Introduction:Under the epidemic, all individuals and enterprises are responsible subjects. In this battle without gunpowder smoke, as a consulting company, like many colleagues in the consulting industry, iResearch hopes to help enterprises solve the problems of short-term survival and long-term development by means of research, thus contributing to the national economy, especially the new economy represented by the Internet technology industry.
Introduction: Under the epidemic situation, all individuals and enterprises are responsible subjects. In this battle without gunpowder smoke, iResearch, as a consulting company, like many colleagues in the consulting industry, hopes to help enterprises solve the problems of short-term survival and long-term development by means of research, so as to help the national economy, especiallyinternetThe science and technology industry has made a modest contribution to the new economy. Starting this week, we will launch the special topic of "Industrial Observation in the Epidemic Period", and launch a series of manuscripts from the industrial perspective, consumption perspective, corporate strategy perspective, etc., for the decision-making reference of enterprises, investment institutions, government leaders and other parties in the industry.
From the perspective of economic impact and countermeasures, the coexistence of crises is the industry consensus. Airy appeals to the majority of outstanding enterprises not to underestimate themselves due to short-term difficulties, let alone complacency due to the outbreak of short-term opportunities. Returning to the long river of industry development, the clarity of the enterprise's own strategic objectives, the efficiency of management and implementation, and the quality of the product itself will remain the same magic weapon to win. The sudden challenge is the touchstone in front of us. Irui applauds the entrepreneurs and teams who have the spirit of "thousands of dollars will come back after they are scattered", and applauds the talented people who flexibly adjust their product strategies. I believe that the intensive cultivation of those who return to the market and the business itself will bring about structural growth in all walks of life, so as to consolidate the overall economic quality.
Text: With the continuous fermentation of COVID-19 epidemic, the Spring Festival holiday in 2020 will continue to be extended. Some enterprises with qualified business models have started the "home office" mode and started to try to use various telecommuting products, making "telecommuting" quickly popular. according toBaiduThe search index and the search volume of "telecommuting" have increased sharply since late January, and reached the peak on February 3 and February 10.
Remote office has boosted the popularity of enterprise office SaaS products, and excessive traffic has even led to some products collapse, downtime, and stuck. After the baptism of this sudden storm, can the office SaaS industry usher in the spring that has long been absent?
Overview of remote office application scenarios
Remote office according toFunction ScenarioThe division includes: internal and external communication (IM, video conference), internal collaboration (OA, document collaboration, forms, forms and low code, enterprise online disk, project management), customer acquisition, customer service and delivery (CRM, customer service, online live broadcast), and relatively independent and mature human and financial applications. TelecommutingImplementation formThis includes SaaS and deployment on servers (local, hosted, or cloud). As the epidemic occurred during the Spring Festival, most enterprises were caught unprepared, and SaaS became the best choice, while more mature products such as Jira and influence were also favored, while heavier products that required a large number of configurations or even secondary development could not solve the current problem.
Internal collaboration is the core battlefield, and customer service is the deployment area
In the opinion of iResearch, the impact of an emergency on the industry is reflected in two aspects: first, whether the emergency scenario has an urgent demand for such products, that is, whether it can bring a strong short-term traffic outbreak; The second is the actual satisfaction of this type of product to the emergency scene and the overall experience, that is, whether it can achieve long-term retention of users. With these two dimensions as indicators, we have drawn a matrix chart for the above-mentioned remote office industry segments (see the figure below).
Based on the above matrix analysis, iResearch believes that IM, video conference, forms and low code, enterprise online disk, OA and other types of products will receive the greatest benefit from this event because they meet high demand and high satisfaction at the same time, and are worthy of focus and continuous investment by entrepreneurs and investment institutions. However, the human resources SaaS, customer service, enterprise live broadcast and other scenarios are facing some market blank opportunities due to their high demand and low satisfaction, which deserves some entrepreneurs' attention.
First of all, office products for internal and external communication, such as IM and video conference, were the first to "emerge" from the epidemic. Since internal and external communication is the most rigid demand in remote office, IM and video conference manufacturers have been fully mobilized to actively launch various programs and provide various forms of free services at the beginning of the "epidemic attack" at the end of January. It is worth noting that IM products, such as Nail, WeChat and Cloud Home, have been platformized through traffic siphon effect in recent years, which is particularly prominent in this event: by carrying their own SaaS applications or combining with third-party ISV products, they quickly launched solutions in video conference, education, medical and other scenarios, and thus obtained students, teachers Doctors and other "outsiders". With the surge of users, manufacturers are also carrying out emergency capacity expansion to deal with massive high concurrency business scenarios.
Second, OA, forms and low code products also played an important role in work flow, information collection, task collaboration and other links during the epidemic. During the epidemic, a large number of enterprises, institutions and government departments need to conduct large-scale information collection and reporting. Forms and low code products (including forms modules launched in OA products) provide simple and easy forms services for HR, finance, administration and other employees who do not have IT capabilities, so they are widely favored and quickly received customers.
Third, the value of enterprise online disk products was also greatly demonstrated in this event. Enterprises that had enabled online disk in advance appeared more leisurely in the face of the sudden SOHO mode, and also sounded the alarm for business owners who had not yet used such services and delayed their business. However, as the temporary use of enterprise network disk products is still unable to solve the problem that office files are not around, the short-term outbreak effect will be slightly weak, but the subsequent growth momentum is worth expecting.
At the same time, iResearch believes that the rapid growth of the above applications can also benefit from the remote launch and out of the box features of SaaS products, rather than the need for customized development, implementation, delivery and other offline activities like traditional software. Therefore, in the face of the epidemic situation that has developed rapidly during the holiday, we can quickly obtain a large number of new customers through the whole process of online services. However, whether these "strange faces" stimulated by temporary demand can subsequently be transformed into long-term loyal customers will be another test facing telecommuting manufacturers.
Grasping the Four Principles and Transforming Short term Opportunities into Long term Competitiveness
Although the epidemic has brought challenges and even crises to most enterprises, it has also brought opportunities to some enterprises, such as SaaS services. At ordinary times, many companies still rely on traditional software, or think that the time has not come, and do not want to try. This epidemic has made many applications "compulsory popularization", which has solved the problems of customers' difficulties in obtaining customers and customers' pickiness (mass customization has turned products into projects and leasing into outsourcing) in the SaaS field for a long time.
But in the long run, the epidemic still helps SaaS enterprises solve the problems of customer acquisition, trial use and short-term use. If the short-term vent is turned into a long-term advantage, it still needs to meet at least one of the following characteristics:
(1) I didn't know about an application, but this application can solve some pain points of the enterprise
This scenario is not common, because the enterprise's IT department and CIO have a certain degree of understanding of most applications. However, in some emerging fields, such opportunities do exist: for example, deep form applications such as Jane Dao Cloud and Partner Cloud and the burgeoning low code can quickly build data flows and workflows, while professional cloud knowledge bases such as Yueque can be directly applied to project management, collaboration, etc. All of these applications have been strongly popularized to enterprises.
(2) Although I knew it, I didn't know that the application was so mature
Under the inertia of office scenarios, enterprises may have a certain degree of understanding of certain applications, but never have the opportunity to try them on a large scale, which leads to deviation in enterprise cognition. For example, many enterprises still believe that high-quality video conferencing must be based on expensive and complex enterprise leased lines plus dedicated codec hardware, but they do not understand the current bandwidth and SVC, which makes cloud video conferencing in most scenarios very smooth.
(3) Discover new scenarios or ways to reduce costs
In this epidemic, some catering enterprises are "unable to endure" and some fresh e-commerce enterprises are "labor shortage". "Hiring employees" has become a hot topic. This objectively promotes the thinking and exploration of enterprises for flexible and socialized employment. Although platforms focusing on social employment, such as Salary and Welfare Society, did not show an outbreak trend in a short time, the epidemic situation prompted most enterprises to have a further understanding of this type of business.
(4) Enterprises learn from mistakes to choose certain services
When returning to work after the holiday, the more disturbing reality than the employee's remote is that "the data is in the company's computer". Many people regret that they could not use the online disk earlier. Obviously, at present, enterprise network disk is not the most urgent and important demand of most enterprises. However, the epidemic has enabled enterprises to have a more "unforgettable" understanding of the role of netdisk.
For most enterprises, the danger still outweighs the opportunity. For the suddenly popular remote office and SaaS services, a considerable part of them will still be in a dull or even silent state after the epidemic ends. The state of working at home will not be universal and lasting in the future, because the psychological problems of "paddling" and "fishing" can not be simply solved through technology or SaaS; In addition, after the epidemic, customers will become picky again, and problems such as access to different application data and heavy customization still exist. In the opinion of iResearch, there is no accidental opportunity or vent that can accelerate a pseudo demand or fragile industry; The products that can be accelerated are usually solid and mature products that are just needed, but they just go to the front and the spotlight under the epidemic.
It is recommended that investors return to the long-term perspective, carefully examine the industry, and rationally identify high-quality targets
In the face of the sudden upsurge of remote office, some people call it the "first vent" in 2020. For those who have been paying attention to this track for a long time, this time is more like the return of this wave. During 2015-2016, the domestic enterprise level SaaS industry has experienced a more frenzied capital entry, and a large number of SaaS start-ups have emerged, fully replicating various mature tracks in Europe and the United States; Many CRM, HRM, and enterprise network disk products that we are familiar with are also born here. Investment institutions are committed to China's broader enterprise service market, but they are wrong about the timing of its outbreak. Restricted by many subjective and objective factors in China, enterprise level SaaS products have not quickly occupied the market, and sometimes it is difficult to shake the position of traditional software, so that in recent two years, discussions about "whether SaaS is a true proposition or a false proposition" have emerged one after another.
If the "enterprise service craze" in 2015 is just a "capital carnival", the "SOHO wave" in early 2020 is a "nationwide practice" of telecommuting. From the appearance of the track to the large-scale enterprise practice, this long-lasting market education activity was suddenly strongly accelerated, which also indicates that the real prosperity of the market is not far away. In the opinion of iResearch, as the closest layer to users in the cloud service field, SaaS is actually a sector that many investment institutions have been focusing on cloud services for a long time. For the capital market, it will be a more rational investment path to hold an optimistic and prudent investment attitude, identify the track with long-term opportunities, and test the manufacturers with good user experience and subsequent retention effects through this "national trial". The space is limited. Welcome to the 2019 China Enterprise SaaS Industry Research Report, 2018 China Enterprise Online Disk Industry Development White Paper, 2019 China HR SaaS Industry Research Report and other relevant reports for research support.
Related report links attached:
《2019 China Enterprise SaaS Industry Research Report》
《White Paper on the Development of China's Enterprise Online Disk Industry in 2018》
《2019 China HR SaaS Industry Research Report》