Industrial Internet Headquarters Base Landed in Bao'an Tang Daosheng Explains Tencent's New Industrial Internet Positioning

Author: Hao Junhui

If Shenzhen is the headquarters of Tencent, then Bao’an is the birthplace of Tencent Industrial Internet. Fifteen years ago, Tencent built its first data center in Bao’an District, Shenzhen. Fifteen years later, this data center was like a seed that grew out of Tencent Cloud and Tencent Smart Industry. The Internet headquarters base landed in Bao’an. At the 2022 Tencent Global Digital Ecology Conference held on November 30, Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group, announced the news.

This is a new seed. In the next few years, Tencent’s global headquarters will also move into the Dachan Bay Future Science and Technology City in Bao’an District. Tang Daosheng said that this hot spot will be built into a model room for industrial Internet business, with products such as autonomous driving, digital twins, and comprehensive energy management. The solutions will all be applied here. “We believe that with the support of governments at all levels and industry partners, new seeds will soon become dense forests and grow into a large ecology integrating digital and real.”

Since the proposal of “taking root in the consumer Internet and embracing the industrial Internet” in 2018, Tencent Cloud and Smart Industry Group (CSIG) has been running all the way in the TO B business. However, on July 25 this year, Tencent issued an internal document to adjust the CSIG organizational structure and some management cadres, announcing the establishment of the Map Product Department and the Digital Twin Product Department, and at the same time canceling the Smart Space Product Department and the Transportation Platform Product Department.

This means that after four years of “touching” the stone, Tencent once again clarified its advantages and positioning in the industrial Internet. At this eco-conference, Tang Daosheng explained it as “products are king, scenarios are the first”, and he wants to be one of the best products in the industry on the key product track, and proposed Tencent’s new positioning in the industrial Internet: to be a good enterprise “Digital Assistant”, and join hands with ecological partners, use one of the best “champion applications” to help the real economy produce more “industry champions”.

The conference has a total of 29 product technology-themed sessions, 18 industry-themed sessions and 6 ecological-themed sessions, covering topics such as digital twins, cloud native, enterprise WeChat, and going overseas.

Create “championship products” on key tracks

In July this year, Tsinghua University released the “Report on the Ecological Development of China’s Industrial Internet” (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”). The “Report” shows that from 2019 to 2021, the growth rate of GDP driven by the industrial Internet will be 0.22, 0.14, and 0.30 respectively. percentage points, by 2035, the Industrial Internet will account for 21% of China’s GDP.

With the continuous breakthrough and improvement of digital technology, the digital economy with the industrial Internet as an important component will become a new driving force for economic growth, and Tencent, which has transformed to embrace the industrial Internet, has also achieved good results.

It is understood that the number of Tencent partners has exceeded 10,000 at present, and the proportion of revenue contributed by partners has reached ¹⁄₃. The number of partners with an annual income of over 10 million has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 80% in the past three years.

Tang Daosheng believes that the deepening of the industrial Internet is reflected in three major trends: First, lean manufacturing has become the digital goal of many manufacturing companies. Second, collaborative tools can improve decision-making and execution efficiency. Finally, digital precision marketing can identify user needs and capture market opportunities.

“Practice and experience have further proved the important value of the industrial Internet, and also strengthened Tencent’s goal of helping the physical industry with digitalization.” Tang Daosheng said that Tencent will be based on “products are king, scenarios first”, and on the key product track, do One of the best products in the industry.

To this end, Tencent will make efforts to shape benchmarks from three aspects. First, build product benchmarks and create a digital “toolbox” for enterprises; second, build technical benchmarks and build a “hard support” for digital-real integration; third, build ecological benchmarks and invite ecological partners to “play the leading role” to create a win-win situation for the industry “big space”.

From the previous structural adjustments and the sub-forums of this conference, we can roughly see that Tencent hopes to develop product tracks, such as maps, digital twins, smart buildings, smart retail, and so on.

Comprehensive Cloud Native

In June this year, Tencent announced that a large number of internal self-developed businesses have been fully migrated to the cloud, becoming the largest cloud-native practice in China, with a cumulative saving of more than 3 billion yuan in IT costs, fully demonstrating Tencent Cloud’s products, technologies and comprehensive service capabilities.

In the subsequent cloud-native database technology exploration session, Tencent Cloud introduced the technological evolution and exploration in the field of cloud-native database.

For example, TDSQL-C, the core product of Tencent Cloud’s new-generation cloud-native database, has a 200% performance improvement compared to traditional cloud databases in full-cached and big data scenarios, and can achieve high throughput of over one million QPS and massive distributed databases. Smart storage, serverless second-level scaling, and the price is only ¹⁄₁₀ of commercial databases.

Taking the practice of Ruixing Coffee as an example, TDSQL-C helped Ruixing achieve a cloud-native architecture upgrade with zero replacement and transformation costs, which can flexibly cope with 10 times the sales traffic peak, while saving a lot of resources and operation and maintenance costs.

Qiu Yuepeng, vice president of Tencent Group, COO of the cloud and smart industry business group, and president of Tencent Cloud, said that on the basis of independent controllable computing power integrated with software and hardware, cloud computing is entering the era of full cloud native, and components on the cloud can be freely called. The integration of digital intelligence and real-time authenticity has become a trend. Finally, through out-of-the-box SaaS, enterprises can significantly improve efficiency. In the future, every enterprise will seamlessly collaborate on the cloud.

In 2026, the number of digital people will exceed 10 billion

As digital humans with interactive capabilities have successfully “onboarded” in different scenarios in various industries, more users have begun to experience the tangible changes brought about by digital humans in physical scene services.

According to the forecast of market analysis agencies, by 2026, the scale of China’s AI digital human market will reach 10.24 billion yuan, and the digital human market will show a trend of rapid growth. The breaking point event promotes the digital human industry to be recognized by the majority of users. The bottom layer is the support of technological development, user needs, ecological construction and standard establishment.

At the conference, Tencent Research Institute, Tencent Cloud Intelligence, and Entrepreneurship Dark Horse jointly released the “Digital Human Industry Development Trend Report (2023)”.

Niu Wenwen, founder of Entrepreneurial Black Horse Group, said in the preface of the “Report”: “In the world of Web3.0, digital people are the basic tool for each user to create a unique identity. The depth and breadth of integration with different industries, digital assets are indeed The ability to protect rights and productize products for the C-end constitutes the main barriers to competition among different digital human companies.”

The “Report” pointed out that the core technologies of digital humans mainly include computer graphics, motion capture, image rendering, AI, etc. With the continuous iteration of various technologies, the production efficiency and intelligence level of digital humans are being continuously improved. While meticulously polishing the “good-looking skin”, technological development has endowed digital humans with an “interesting soul”, enabling digital humans to have the ability to interact intelligently, and allowing users to feel more personalized digital humans.

Tencent Cloud Smart’s new generation of super-realistic digital Sapiens Xiaowei also participated in the release of this “Report”. Small and micro companies have the advantages of digital intelligence such as broadcasting, interaction, and sign language. The Tencent Cloud intelligent digital intelligence represented by it can serve thousands of people with “one person” in more than 100 business scenarios in more than 10 industries, enabling enterprises to The service breaks through time and space constraints, effectively improving communication efficiency and service temperature.

Since the beginning of this year, policies related to digital humans have been introduced one after another, and as an important link in the digital economy, they have received guidance and support. In July, Beijing issued the “Beijing Action Plan for Promoting the Innovation and Development of the Digital Human Industry (2022-2025)”, which is the first special support policy for the digital human industry issued in China. At the same time, the formulation of standards for general-purpose technology for digital humans has also been implemented one after another. For example, the financial industry has released relevant application construction guidelines in the fields of securities, futures, and financial applications. Policy norms will further guide digital people to better serve the real society, and promote digital people to become a new growth point of China’s digital economy.