Editor’s note: This article is compiled from an email interview with LiveVideoStack by Yang Pan, co-founder and CTO of Rongyun. Yang discussed his personal growth experience, his responsibility as a technical leader of a startup company, and the opportunities and challenges for the enterprise communication market.
LiveVideoStack: Hello Yang Pan, I would like to briefly introduce my work experience, as well as the work content and focus field in Rongyun.
Yang Pan: Hello, everyone. My name is Yang Pan, co-founder and CTO of Rongyun. I was mainly engaged in THE SP industry in my early years and experienced the first wave of Chinese Internet boom. I was also one of the earliest.NET developers in China. Because of these two experiences, I was fortunate to participate in the development of MSN Mobile China Hub, which combined the communication capability of MSN Messenger with the SMS capability of Chinese telecom operators. Later, I joined the team of China Mobile Feisin, and was mainly engaged in work related to instant messaging, open platform and social platform during this experience. In Rongyun, I am mainly responsible for all the products and R&D work of the company. With the gradual development and expansion of the team, I began to focus on the r&d and management of the company’s core technologies this year.
LiveVideoStack: led the whole technical team from participating in the development of MSN Messenger to taking charge of important technical modules of Feisun, to co-founding Rongyun and serving as CTO. Believe that it is not plain sailing, overnight, what are the unforgettable stories behind each change? What leads you forward?
Yang Pan: I’ve been passionate about social and communication technology for years, and my work experience has never left the field. In addition, through the experience of MSN and Feimin, I was fortunate enough to have access to the business with massive data and high concurrency, which enabled me to accumulate a lot of experience in the research and development of large-scale and high concurrency systems.
There is also a very big dream: I have been working in the field of instant messaging for many years, but I also know how difficult it is To do instant messaging in China. At that time, the idea of Rongyun team was that there were actually a few teams in China who mastered large-scale and highly concurrent instant messaging technology, but the technology was not universal. So our choice at the time was to make it a cloud service open to all developers by simply integrating the SDK on the client side and accessing the Server API on the Server side. Skilled developers can integrate instant messaging capabilities into their businesses in as little as a day, which is definitely a great feeling of accomplishment.
LiveVideoStack: What are your personal experiences with tech startups? What lessons have you learned?
Yang Pan: Last year, there was a very popular phrase called “stay true to your original aspiration”. In fact, the original aspiration of starting a business is to thoroughly solve the problem you choose to solve. When it comes to lessons, I think focus is the biggest lesson and the biggest lesson. Looking back on rongyun’s entrepreneurial history, the more we focus on the period, the faster we develop, while in the period of lack of focus, we often encounter difficulties. Focus is solving a problem in a particular direction more thoroughly than anyone else. The various indicators and service levels are done to the extreme, a good product will speak, this is the best marketing.
LiveVideoStack: Taking on a team is a challenge that all CXOS must face. What are your methods and experiences for this?
Yang Pan: Team management is a very big topic, in fact, I just want to say one point, the most simple and core point, that is to take all members of the team to grow together in the management process. Under the guidance of this core goal, there are many things to be done: to build a professional R&D environment and process system for the team, to establish a systematic training and growth system, to give the team more opportunities to trial and error, and to give everyone more challenges and guidance. As team members grow, the team as a whole grows, takes on greater responsibility and creates better products.
LiveVideoStack: From message, to audio and video, Rongyun has been trying to help users get communication ability more easily. What do you see as unmet needs in the enterprise communications market? In the meantime, what technologies do you think are likely to meet this market? What technology reserves are you and your team doing for this purpose?
Yang Pan: Rongyun’s mission is to provide platforms and tools to make communication easier and more reliable. In this direction alone, there is a lot of work to be done as a service vendor, including cleaner service interfaces, simpler development, integration and debugging processes, more transparent quality data and quality tools, and even the ability for developers to view quality metrics and troubleshoot problems themselves. I have always believed that the best service is to make the customer feel invisible. And in order to do that, you have to have the ultimate quality.
But on the other hand, as a capability service vendor. Meeting the diverse needs of customers is a very complicated matter. Most customers have the same basic needs, but at the same time, customers also have a variety of scenarios, so the scenario of product functions is actually the focus of future industrial development.
In terms of technology portfolio, we are committed to providing a better communications cloud network both nationally and globally, and we will continue to invest very heavily this year in the continuous improvement of network quality, both in r&d and infrastructure.
LiveVideoStack: as an Internet communication cloud company, why should Rongyun vigorously develop real-time audio and video business? What is the value of real-time audio and video for rongyun’s overall business line? Will rongyun’s existing customers also benefit?
Yang Pan: In fact, rongyun started to develop audio and video business mainly because of the demands of rongyun customers. Rongyun positions itself as an Internet communication cloud service company, and we should provide all the products and technologies that customers need in this field. In order to meet the diverse and complex needs of customers in the communication cloud, from IM messaging services to real-time audio and video services, we should and must go this way. In the future, with the advent of 5G, more and richer scene applications will be based on audio and video services, so the proportion of audio and video services in cloud financing will be increasing in the future. Rongyun provides worldwide all-media communication services, which enables the developers of Rongyun to integrate all communication capabilities into their products simply by using a simple account, a set of backstage management interface and a set of development system, which is also very convenient for developers.
LiveVideoStack: How do you see the market space for enterprise communications? Is this a red sea or a blue sea?
Yang Pan: At present, we are still in the early stage of competition in terms of the adoption rate of customers and the variety of scenarios used. We also see that there is a lot of room for growth and expansion in both the IM market and the audio and video market. So I think we are not really competing with each other, but we should work together to make the market bigger and achieve faster growth in this bigger market.
LiveVideoStack: Are there any technologies that have changed or are beginning to change the enterprise communications market? (AI, for example)
Yang Pan: I think we should look at this problem on two levels. First, the upper level application, and then the underlying technology. Upper-level applications, such as some AI chatbots and some TTS voice synthesis technologies, have had some good landing scenes in recent years. However, I think these are basically the grafting and landing of technologies and scenes, and there is no essential change to the core technology of this industry. On the underlying technology, at present, the steady improvement of communication quality is still a very core working level. We can see that in recent years, both in the FIELD of IM and in the field of audio and video communication, technology has not stopped iteration and progress, especially in the face of complex network quality assurance scheme, global network low latency and link optimization scheme are still in constant iteration, there is a lot of room for improvement. In fact, AI is also optimizing the computational power problem in many scenarios. In general, I am more concerned about the introduction and design of technologies that can lead to greater quality improvement or cost reduction, and can make a big difference to the cost structure of the industry.
LiveVideoStack: Finally, how about sharing your story in LiveVideoStack2019 Shanghai?
Yang Pan: In order to improve the quality of audio and video communication services, in addition to the necessary anti-loss optimization, the most effective way is to deploy media services in more areas and make them closer to users. More media services would make the network structure more complex and more difficult to manage, so we designed a decentralized RTC network. It has the following features: 1. No central management node. 2. No need to care about the state of other media services; 3. Rapidly increase regional media service node deployment; 4. No coupling with signaling service.
We look forward to sharing our design and implementation further at LiveVideoStack2019 Shanghai.