Can Enterprise IT be given a boost by AI?

The rise of large models and AI technology has endowed IT management with a new mission.

IT management means achieving ubiquitous office connectivity for enterprises and employees by managing identities, networks, terminals, applications, and data. It sounds close to the digital transformation of enterprises, but in fact, in the past decade or so, IT management has been regarded as a field with "not very high innovation".

In such a service field, if the end-user experience cannot be directly made safe, seamless, and consistently stable, and significantly improve business efficiency, then investing huge resources in IT management to innovate industry technologies is like an ant trying to shake a big tree.

However, "Feilian", an IT management platform under Volcano Engine, which originated within ByteDance (hereinafter collectively referred to as ByteDance), has broken the silent pattern with a remarkable commercial achievement.

Volcano Engine is a cloud service platform under ByteDance, dedicated to opening the growth methods, technologies, and application tools within ByteDance to enterprise customers. Recently, Feilian, which has entered its fourth year of commercialization, is a pioneer in the large-scale practice of All in One office IT management in China, and has launched the first large-model IT empowerment platform in the industry, exploring AI applications in the IT management scenario.

01 Growing Outward, Experience Comes First

From a traditional perspective, IT management is an intricate field that operates in isolation.

The product experience is poor, the ecosystem is closed, no manufacturer can achieve full coverage, and the openness between manufacturers is low. Enterprises need to spend a high cost to achieve synergy.

These "chronic problems" on the surface are not unperceived by enterprises, but the underlying logical essence makes most people have to accept the inefficiency caused by the slow evolution of industry technologies. Coupled with traditional mainstream products such as Windows AD, which have been relatively mature and complete more than ten years ago and can meet the basic needs of enterprises.

Therefore, before Feilian entered the IT field, few domestic products were truly motivated to solve the problems of product fragmentation and poor user experience.

Back in 2017. At that time, enterprise office work was mainly based on PCs, and the adaptability of mainstream digital systems such as OA and CRM to the mobile terminal was very poor. But in that era when the Internet traffic dividend was booming, companies with high business growth like ByteDance had a high proportion of business travelers and a lot of remote office work, and it would be very inconvenient to only use computers for office work.

It was an obvious thing that mobile office work would become a trend at that time. However, in the case where the IT infrastructure could not keep up, the fragmented control and collaboration needs such as multi-device environments, multi-systems, and multi-identity roles have long exceeded the capability of traditional IT management products. The problem is, to solve such complex IT management needs, is it to purchase products for customization or to self-develop?

Liu Wei, the person in charge of the Volcano Engine Feilian product, said that to verify whether self-developing a product is valuable, it is necessary to see if there are similar products on the market that can meet the experience needs of the company's employees themselves.

The answer is yes, but at that time, there was no manufacturer that could fully cover the scenarios. With the number of ByteDance employees, not only might it cost a high budget, but also problems such as product fragmentation, poor mobile adaptation, and slow cross-border service response would be faced. After calculating this account, Feilian naturally came into being.

At the beginning, when Feilian had not considered commercialization, it was determined to do at least two things well for the company. First, cooperate with other efficient office products to solve the lack of mobile office work and improve the employee's mobile office experience; second, solve the problems of IT management product fragmentation and fragmented needs.

It can be said that traditional IT management is actually dealing with various "confrontations" and conflicts on multiple goals. For example, the balance between security, management, and efficiency. After solving the efficiency experience and achieving one-stop management, the Feilian team found that what they did is actually a strong market demand.

After applying Feilian, the proportion of operation and maintenance in the daily work of ByteDance's IT department has decreased to 10%, and the proportion of business support has increased to 50%. In June 2021, the Volcano Engine brand was released, and Feilian, as part of Volcano Engine, embarked on the road of commercialization.

02 Enterprises Need Higher Personnel Efficiency Ratio to Make Money

In the same period when Feilian was established, other large companies were also self-developing IT management solutions one after another. The reason why Feilian can embark on the road of commercialization faster is due to the advantages of its product strength.

First, from the perspective of the urgency of demand at that time, ByteDance is one of the domestic manufacturers with the most extreme requirements for efficiency, with a large increase in personnel and a fast business growth. Therefore, before commercialization, Feilian is also very important for the company's development pace.

Secondly, enterprise customers in various industries outside also have the same problems: the separation of human resource data and IT data, and the high security risks of cross-system and cross-device management.

The Feilian team said: One of Feilian's core competencies is that it always insists that the products used within the company and sold to customers are exactly the same, and the external commercialization and internal R & D belong to the same team.

From the product form of Feilian today, the innovation point lies in the All in One architecture, making it a one-stop management platform that covers various digital processes.

Before Feilian, there were no mature one-stop products on the market, and the technical challenges cannot be ignored, and the future of commercialization is even more unknown. Deciding to be a one-stop solution represents that Feilian is very quick and sensitive in perceiving the IT management technology trend.

The difficulty of integration lies not only in the aggregation of capabilities but also in the completion of the connection. Each category is a separate field. Only when all are done well and the investment in multiple fields is simultaneously rolled out can the management needs of enterprise customers be truly met. Because domestic enterprise IT requires an integrated product, the technical reserves and integration of personnel in each field direction are a long-term test of the team's confidence and resource investment.

And for how to define a good product, at the Volcano Engine Feilian New Product Launch Conference on October 16, Liu Wei said directly: "The three characteristics that an IT product should have are: simplicity, growth, and pragmatism."

A "growing" product can continuously adapt to an increasingly complex environment. For many technology manufacturers and enterprise self-developing teams, the survival pressure is on the one hand, and the problem of the enterprise's own personnel efficiency is not "intensified", which is not conducive to making an advanced and universal efficiency product. Minimizing the complex and rich IT management into a set of "terminal, cloud, and network", and also being able to elastically expand and superimpose on this basis, has also created sufficient space for the in-depth application of AI and the intelligent transformation of enterprises in the future.

"Simplicity" means that both use and management should be simple. The user's one-stop IT entry, from network access, business entry, basic office work, to terminal security checks, is completed through a single product. Administrators can effectively implement management strategies through a "parameterized" + multi-module associated management platform.

Only by doing each scene thoroughly can it be widely used. The core of IT management is not only the technical barrier, but also the complexity brought by the management application, terminal and other digital carriers, and the diversification of management identities and terminals. The increasingly complex IT environment, device categories, and operating systems can only be recognized and iterated through the accumulation of practice over time.

Enterprise IT requires an integrated product, not only for a simple and efficient consistent experience, but also to allow data to run through it, creating a quantifiable management dimension for the enterprise. Therefore, an integrated product needs to work in one direction to focus on the goals for customers. Serving the internal of ByteDance steadily and then starting to commercialize is also the advantage of Feilian in finding its own positioning.

03 In the AI Era, Improving Efficiency is an "Inevitable Choice"

Enterprise needs are constantly growing and evolving, but the purpose of IT management remains the same: to support the office form required by the business.

With the enhancement of digitalization and AI capabilities, enterprises will eventually undergo intelligent transformation for efficiency. And IT management is a problem that every company needs to solve.

"The greatest value of AI for IT management at present is not to replace professional talents, but to enable every employee in the enterprise to become a hexagonal warrior."

At the launch conference, Feilian released the large-model IT empowerment platform. The precision and efficiency shown by AI in dimensions such as data utilization methods and automated responses, combined with the natural language interaction of the large model, have produced quantitative changes in efficiency in more and more fields.

In the field of IT management, AI and large models may undergo a "qualitative change" earlier, mainly reflected in the following three aspects:

First, in terms of security management, AI algorithms can monitor potential risks of enterprises in real time, and use data-driven large-model analysis and disposal decisions to improve operational efficiency.

Second, the automated operation and generation capabilities of AI and large models can automatically generate management strategies based on the enterprise's own IT management system, and flexibly adjust with the development of the enterprise, achieving that the management tools grow with the enterprise.

Third, through the ecological openness of the large-model platform, manufacturers like Feilian can open the IT experience and industry accumulation of advanced enterprises to more enterprise customers, allowing the knowledge system of technology and management strategies to "flow".

In this process, the risks such as information abuse and data leakage that AI may face need to be further optimized through product logic and technical accumulation. For example, when an enterprise introduces an intelligent agent due to business needs, Feilian will provide the enterprise with sensitive data analysis and filtering capabilities for the intelligent agent to ensure security.

On the other hand, to achieve data and control capabilities, the integration of software and hardware is indispensable for the injection of AI capabilities. At the Feilian New Product Launch Conference, Feilian also released a software and hardware integrated solution to help the IT management solution transform to intelligence more quickly.

In five to ten years, every company may become an "AI company". From the perspective of improving efficiency, there are many reasons why AI capabilities match the IT management needs of enterprises. For example, in the "contradictory balance" between security and efficiency, AI, which is naturally good at data reasoning and automation, can simultaneously meet the two needs through a self-operating closed loop.

The innovative application scenarios of Feilian have verified this point: Today, a management platform can automatically achieve risk insight, data analysis, and automatic disposal. With the help of AI, every IT person can easily assume the roles of IT operation and maintenance engineer and data security engineer.

Therefore, for Feilian, the introduction of AI capabilities, on the one hand, is to solve the IT management problem for the enterprise itself, and on the other hand, it is also an exploration and preparation for the future business form. Promoting the intelligent transformation of the enterprise from the "efficiency foundation".

At the point of the fourth year of commercialization, Feilian has delivered a quite excellent answer, whether for the IT management field or the benefits brought to the internal and external.

Before the arrival of the market environment of cost reduction and efficiency increase, products like Feilian are the direct choice of high-growth enterprises.

For some other enterprises, the attitude used to be mostly rational observation. However, as the traffic dividend fades, the four words "cost reduction and efficiency increase" have become an operating method that almost all enterprises cannot avoid.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that the improvement of efficiency no longer corresponds to the pursuit of quantifiable explicit benefits, but has raised the value of efficiency services such as IT management. It is believed that the commercialization potential of cost reduction and efficiency increase can indeed promote technological innovation.

In conclusion, all competitions will eventually come down to efficiency competition. In the methodology of "improving business efficiency through improving office efficiency", IT tools are the most basic link. Whether there is the addition of AI capabilities or not, it can be seen from the three-year commercial growth of Feilian that it is not new products that are opening the market, but the changes in the efficiency needs and efficiency driving forces of domestic enterprises themselves.

And the next step, AI will break the "efficiency illusion" in enterprise IT and continue to explore the two ends of the scale: security and efficiency.