be easy to use, just as people usually use it on the Internet. Same as various applications.

"Software is done by way of the Internet." This is the principle that Wen Rong has set for himself. Not only does the product development and application require the use of the Internet, but even the operation of products must adopt the business model of the Internet.

All features are permanently free "Tonight, we will formally launch the Mac version of the target management software." On June 21, Wen Rong said in an interview with a reporter from China Computer News that the product was named "Today's goal." It is hoped that this system will become a corporate work platform for companies to complete their daily work goals in the Internet era. Prior to this, the company has successively launched versions of Windows, Android, and so on.

What is even more exciting for Wen Rong than the new version is that since the beginning of March this year, the company’s revenue growth has exceeded his expectations. As the momentum develops, by the end of the fiscal year ending in March 2014, the company can achieve break-even. .

After more than half a year of controversy, on October 25, 2010, Wenrong decided to change the typical SaaS model adopted in the past and announced that the target company’s working platform was permanently free. This is an absolute Internet business model - free basic services, and value-added services. Wenrong's idea is that nearly 28 applications on the platform are all free. Users can use a certain amount of storage space for free, and pay for the excess. In addition, the SMS application on the platform is a paid service. In the future, the platform will introduce more third-party management applications, such as financial management software, which will also be charged.

The original intention of this decision is to sacrifice the short-term benefits of E-Commerce at the expense of attracting more customers to start using today's target products in exchange for a substantial increase in the number of customer registrations. But no one can grasp the success of this approach to gambling.

"Speaking of that, you may not believe that until the beginning of March this year, we slowly see the return. The current income growth is very good." Wen Rong told the author, in order to attract users, the company sent every month Give the old user some storage space, but now has gradually stopped giving away. "Actually, some old users often tell me that they hope to spend some money on today's target platform so that they can use it more practically."

With an increase of 1,000 corporate users every day, eight years in the past, Wen Rong was filled with emotion.

Wen Rong is a Ph.D. in mechanics. After graduating from college, he was engaged in research work in the subordinate units of the Department of Aerospace. However, because he has always been interested in computers and management, he later switched to research and development in enterprise informationization. Once, when he was a petrochemical enterprise informatization project, a friend asked him if he was interested in developing an enterprise working platform that would make it easy for enterprises to apply. He thus began the road to entrepreneurship.

In 2005, he and several friends founded the Enterprise Link, and in August 2006, the product was officially launched.

"At that time, the basic charging standard for the platform was 198 yuan per person per year. With the increase in the number of users, the unit price decreased. If the company is 100 people, the annual cost is about 15,000 yuan." This is a typical SaaS model, although The growth of customers is very fast. The number of registered companies exceeded 5,000 in September 2007 and 70,000 in July 2009. However, this is not enough to enable the company to achieve its goal of profitability as soon as possible.

After changing to a platform-free strategy, the number of users of the current target has grown at a rapid rate of 1,000 per day. At present, there are already 510,000 registered companies in this target, of which 430,000 are active users. In addition, there are not only a large number of companies, but also many government departments, schools, and other users.

Wen Rong hopes that by the end of the fiscal year ending in March 2014, the number of registered users will reach 1 million.

In the eyes of many people, the mobile market broke out in the coming years. Compared with other software such as ERP, CRM, and financial management, the OA software has obviously lower gold content. However, such a simple application is often idle or semi-idle in many enterprises. Why is this?

Wen Rong believes that the most important reason is that many management softwares are too complicated to use, the interface is not intuitive, and even the user needs special training. In this way, companies often invest a lot in this, but they cannot solve their fundamental problems.

"Every application like Tencent QQ can be used by everyone, and nobody has heard of anyone who needs training. Management software should also be made like this." Wen Rong said that if you want to do OA software, first of all, OA software contains applications. To many, completely covering the company's daily management applications, can not allow companies to find a software developer in order to lack an application function. This software has a unified entrance, and data are all unified on one platform. In addition, applications can be used across screens and across platforms in various terminal devices and various application environments. "OA software doesn't require all users to use all of the platform's capabilities. If 30% of users use 30% of the platform's capabilities, there will be a very large market."

The maturing of the mobile Internet and mobile terminals has provided a very good development environment for mobile applications. Now, not only people who previously used only desktop applications started to use mobile applications. More often than not, people who didn’t use desktop management software before had started to adopt mobile management solutions, such as logistics and distribution staff, supervisors of retail stores, etc. .

For increasingly hot mobile business opportunities, Wen Rong said calmly: “Compared with mobile applications in the personal consumption field, mobile applications have a lag period in the commercial sector and are expected to break out in the next year and then move to users in the next year. The number may even exceed the number of desktop application users.” At the end of last year, the proportion of users using mobile clients was less than 5% of the current target users, and this figure has now grown to 8%. Wen Rong estimated that this figure will grow to 40% by the end of next year.

Use search only for promotion For businesses, the work platform is a tool. In order to complete the work, what tools are more simple, more in line with the user's habits, and save on business costs, what kind of tools will be favored by the enterprise. Applications such as instant messaging, e-mail, electronic documents, work logs, memos, and knowledge bases are still very strong after many years of development because they have irreplaceable value. In today's target enterprise work platforms, applications such as instant messaging, document management, and logs are still the most popular among users.

Although the various applications of OA are simple, if you want to build a platform with a large number of users, it will not be completed overnight. Wen Rong admits that although OA software development does not have a high technical threshold, it is not a simple matter if you want to make the software easy to use and easy to use, not to mention the brand cognition and user accumulation and other factors. To achieve greater market share, OA vendors need to focus on this area for a long period of time. "In the field of management software, the user's viscosity is generally high, because the migration cost is too high, so companies must choose products with very good reputation."

At present, 85% of the employees of EPC are R&D engineers, in addition to a small number of customer service personnel, and basically no sales staff. "We currently use only one web search method for promotion." Wen Rong said that by purchasing search keywords, customers can easily be attracted to this goal's corporate work platform. Users can register and download by themselves. It is very convenient to use today's target enterprise work platform and become a target user.

"A lot of people will ask, management software vendors have similar features, if they use our similar approach, it is easy to seize our market. Then I would ask in reverse if our platform is powerful enough, the customer enough, If we add more functions, do we want to seize their market? Are they afraid?” Wen Rong said that with the development of the enterprise, the products of mature industries are increasingly convergent, “but if I have 3 million users, then I'm not afraid of anyone."

The reporter's notes put Drucker's ideas into IT's office. There was a large bookcase full of books. Because there are so many books, between the neat rows of books and glass doors, the books are full. There are two types of Wen Rong's favorite books in the software industry: management and philosophy.

Wen Rong called him "father of modern management" - Peter Drucker's loyal supporter, because he felt that Drucker's management thoughts were very simple and plain. Drucker could always say basic in simplest but yet Very practical reason. In Wenrong's blog and Weibo, from time to time, he talked about his thinking about Drucker's management thinking.

As the company’s number one product manager, Wen Rong is different from other Drucker-loving readers. He is also the practitioner of Drucker’s management thinking. Many of Drucker's management quintessences have been incorporated into many of the applications that he has created for today's target enterprise work platforms, allowing Drucker's management ideas to solidify into people's daily work through IT systems.