1. Understanding ToB

It is only because money has become harder and harder to make from ToC that ToB has flourished.

The era in which a single idea could be turned into a good product and ultimately accepted by everyone has been crushed beneath the wheels. In the early days of the internet, a single portal directory made Sohu, a single chat tool made Tencent, and even hao123 — nothing more than a handful of jump pages — sold for tens of millions. In the mobile internet that followed, one APP was a company, and one official account could support a whole group of people. Now, in the post-internet era, giants stand everywhere; no matter how many ideas you have or how many millions in capital, it is hard to stir up any waves again.

We live in an era of drastic change. Material goods are becoming abundant at a rapid pace, and culture is evolving quickly. Innovation in enterprise technology and business models, and the turnover of generations, are all happening faster. The ToB market was born for this: to serve these enterprises and improve the efficiency of their business activities — R&D, sales, operations, decision-making, and more. ToB services can help enterprises respond to market changes faster and focus on the business itself.

Some say the essence of ToB is ToC. That reading is not wrong: the core of serving an enterprise is helping it serve its own customers well — when customers are satisfied and the enterprise succeeds, the ToB company can succeed. Customer success is much the same idea.

2. Large Companies VS Small Companies

A large company is horizontal; a small company is vertical. The one whose boundaries cannot be seen is large. A large company has many people and ample capital, and holds an advantage in its domain. Once it reaches a certain stage of development, it inevitably hits the ceiling of its industry and expands horizontally on the strength of its accumulated base. The one who sees the whole ox is small. To survive, a small company focuses more tightly on the area it is good at, cultivating it continuously and growing continuously.

A large company is a medium- to long-term investor; a small company is a short- to medium-term investor. Large companies value employee potential more, are willing to hire graduates and spend manpower and money to develop them, and invest more in training and growth programs. Small companies care more about solving problems immediately; they have little slack in headcount, and every person is a cost.

A large company is still a school; a small company is where you truly graduate. There is not much difference between a large company and a school: apart from the work itself, someone else follows up on everything, just as at school you only had to focus on studying. A small company’s administration and systems are incomplete — only by doing things yourself can you have food and clothing, and you need a stronger sense of ownership.

A large company is the direction in which a small company grows, and a small company is the source of a large company’s innovation. Large companies grew step by step out of small ones; their organizational form has a certain inevitability about it and is something small companies can learn from. To survive, small companies work harder at innovation, injecting vitality into the industry and carving out a sliver of room to grow in the cracks.

3. Tencent BlueKing’s ToB Model

Tencent grew large through ToC, and now it has set out on ToB. Tencent BlueKing is an important part of Tencent’s ToB strategy.

In the architecture diagram, Tencent BlueKing is divided into four main parts — the control platform, the basic platform, the integration platform, and application scenarios — each corresponding to an internal team, organized and designed entirely in accordance with Conway’s Law. The control platform at the very bottom manages the agents on machines and provides pipes upward for transferring files, executing scripts, and so on. The basic platform is the operations-domain implementation: a configuration platform for managing machines, a Job platform for executing scripts, and a data platform for collecting and analyzing data. The integration platform mainly provides aPaaS and iPaaS. aPaaS provides the runtime for the upper-layer SaaS, along with related services such as test submission, deployment, and log queries; iPaaS is mainly responsible for integrating APIs, exporting the basic platform and external capabilities upward to the SaaS in the form of interfaces. The SaaS at the very top assembles the APIs, facing user scenarios directly and solving business requirements.

Tencent BlueKing’s approach is to provide an integrated operations toolset — to be the operating system inside the enterprise.

For a platform-level product, the most important thing is the ecosystem. Compare Windows and iOS: they achieved their enormous success by building a virtuous-cycle economic ecosystem among enterprises, developers, and users.

BlueKing’s ecosystem has two parts: internal and external.

Internally, it serves Tencent’s operations and R&D system. On one hand, it leverages the Tencent brand to cooperate with universities, promote BlueKing, and broaden the pool of graduate candidates, making hiring easier for the department. On the other hand, it trains interns and newcomers and releases them into the internal organization, planting seeds of BlueKing internally while keeping the best developers to take part directly in BlueKing’s R&D.

Externally, it turns to open source and develops service providers. BlueKing’s lead has a ToB service background, and at the same time the company’s investment in manpower is limited, so it adopts a first-tier service-provider model. BlueKing focuses only on product R&D and on building product influence, leaving service providers to face customers directly. Depending on the service provider’s tier, BlueKing charges a fee each year, ranging from a few hundred thousand to over a million. Service providers take BlueKing products to bid at enterprises and earn money from custom development, maintenance, and the like.

Custom development comes in two kinds. One is building entirely new SaaS on top of the BlueKing system, which can enrich BlueKing’s application scenarios. The other is secondary development on top of BlueKing’s premium SaaS, where service-provider employees are dispatched to BlueKing to take part in projects as outsourced manpower. While supplementing BlueKing’s manpower, the service provider’s employees are also trained.

The internal and external parts reinforce and influence each other. When the internal side is recognized, the external endorsement is stronger; when the external side is recognized, the internal side finds it easier to accept BlueKing’s transformation. The vast majority of employees BlueKing invests are engineers serving the internal organization, with costs spread across Tencent Games, giving it strong sustainability and staying power. When competing externally, even if some features are not good enough, BlueKing has no survival pressure and can trade time for market.

Tencent BlueKing’s advantages are low cost and strong endorsement: by building internal and external ecosystems, it creates an enterprise-grade operating system.

4. QingCloud’s ToB Model

Compared with Tencent BlueKing, which uses its internal organization as a low-cost testing ground, QingCloud faces fiercer market competition. Also founded in 2012, QingCloud has a different ToB approach. ToB business is QingCloud’s core business, driving it to keep cultivating its field in depth.

At the outset, QingCloud built public-cloud IaaS, completing the development of components for compute, storage, network, and security, and then moved into private cloud. In 2016, QingCloud became profitable.

Having private cloud subsidize public cloud is QingCloud’s strategy. Public cloud is a mature, standardized market with thin margins and heavy competition; private cloud has larger margins and can subsidize public cloud. At the same time, once private cloud gets inside an enterprise, it cultivates users and can further boost the public-cloud business.

QingCloud is more customer-facing and market-facing. Relying on core technologies in network, storage, and backbone networking, QingCloud builds upper-layer enterprise service scenarios, gradually forming a tiered lineup of editions — Easy, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. It earns profit through service fees and private deployment. Similar products include a cloud management platform, a container platform, and QingCube.

QingCloud’s advantages are its accumulated technology and market sensitivity: on top of its existing infrastructure it can quickly build products that meet customer needs.