The guest is introduced

Fan Weixiao, known online as CC, is currently the CEO of Allegro Xele Technology and TVP of Tencent Cloud. In 1998, HE started to make open source BBS products. In 2006, he joined CSDN and was responsible for FExin.com SNS business as chief architect. In 2011, it entered the field of mobile Internet to build social music App and music copyright trading platform. Since 2019, he has established Allegro Xeller to create YoMo, an open source low-delay edge computing framework, to provide the industry with IoT real-time data computing framework. He has also participated in the formulation of relevant standards for China’s industrial Internet, and is committed to promoting the integration of cloud computing and edge computing ecology.

preface

After more than 20 years of development, the Internet in China has been very different from that time. However, on the road of this change, whether it is from the PC era to the mobile Internet era, or from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet upgrade, the track choice of technical personnel is always an eternal topic. In the rapid development of industrial Internet, how should technical people adapt to the tide of The Times? How should adjust oneself, seek transformation breakthrough? And in this change, what should be the constant adherence? In February 2022, Allegro Xiele Technology, a domestic low-latency edge computing enterprise, announced that it had obtained $3 million angel round financing, stepping on the fast track of accelerated development. As the founder of the enterprise and TVP of Tencent Cloud, Professor Fan Weixiao will start from his own experience. Bring you a professional interpretation of the transformation of the track and the ecology of the Internet of Things.

Transformational path for experienced programmers

“I think when a new technology comes along, people will see innovation. But we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate what it will bring us in the long run.”

When it comes to Van Vishau, many people may be better known by his online name “CC”. As one of the earliest participants in the development of the Internet in China, CC grew up with the development of the Internet in China.

Van Weshau became interested in Internet technology in 1998 when he was still in high school. Recalling the experience of that year, his words revealed pride and pride, he said, “WHEN I first pay attention to the Internet, from the computer newspaper magazine read about programming things, began to find the Web is very attractive, at the same time began to learn ASP technology, do online forum. In 1999, 2000 or so, there are a lot of ASP language written Web forums are I do. It was this experience that inspired me to write plugins for various forums, until I graduated from college in 2006 and started the CSDN developer community.”

But after graduating from college, Van Weshau’s Internet path was not as “static” as it had been before. The adventurous nature in his bones also urges him to always look for the most promising and challenging technical fields to make breakthroughs.

I was working on blogs and forums until 2008, when social products came out, and I joined The China Mobile Feishin project and started working on social networks in China. After 2010, with the rise of mobile Internet, I also firmly jumped into the torrent of mobile Internet. We thought that the future of IM was going to be in the mobile Internet, and music was going to be in the mobile Internet, and music streaming was going to be social, and it was going to be in your pocket. Therefore, I started my own business, including mobile terminal ARM, social music project, and music copyright trading platform and AI platform of To B.

In 2015, I felt it was a big turning point in my life. I had started my own business for three times, and the product I wanted to do most was successfully listed on gem. At this time, I realized that I had been focusing only on technology and products, and I didn’t understand many things. But when technology wants to create value for the society, it must integrate multiple factors, and the whole economy and business structure need to be cared about. Therefore, IN 2015, I also co-founded a VC company, hoping to understand technology entrepreneurship from a different perspective and learn more about the relationship between technology and commercialization.

After 2015, as I got more and more understanding of this industry and saw more and more angles, I began To notice the fact that the To B market in China was growing rapidly. At that time, I was thinking that if technology can be turned into a digital way to help the development of the society, I think it will be a more impact and challenge to my life.

So in March 2019, my partners and I founded Xile Technology, and what we saw at that time was the development of cloud computing over the past decade to connect 7 billion people around the world. At the same time, more and more smart devices are emerging in the field of the Internet of Things, which is a connection of tens of billions of devices. The production of this data needs to be calculated in real time and it needs to be stored. The cloud computing of today we believe there will be spillovers in the future, and it cannot meet the needs of the future at present. So we are targeting a market called edge computing, which is what the whole Hessler technology is doing, and today we are using edge computing to serve the Internet of Things IoT related industry.

In the process of constantly seeking breakthroughs, Van Vishau also experienced the transformation from architect to CTO, from CTO to investor, and from investor to CEO. Every change of identity brings him a new examination and speculation of the industry he is engaged in and his career development. At the TVP technology entrepreneurship closed-door meeting, Van Weshau once mentioned that “the technical person is the hunter, the CTO is the chief, and the CEO is the king”. Now, facing the question of how he weighs the three identities, Van Weshau said frankly:

I think what makes me excited is the three states in a day. When you get up in the morning, you should think about all the problems like the CEO. At night, when everyone is off work, you should review and review the overall problems like the CTO. When you turn off the lights in the office and look at the street lamps at night and the stars in the sky on your way home at midnight, you should step out of the company and look at what you are doing and the changes in the industry from an external perspective to correct yourself. Every day, three perspectives and three identities are constantly changing. Although I sleep in doubt and doubt every day, I wake up each morning with this kind of introspection that gives me the confidence to move forward.

During Fan Weichao’s 20-year Internet career, China’s Internet technology has been constantly upgraded and iterated, with one tuyar after another emerging in turn. Face these emerging tuyere, how should choose? As a track to choose “experienced” Fan Weichao, also put forward a very pertinent suggestion. He think:

I think one is that the emergence of new technologies will definitely make people see innovation. But we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate what it will bring us in the long run. Often in the market environment, we are always hot AI this year, hot code next year, a tuyere to a tuyere. However, the real landing of the technology needs to rise. When the popularity reaches the peak, it will start to decline slowly, but its maturity, people involved in it and the industry’s acceptance of it will gradually emerge. After that period, it will be another three or four years before the industry really matures.

Like today’s AI, it was very hot in 2015 and 2016, and everyone was asking for it. The word AI is not so hot today, but AI has entered every industry and every household. In the past two years, AI has played a significant role in the manufacturing of medical products, health codes and epidemic tracking.

In my opinion, new technologies need to accompany him for a longer period of time, and in the longer term, new technologies need to be constantly integrated to transform the value of technology into the value of business, so as to serve the society. At the same time, the technology has to be connected to the whole industry upstream and downstream. In fact, this is also the digital transformation proposed by the country. In my opinion, the digital transformation means that there are no more numbers and people can’t feel the digital, because everything will be accepted smoothly.

In 2019, Van Weshau founded Allegro Xiele. With the rapid development of Industrial Internet in China, Van Weshau was naturally keen To capture the future prospects of the Domestic iot To B market. His vision of “building the digital ecological chain of the whole industry” is also prompting him to move forward steadily towards the future.

Be the ecological builder of industrial Internet

“Today with digitization we can connect all the core parts of the industrial process. The whole industrial Internet ecological chain is the biggest value to society.”

As one of the current focus on the field, for the future development of China’s industrial Internet, Fan Weixiao can be said to be full of confidence. As an ecological builder of industrial Internet, he also plays an increasingly decisive role in the linkage process with more industrial enterprises. He not only served as TVP of Tencent Cloud, but also carried out more and more in-depth cooperation with Tencent Cloud. In the past few years, his company and Tencent Cloud have implemented more than 400 million yuan of digital transformation work in large industrial enterprises. In view of this cooperation, Van Weishaw also put forward ardent expectations.

During the more than one year of joining Tencent Cloud TVP organization, I have felt great power. In the past year, the products that we YoMo cooperated with five partners of Tencent Cloud TVP have been implemented into industrial services. These partnerships enable us to help many industrial companies deliver their industry digitisation at a cost reduction of 70%, something that is very difficult to do in the industrial industry, something that is difficult for any company to do on its own, and it is the result of layered collaboration. In particular, we expect to integrate more solutions and more digital cooperation with Tencent Cloud TVP and the small industry ecosystem in the future, so as to bring more power and empowerment to more industrial enterprises and jointly build a complete industrial Internet ecosystem.

In previous TVP technology entrepreneurship behind closed doors, Fan Weixiao also when sharing focused on the topic of “ecological”, he put forward “in an enterprise, the CEO is king, the king should be more care about some territory, landscape, such as a more liberal content, more attention should be the whole industry ecology should be how to build.” When landing on the industrial Internet, Fan Weichao again talked about the topic of ecology, in the face of “where should the ecological construction of the industrial Internet go?” This question, he also gave his own answer.

In my opinion, the development of industrial Internet today is still very hot in China. However, with the in-depth interaction with industrial enterprises in the past two years, we increasingly feel that there are too few ingredients to be integrated into the whole ecological structure through digitalization. Today we need to connect them all digitally and express them more effectively. I think this is a great value that digitalization has for traditional industries, and I call this the digital optimization of stock markets. With digitization, there are new ways of organizing, new ways of managing, new ways of collaborating. It’s something that’s going to make the industry more efficient, and I think it’s hard to do it any other way than digitally.

Secondly, digitalization brings new means, such as industrial quality inspection, predictive maintenance of equipment, etc., all of which can express the value of data by means of technical means, which brings a new opportunity to the industrial industry. Things that were previously unknown in industry can now be quantified with big data. Instead of looking at the future through experience and guesswork, we’re using machine learning to predict the future, and that’s something new that machine learning can bring.

The last layer is how to further upgrade our business with the help of digital capabilities. Before, production and sales were two separate links. And today we see more and more people, with the help of platforms like wechat, very directly reach the end consumer. As an industrial company, you can quickly determine what your customers like, quickly collect feedback and form a very good positive feedback loop, and then continuously accelerate the development process of new products. China has a large domestic market, and we can quickly speed up the cycle with the help of digital means in the domestic market, which is also the value we see digitalization.

So I think today with digital we can connect all the core parts of the industry together. The entire industrial Internet is connected, and the value of this complete ecological chain to society is the biggest.

At the same time, on the technical level, Van Vishau also put forward his own expectations, he thinks:

Industry in China needs more abundant PaaS layer services. Because China’s industrial enterprise digitization process generally started relatively late. Today, there is no rich PaaS ecosystem in the upper echelons of the industrial field, and each company has a different understanding of its own business. Each company has a different position and pressure in its own industry, so each company has a unique way of digitizing its own process. In this scenario, it is difficult to have a few universal PaaS products that can serve the market at scale.

Now we see a change, more and more industrial enterprises have their own R & D capabilities, they have 20 to 50 people r & D teams, they can do the core applications themselves, but they lack more supporting services. Whereas our Internet technology industry like cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, layering is very clear, in each layer has a combination of point, virtualization, containers, and even whole mature SaaS ecological, everyone can be layered to everyone this one professional to do their own, the whole industry is very structured, we can together.

Today’s industrial industry is like a vertical chimney, which I call the windmill model. If you go to a beautiful grassland, you will see isolated windmills. Here, how to effectively connect them, I think, is an urgent problem to be solved. The cloud provides the hardware, and SaaS needs to accelerate the delivery of software and developer services so that the ecosystem becomes more healthy and efficient.

As a key strategy at the national level, the development of industrial Internet and new infrastructure is also receiving increasing attention at the national level. Since the proposal of China’s 2035 vision, the construction of the domestic industrial Internet is accelerating into the fast lane. In this context, doomed to the next few years of the domestic industrial Internet will present a blowout type of development. For the future of the industrial Internet, Van Weishaw also has extremely optimistic expectations. He put forward:

In the past few years, with the strong implementation of the state and policies, I see the promotion of automation in this industry is getting faster and faster, which is a good foundation for digitization. With automation, we can collect data from many places and make the previously unknown things known, a very good foundation.

Since the outbreak, many industrial sectors have become more aware of the importance of digitalization. In 2020, we have seen problems in the upstream and downstream industrial chains of many industrial enterprises. And in the reconstruction of the entire industrial chain, everyone is using digital means to complete. Everyone will see how effective digital means can be. I think 2020 can be called the first year of digital industry.

In addition, China’s epidemic control is very good, and the domestic market is booming, which also drives industrial enterprises to continue to stride forward. Moreover, from the perspective of the development of the whole industry, no matter at home or abroad, 2023 and 2025 are considered as two important nodes. By 2025 China’s industrial Internet is likely to account for more than 25% of the world’s industrial Internet, which is a new growth period, I am also very optimistic about this matter. China has a very strong advantage in this regard. We are now at the core of production in the world, and the digitalization of industrial manufacturing is rapidly improving. In this process, our big data and AI technologies are leading in the world from the perspective of application.

Therefore, I am personally optimistic that the next five years will be a very high-speed growth period, there will be more and more Internet technology spillover into the industry. I am very optimistic about the future of the industrial Internet.

The technical stickiness of the atypical programmer

“In the technology industry, we must not leave the line, once we leave the line, just like the feet out of the water, no longer can perceive the water temperature, only put feet in the water, in order to timely perceive the changes in technology.”

In China’s numerous technical personnel, Fan Weixiao is definitely a senior group. Whether it is the industry involved in the wide, or engaged in the long time, are very representative in the Internet circle. But to many people who meet him for the first time, he is taken aback by his lack of appearance as a traditional programmer.

As a technical person who loves football and music, Fan Weixiao has an obvious “rock and roll fan”, flowing long hair and talkative personality, so that many people will mistakenly think that he is engaged in literary and artistic work. Now, with the continuous promotion of open source YoMo in the field of IoT, Van Weshau also goes out of the office and begins to visit and inspect factories more and more. He once joked to us that he is now a “workshop man”. But when we ask him which of his many current identities he likes best, he doesn’t hesitate to say:

My favorite character is still a programmer, especially late at night when I can turn on my computer and write code. The most exciting moment was when I read the email and saw that there were people in the community who wanted to do this, and I thought we should change the code like this. You communicate with people in each community to see if we can do this for the next version, and then you will also give suggestions and contribute to other people’s products. Those two or three hours a day are when I think I’m happiest, when I’m completely lost doing what I love.

Because I have been writing code for 20 years, I believe that as a technology entrepreneur, in the technology industry, we must not leave the front line. Once we leave the front line, it is like taking our feet out of the water, and we can no longer perceive the water temperature. Only by putting our feet in the water can we perceive the change of technology. At the same time, I’ve always believed that perception comes from feeling, feeling comes from practice, and practice comes from the points where you deal with problems on the front line.

Therefore, I have to work for a long time every day. I always spend more than 10 hours a week looking at, researching and testing new technologies. This is also the happiest time because there are no interruptions and you are completely immersed in what you are focusing on.

As a veteran tech guy who loves being a programmer, Van Weshaut also has some advice for today’s new young tech guys.

I do recommend looking at some of the underlying things, like when we first started programming, there were few development tools, few development languages, and very little documentation. As a result, you could not ask questions but could only study them by yourself. At that time, we saw that many old programmers could establish their own solutions to find and solve problems. Let’s say I see that the framework is broken, and I go to him with this core problem, and I think about how do I focus on the framework. Today, I saw a bad phenomenon, we found that there is a problem to ask, when asked to wait, no one to solve the problem, this problem we went around in the past, this down for a long time, I think everyone will core will be more and more far away from the technology, which to build a train of thought to solve problems, let us more conducive to innovation.

Today’s cloud computing, open source has brought us a very good developer tools and the underlying technology practice experience, we can learn a month, then I can do very good products out, this is the advantage of the technology in the world today, but the other side, is a time when we go to innovation, the whole process of thinking will break. If today also gradually become the industry has some utility, I think this is very terrible, doing or going to technology innovation, still want to see something deeper, and then set up their own a problem solving technique system of thinking, this is a very important thing, but these things are our textbook is hard to learn. Your environment doesn’t give you that on a daily basis, and it takes a lot of self-drive and a love of code to get there.

So I want you to first of all never stop innovating; At the same time, must be bold, do not pay too much attention to the immediate wind, to prefer to do long-term challenges; In addition, we must grasp the non-consensus, often in the non-consensus system of society, we must pay more attention to it, study it, and study it. These are three very important points in my opinion.

With the rapid development of industrial Internet, I also hope there will be more new technologies in 10 years. China has many outstanding technical personnel, such a group of outstanding people, together to do the technology will be able to spread around the world, serve the world. At the same time, we are also thinking of changing the current Cloud Centric Cloud architecture mode. We believe that only one Region in the world should be called earth, so the geo-distributed Cloud is more efficient and convenient. We also welcome those who like innovation to join us.

Remarks TVP

As a member of Tencent Cloud Most Valuable Expert (TVP), Fan Weixiao has always been concerned about the construction of technology ecology and industry digital ecology, and has always been practicing his own efforts. At the end of the interview, when talking about Tencent Cloud TVP, he also sent his sincere wishes.

I feel that TVP family is very warm and tolerant. I am looking forward to working with TVP family to bring TVP activities to more traditional enterprises and deliver digital concepts, digital solutions and digital cases for these traditional enterprises. I hope we can travel the country together in the next few years and really use technology to impact the world.

At the same time, I particularly expect that we can really break through the level of technical personnel, to integrate and introduce in the industry, so that we can work together to improve the ecosystem. It can really integrate all the core elements of the industry and express them in a digital way. This requires a strong organization to continue to promote and support this matter in the long term, and I particularly hope that Tencent Cloud TVP can further help in this direction.