Zhongtai originated from Ali

In recent years, the term “zhongtai” has become a hot mess. As a result, many companies blindly follow and build their own middle stage. How did this word come from?

In fact, this word originated from Ali, is also the earliest implementation of Ali. With 17 years of free and easy son’s command, Ali began the construction of technical center, it is so, “center” the word has gradually come to the front of everyone.

As for why Ali wants to build zhongtai, it can be said that there are different opinions. To be sure, Jack Ma took a group of Alibaba executives to Visit Supercell, a Dutch gaming company that claims to be the most successful in the world. They only had about 200 or 300 employees, and they were able to release new products in a very short period of time. The reason for this is that they abstract away the common modules of the game and have dedicated teams to maintain them. Others are divided into small teams (10 people or so), and only need access to the common part of the game, so that they can constantly develop new games and quickly launch new products. This deeply affected the visiting Ali and others, so when they returned, they began to build a new architecture.

Introduction to China

Since we want to do central Taiwan, then what is central Taiwan? How to do it. The so-called intermediate stage is to precipitate the general capabilities into a module, and then provide output capabilities for the business side or the demand side, avoiding repetitive work, so as to improve efficiency. This description may strike the reader as abstract and difficult to understand.

Here is an example to explain: For example, we want to develop an APP [X], which is a social product. We want to create a function similar to the circle of friends, which involves the functions of Posting content, commenting, liking and sharing. And the company has several products, all have like, share, comment functions. Each team develops its own set of services with the same functionality. Its structure is as follows:

For such a scenario, can we abstract the services of “like”, “comment” and “share” into a service center? Any business side that needs such requirements can directly access it without developing them independently and avoid repetitive work. This is zhongtai, providing business capabilities for multiple business parties. Therefore, can we further optimize:

In this way, we only need to quickly access the review center for each development, and then we can complete the corresponding business, and the efficiency will be greatly improved. Of course, the center is also divided into data center, business center, etc. Business center can also be divided into mobile center, management center, technology center and so on.

China current situation

From the above introduction, it is not difficult to see that the scene of Zhongtai construction appears at the level of the whole company, and each department has the appeal of sharing some part of the business. So for small and medium sized companies, there are fewer of these scenarios. It would be a waste of resources to build the Central Taiwan by force. For big companies, there is a strong appeal to build the central platform, which is why Ali, Tencent, Baidu, Byte and other companies will build the central platform.

About the future of central Taiwan

We often hear a saying: “big front desk, small middle desk”, the front desk services directly connected with the front end, will gather a number of middle desk and its own business, the middle desk only focuses on a certain part of the public service. Of course, this is not to say that Taiwan is not good, each has a special. With the fast development of the domestic Internet, the vertical business has the bigger of the two giants, such as travel, netease and tencent games, short video quickly and bytes, electricity ali and spell evening to evening, want to survive in this environment, it must has the ability to quickly validate new business, which requires we have the basic ability of public support. For a long time to come, I believe that the Central Platform is what we will continue to improve and build.