It’s all over the place. It’s all over the place. The word “zhongtai” has been overused in many places.

In some people’s eyes: The middle platform is the technology platform, like the microservices development framework, Devops platform, PaaS platform, container cloud, etc., people call it “the middle platform”.

In some people’s eyes: the middle platform is the micro service business platform, like the most common user center, order center, a variety of micro service distribution center, people call it “business in the center”.

In some people’s eyes: the middle desk should be the organization of things, similar to the enterprise internal resource scheduling center and internal innovation incubation organization, people call it “organization of the middle desk”.

The middle desk, literally, is between the front and back.

So, what exactly is the Middle stage?

When it comes to the middle Platform, the first thing that comes to mind is Alibaba. Today, let’s start from the Middle platform and get to know what the middle platform is. How did it develop?

The development course of Ali Zhongtai

Alibaba taobao group is established in 2003, in 2008 founded the Tmall division (some of them are from taobao division), before long, Tmall with taobao, taobao’s technical team at this time and at the same time support the taobao and Tmall business, taobao is preferred to satisfy his own business, make Tmall business team was full of complaints, It has seriously affected the business development of Tmall.

Another problem was at the level of business architecture: at that time, the e-commerce systems of Taobao and Tmall were completely independent, but they both included the same functions such as goods, transaction, evaluation, payment and logistics.

Because of the above problems, in 2009, “Shared division” arises at the historic moment, the main members from the previous taobao technical team, in the organizational structure with taobao, Tmall level 4 of the (pictured above), group hoped that the technical team in such a way to better support good taobao and Tmall business at the same time, and to make the two sets of electricity business comb and precipitation, The common and common business functions of the two platforms are deposited into the shared business division to avoid repeated construction and maintenance of functions and make more rational use of technical resources.

But what followed backfired. Although the sharing division is on the same level as Taobao and Tmall in terms of organizational structure, it is obvious that Taobao and Tmall have more say in terms of understanding and contribution to the business. As a result, the sharing division survives in the cracks between the two business departments (as shown in figure 5 above). To this end, the development of the shared business department is very different from most people’s expectations.

Here’s what happened next:

In 2010, Juhuasuan appeared. As soon as juhuasuan platform was launched, it showed strong traffic attraction, so people flocked to juhuasuan platform one after another.

Later, 1688 also participated in it. The three e-commerce operators showed their strengths and competed for the favorable resources on Juhuasuan platform. Faced with a torrent of business docking demands, juhuasuan team, which had just been established at that time, was overwhelmed (as shown in the upper right of the picture above).

At this time, the group requires that if the three e-commerce platforms want to connect with Juhuasuan platform, they must go through the sharing division! It is with this “finishing touch” that the Sharing Business Department has a strong grasp to equalize the unequal dialogue rights with the three major e-commerce platforms, which makes the “Sharing business Department” the core business platform of Alibaba Group.

Ali zhongtai positioning

Below clearly describes the alibaba platform for thick and thin “applied” * * * * architectural form, ali cloud technology platform in the back-end and front-end business between a “Shared business unit”, the alibaba group, the front-end business precipitation to the public, general business division, Shared business division is the real embodiment of thick platform “, It provides the most professional and stable business services for various front-end businesses in the field of corresponding service centers to meet the needs of rapid business response and business model innovation.

At the end of 2015, after visiting the Finnish mobile game company Supercell, Alibaba Group officially announced the full launch of alibaba Group’s 2018 Middle and Taiwan strategy to build a more innovative and flexible organizational and business mechanism of “big middle and small front desk” in line with the era of big data, namely: The front desk is more agile and responsive to business changes, while the middle desk, as a collection of the group’s operational data capabilities and product technology capabilities, forms a strong support for the front desk business.

The architecture of “big middle desk, small front desk” is mainly focused on the business sharing service layer. The business sharing service team has an independent team to do it, which is more conducive to the precipitation of business, reduce research and development costs, and improve research and development efficiency. Product barriers have been broken. Before, data was needed between systems, but now people go to the shared service center for data. The shared service center provides unified and standard data. Reduce the cost of interaction between systems and collaboration between teams. Standing on the shoulders of giants. New product research and development need not consider the previous things, can quickly incubate new products, trial and error cost is low, product innovation, dare to embrace change, it was difficult to catch up with competitors, now equivalent to competitors’ product managers constantly provide us with new ideas. Sustainable development, technology and business capabilities can be accumulated.

Through years of unremitting efforts, under the continuous catalytic nourishment of the business, Ali has accumulated its own technology and business capabilities into a set of comprehensive capability platform, with the ability to respond quickly to the changes and innovations of the front desk business.

Definition of middle platform

The definition of middle Taiwan, different people may have different definitions, but I think it is easy to understand only by grasping the following core words.

• Ability precipitate: The ability to precipitate together in some form of previously scattered ability.

• ** Service sharing: ** will precipitate the ability, in the form of service, to provide the ability of service sharing for different receptionists.

• ** Rapid response: ** in order to meet the business rapid change, exploration and innovation, can achieve rapid response to user needs, in order to occupy the market.

Here’s Ali’s definition of middle Platform:

“The core competence of the enterprise as the business development in digital form precipitation to the platform, formed to serve as the center, by the middle of business and data middle closed loop operation of the operating system, build up the data for the business enterprise more efficient exploration and innovation, to achieve the form of digital assets to build enterprise core differentiation competitive.”

• The business center integrates and abstractly packages the background resources, and transforms them into the core capabilities that are friendly to the foreground and reusable and shared, so as to realize the transformation of the back-end business resources into the easy-to-use capabilities of the foreground.

• The data center flows data from the background and business center to complete the storage, computing and product packaging of massive data, forming the core data capability of the enterprise, and providing strong support for the data-based customization innovation of the front stage and the continuous evolution of the business center based on data feedback.

• The technology center will integrate and package the ability to use cloud or other infrastructure and the ability to apply various technical middleware to facilitate the rapid construction of the front desk, business center and data center.

• The R&D center provides process and quality control and continuous delivery capabilities for front-end applications, which precipitates enterprise development process best practices into reusable “capabilities” that facilitate rapid development iterations of innovative applications.

Reference documents:

1. How to Transform Enterprise IT Architecture: Alibaba Middle Platform by Hua Zhong

2. Wang Jian, The Vernacular Strategy of China and Taiwan