Can Yisaiqi's mall create a new RPA ecosystem in China? An interview with Tang Qisong, CEO of Yisaiqi

In China, it took less than a year for the concept of RPA+AI to emerge and be favored by a lot of capital.

Although the market has just started, various players have already entered. In the context of the Sino-US trade war, many institutions, especially state-owned enterprises and government agencies, have increasingly highlighted the de-Americanization of IT procurement. Nowadays, product homogeneity, price wars, and lack of scenario-based services are common manifestations of the current market. Practitioners have also given strategic directions of "codeless development" and "developer ecology" based on their own characteristics and reference to overseas innovation models.

The market that has become so popular so quickly has also made Yisaiqi determined to follow the track, and it has stepped up the iteration and upgrade of the iS-RPA system in the past two years. Not long ago, Yisaiqi announced the iS-RPA 10.0 version and the subsequent ecological strategic plan. The latest data shows that Yisaiqi has launched 10,000+ ultra-large-scale RPA auxiliary robots, covering 15+ industries, 100+ single-customer RPA robots, and 30+ benchmark enterprise users.

The disclosure of this data shows the accumulation of Yisaiqi in RPA products and services. However, it is undeniable that RPA has high requirements for users and the cost of user education is too high. Currently, the widely used RPA products have strong developer communities and ecological support. What new ways will Yisaiqi play in the ecosystem that everyone is talking about?

With this question, Leifeng.com recently interviewed Tang Qisong, founder and CEO of YisaiQi.

Looking back at the past six months of YisaiQi, we have been making cautious moves in the technology ecosystem.

Version 8.0 was launched at the beginning of the year, featuring a fully open trial; version 9.0 was launched in April, launching the Yisaiqi ID. According to reports, in addition to the continuous iteration of the product, such as optimizing 200+ functions, introducing tool application robots, opening the community version, and cloud service console, version 10.0 also launched a new function: application robot mall.

Yisaiqi believes that the difficulty of RPA lies in the creation of processes. Moreover, many customers cannot afford servers and business personnel do not understand IT management. The application robot mall can connect developers with small and medium-sized enterprises.

Specifically, the App Robot Mall will mainly target three groups of people: independent software developers, actual users, and IT purchasing decision makers.

For developers, dozens of independent robot scenarios will be released, including daily finance, taxation, administration, personnel, etc., which can be used directly by large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises and individual users. For users and decision makers, the mall will open a beta version without registration or license application. Enterprises can use it right away. Compared with traditional channel sales and POC test sales models, it greatly reduces the pre-sales costs of enterprises.

In order to strengthen the stickiness with third-party developers and lower their threshold for using the product, manufacturers will also provide RPA software with extended interfaces in multiple programming languages ​​such as Python, C/C++, and .Net, and can be adapted to mainstream operating systems such as Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux.

Tang Qisong pointed out that Yisaiqi chose to use Python language from the beginning and built on the Linux native system. In a sense, this is because of the importance of Python language ecology in big data and deep learning applications. For enterprise users, the cost for their development teams to choose to learn other languages ​​is relatively high.

Another important reason is that the Windows service control end is completely incomparable to Linux in terms of stability. For example, the Big Four, although they are naturally familiar with corporate processes, it is difficult for them to have new expansion outside of financial scenarios in terms of the entire IT deployment plan. "This is why state-owned enterprises and governments have come to us, and it is also because our next product is fully compatible with Linux. "

It is understood that the Yisaiqi team has about 300 people, of which R&D, sales, and training account for the majority. From "open trial" to "Yisaiqi ID" and then to "mall model", combined with Yisaiqi's own relatively complete communication community and training system, we can see that under the guidance of the "sharing" concept, Yisaiqi has stepped into a new channel for the development of China's RPA ecosystem, and is facing more and more users and industries.

In addition to building a complete ecological capability, how to compete with other competitors and how to view the future application trend of RPA+AI are also issues that Yisaiqi needs to think about. Tang Qisong also answered them one by one:

1. What is YisaiQi’s core competitiveness?

Why did UiPath rise so quickly, while Blue Prism was the original creator of RPA? In addition to capital promotion, the more important reason lies in the RPA product itself.

Tang Qisong said that Yisaiqi's core competitiveness has three elements: products, ecology, and embracing AI. The premise of a good ecology is that the product must be easy to use. In order to let more users learn and use RPA, Yisaiqi started to provide offline training for engineers last year. Moreover, the purpose of developing the mall is to connect decision makers and users in order to deepen their understanding of the management process.

Today, Yisaiqi has developed from the earliest UEBA to auxiliary robots and then to fully automatic robots. Its business revenue has been relatively stable, and it is expected that RPA will soon dominate the company's revenue. In terms of AI, Yisaiqi has set up its R&D center in Nanjing very early, and has carried out technical exploration and implementation of machine learning (from behavior collection to analysis and then to automation) and CVA (CV at the UI understanding level of RPA) with Zhou Zhihua's team at Nanjing University.

2. What signal did the teammates send out when they rushed in?

In fact, this market is far from mature. According to HFSResearch data, the global RPA market size has grown from US$612 million in 2016 to US$1.714 billion in 2018, with an annual growth rate of more than 50% in the past three years; it is expected that by 2022, the market size will reach US$4.308 billion.

Leifeng.com has previously roughly classified domestic RPA players. In addition to YisaiQi, many other players including NLP cross-field enterprises, emerging companies, and technology giants are scrambling to catch the trend.

"I think this industry will undergo a big change in the next two years. There are at least 20 companies in this field abroad, but they have already shown a clear differentiation. In comparison, the domestic market is not yet mature, and more companies will follow suit, " said Tang Qisong. In his opinion, in fact, only companies like BAT that have accumulated a huge amount of data can have a profit point, and once the giants open source new technologies, it will have a great impact on the market.

In addition, Yisaiqi is also exploring overseas markets. Yisaiqi currently has four versions online: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese, and English. "It is unlikely to enter the US market at present. We will focus more on China and serve domestic enterprises going overseas. "

3. The Chinese market will always surprise you

"The subscription model is still quite difficult to implement in China, " Tang Qisong lamented.

Subscription fees will generate a steady stream of income, but before it reaches scale, the company can only be in a loss, which is also an important reason why the enterprise market has been tepid for many years. An important factor in the current popularity of RPA is the promotion of capital. It is precisely because of this that there are negative views that RPA is overheated and is bound to be educated by capital and the market. How can entrepreneurs in this field be patient and resist temptation?

Tang Qisong said that for Yisaiqi, going public is not the goal. If the Science and Technology Innovation Board performs well in the future, this channel may be chosen. However, the Chinese market will always surprise you, and it is uncertain whether the future development of RPA+AI will be good or bad. "For example, the launch of the mall is just a drop in the ocean. What is really needed is an engineer with ideas who can build an application by himself and make it a hit. I hope that the development of RPA will not only be driven by the 2B model, but also learn from the 2C model. "

In Leifeng.com's view, the enterprise level is a long-distance race of professional competition, which requires stronger industry understanding, longer time cost, greater capital investment, and of course, more solid entry barriers. Next, manufacturers need to consider how to understand user demands, how to help enterprises make RPA productive, and how to better adapt to the Chinese market.