With the gradual maturity of cloud technology, the boundary between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS becomes more and more blurred. As a representative of enterprise-level HR SaaS, Beisen gradually deepens its investment in the field of human resources technology and explores a path of innovative development of SaaS+PaaS.
According to Ji Weiguo, CEO of Beisen, there is a big gap between China and the US in the SaaS field, and of course the development potential is greater. There are already hundreds of SaaS unicorns in the US, and the leader, Salesforce, has already surpassed $10 billion in revenue and is growing at 30% a year. The U.S. enterprise software market is already dominated by SaaS. As you can see, the growth of SaaS is compound because the delivery and business model of SaaS makes vendors more focused on helping customers solve problems.
Beisen is the first SaaS company to introduce "customer success service" into China. In China, more than 5,000 medium and large enterprises have taken the lead in gaining scientific talent data insight and employee empowerment experience by using Beisen's innovative technology, moving from talent success to business success. They are widely distributed in finance, automobile, real estate, Internet, new retail and other vertical industries, including China Life Insurance, China Pacific Insurance, China Merchants Bank, SAIC General Motors, Geely, Country Garden, Vanke, Alibaba, Jingdong, Haier, Hainan Airlines, Homelink and many other leading enterprises.
Ji Weiguo, CEO and co-founder of Beisen Cloud Computing
The exploration road of Beisen SaaS+PaaS
Mr Beeson started SaaS in 2010, when the concept was emerging in Silicon Valley and had yet to be recognised by the capital markets. Ji Weiguo mentioned that Beisen started from talent evaluation, hoping to enter the software field from the perspective of evaluation, to provide customers with overall talent technology solutions and tools.
At the beginning of the rise of SaaS in China, mainly for small customers, in the form of free to quickly gain customers, Beisen has also been "routine". "After Beisen entered the SaaS space, it was a bumpy road. In 2010, Beisen started to build the bottom Platform from Platform, hoping to build applications on the platform. In 2011, it became free. In 2012, it became a small customer. Ji Weiguo said.
In 2014, Beisen and investors with three questions, a team of five people went to the United States. The first question is whether SaaS should be a large or small customer. The answer is that small customers face higher challenges in terms of increasing ARR and renewal rate than large customers, and most successful SaaS companies start from large customers. The second question is whether you can do it for free. The answer is no. Free SaaS has not been successful in the US. The final question is why SaaS software can replace installed versions, and all the answers are in one word: cost.
At that time, Ji Weiguo found that all SaaS vendors in the United States were building platforms. After research, he found that foreign countries encapsulated development platforms for engineers and made them available to customers and ISVs, thus solving the personalized problems of large customers. Thus, Beisen formulated the strategy of opening PaaS to the outside world and continued to increase the investment in PaaS platform.
It can be said that this visit to the United States has strengthened the determination of Beisen to become a major customer. Large customers have high requirements for service and solutions, which is exactly the field Beisen is best at. Many SaaS companies start with small and medium-sized customers and then mature into large customers, but Beisen is the opposite. Today, Beisen has grown from 200 employees to 2,000, making it a big player in SaaS, but Ji says it is "still a small provider in the eyes of big customers" who bid globally. When it comes to the reason why Beisen can compete with international giants and win many TOP customers, Ji Weiguo believes that the root cause lies in the differentiation of Beisen's products and localized services.
Build HR SaaS moat with integration, platform and ecology
In 2019, Beisen, which has always been known for its low profile, released the three-year product strategy of integration, platform and ecology, and expanded against the trend to make full efforts in the HR SaaS market. In this regard, Ji Weiguo said that the formal commercial use of PaaS platform for the company to build a foundation for full strength.
Integration: It refers to the integration of HR SaaS, including three parts: cloud eHR + talent management software + talent management technology. Beisen will provide customers with all the software and technology needed by human resources. The first part is that cloud eHR is personnel management software, which mainly solves the most basic personnel management needs such as employee transfer, leave and attendance, compensation and benefits. The second part is the talent management software, mainly provides recruitment, performance management, career and succession of people around the ability to achieve the career cycle management of talent solutions, to help enterprises attract, cultivate and retain diverse talents. The third part is talent management technology, including talent evaluation, 360-degree evaluation and feedback, engagement survey, ability and quality model.
In 2004, Beisen set up the Talent Management Research Institute, which has more than 100 psychology and HR researchers from famous universities, to provide professional intelligence foundation for service and enabling enterprises. This is the biggest difference between Beisen and other HR software companies.
Platform: Beisen will continue to improve the open ability of PaaS platform, meet the individual needs of independent development of large and medium-sized enterprises, and establish enterprise application ecology. Beizen's view is no PaaS, no SaaS, so he has been insisting on his own PaaS platform. Ji Weiguo believes that even in the SaaS era, software is not standardized, must be tailored to provide customers with very strong personalized ability. Northen provides customers with no code development, low code development, and full code development capabilities on the PaaS platform.
It is reported that Beisen plans to launch the PaaS app store in the second quarter of 2019, which is positioned as a Native Application store. In the early stage, it will mainly focus on HR applications, and it is expected to launch 1,000 applications by 2021. It is important to note that, unlike the open interface of Ding Ding, the native app of Bei Sen needs to be developed on the PaaS platform of Bei Sen, and all the code is deployed on Bei Sen's cloud, similar to Apple's App Store.
Ecological: aims to connect all Internet resources, constantly open up new partners around employees' clothing, food, housing and transportation, and create ecological services for employees. Today, the Internet is changing every aspect of people's lives, but in the workplace, it is less intrusive. In fact, enterprises need to pay huge capital and human cost to provide employees with a large number of services such as travel booking, hotel booking, overtime meal booking, commercial insurance, supplementary medical insurance and welfare. Beisen's employee ecological service can connect people with various resources on the Internet, provide one-stop self-service to employees, greatly improve the efficiency of HR, and make these services more simple.
Ji Weiguo stressed that data integration is a major pain point for HR software. A large amount of HR data is scattered in various departments of the company and cannot be integrated, let alone unified analysis. Beisen is rooted in the data layer on the PaaS platform, where it accesses the big data engine and data warehouse. At the same time, it provides innovative AI capabilities, realizes cross-platform and all-application data integration, and truly brings data-driven human resources reform. It is known that there are only two PaaS in the global HR SaaS space, and Beisen is one of them. The other is Workday in the United States.
Three stages of PaaS development
Integration, platform, ecology is the general trend of the development of the industry, but which single out, it is very difficult to achieve.
Take integration as an example. It has been four years since Beisen started its layout in 2015, but it still has a long way to go to cover all the tools and software needed for human resources. But as the PaaS platform matures, the pace of native product launches will accelerate dramatically.
At the beginning of 2018, Beisen adjusted the organizational structure around PaaS and formed the business division structure of large middle desk and small front desk. The business division of PaaS platform was transformed into a large middle desk, focusing on high-performance technology and undertaking business in the middle desk with data technology. Each product line is transformed into a small front desk, facing the market with an independent business team under the divisional system, ensuring the flexibility of business decisions and getting closer to customers. With the underlying PaaS platform, the development cycle and development cost of SaaS products have been significantly reduced, which has injected stronger competitiveness into Beisen Development. Driven by the integration strategy and supported by the bottom PaaS platform, Beisen has created 14 products in total, including talent evaluation, Gene model, recruitment system, online examination, IDP and learning, 360 evaluation, performance, succession, employee survey, ability system, organization, employee, compensation and fake attendance. A steady stream of 2-3 new products are launched each year, with on-boarding and employee eco-services On the way this year.
Looking back, PaaS in Beisen went through three stages: the first stage from 2010 to 2014 was the development platform stage; From 2014 to 2018, the second stage is the internal application stage of PaaS; The period from 2018 to 2021 is the third stage, the stage of open export of PaaS capability.
According to the introduction, PaaS platform opening will be divided into three steps: PaaS For Customer, for customer delivery of personalized business; PaaS For Partners develops and constructs a partner system, and eco-partners improve development services for customers; PaaS For ISVs, third party software developers can develop software on the PaaS platform and then sell it.
PaaS aren't easy to start with
The advantages of PaaS are obvious, but the PaaS platform is not easy to develop. Ji Weiguo calm, Beisen PaaS when stepping on a lot of pits, the largest pit has two.
The first is that a stable and mature PaaS platform must solve the problem of high concurrency and high scalability. Beisen fully considered this problem at the beginning of the design, so he did not use the traditional IT architecture, but adopted the latest Internet technology architecture. This distributed technology architecture has well solved the challenge of high concurrency and high scalability. But at the same time, it also brought the challenge of data consistency in the storage system. In order to fill the hole, Beisen carried out independent research and development and upgrade in the distributed storage system, and spent two years developing its own distributed database to solve the problem of consistency in distributed data storage.
The second problem is that in 2016, Beisen PaaS platform was basically mature at the technical level. It defined objects and fields based on metadata, and customized processes based on workflow engine. It is completely possible to quickly build a native SaaS application. The reason was that PaaS at that time lacked the unique features based on HR business and could not well support customers' actual usage scenarios, so Beisen decided to continue to improve. Beisen has more than 300 engineers working on PaaS. These R&D personnel further unify the highly abstract business architecture of business scenarios with the highly available and highly extensible technical architecture, and constantly polish the PaaS platform. The polishing process takes three years to complete.
Today, Beisen's PaaS platform is fully equipped to meet the challenges of commercialization. Beisen's innovation mechanism driven by human resources technology is basically mature, with nearly 800 R&D personnel and more than 200 iterations throughout the year. Future corporate success depends on talent success and employee success. The development of new technology, the change of business model, the change of organizational boundaries, the rise of individual value, and the flood of post-1995 employees into the workplace... How to use science and technology to empower employees, let employees work more effectively, make management and decision-making more scientific and intelligent, and even how to let people and machines work together harmoniously, all these need to be explored and promoted by human resource technology enterprises like Beisen.
