TanZhen Technology: Crossing the Divide of Enterprise "Cloud Adoption" and Embracing AI

Before the explosion of AIGC, the key driving force for the digital transformation of industries was cloud-native. Then, in the AI era, where should cloud applications head?

As a cybersecurity service provider with cloud-native as its technical gene and entrepreneurial starting point, TanZhen Technology has given a neatly structured answer: to do AI + applications.

However, whether it is a thorough innovation in the business model or exploring the Copilot value of AI, it must not be AI for the sake of AI. Where the mainstream digital technology environment needs it, the capabilities of AI will be released there.

Recently, in the second season of the "Lenovo New Business Innovation Ecological Roadshow", TanZhen Technology was selected as one of the TOP 10 projects, strongly proving that they have chosen a direction worth verifying.

At the same time, the "new topic" of cybersecurity in the AI era not only hits the most practical needs of domestic enterprises but is also closely related to the value logic that Lenovo's SMB Business Group has always been following by providing one-stop services, working hand in hand with enterprise customers for common innovation and growth, and efficiently accompanying customers to success.

From the Year of Cloud-Native to AI

In 2020, Zhang Tao founded TanZhen Technology, and the same year was also the year of cloud-native.

In the initial stage, what TanZhen Technology did was to innovate network security services around the enterprise IT environment. Among them, the most important step was to use the mechanism of K8s to turn applications into a cloud-native containerized microservice.

"During our entrepreneurial period, we could clearly feel that the enterprise technology environment is developing towards agility. And around 2023, after going through a special stage, the requirements and logic for agility of most enterprises have changed."

Zhang Tao recalled more than a year ago, when the internal drive and the external environment were jointly subverting the industry's thinking: Network security has always been a "consensus area" for AI applications. When enterprises are in a downward cycle, the focus of cloud-native network security services is no longer the flexible speed, but has become cost reduction and efficiency improvement. This demand is highly consistent with the technical characteristics of generative AI.

In this context, to do AI applications, a core decision is placed in front of the team - is it AI for network security, or to solve the security problems of AI applications themselves? The complete data flow processing technology of the TanZhen Technology team and the experience of productizing the security operation and maintenance capabilities for many years make both directions possible. But obviously, the former has a higher priority. "When the AI era arrives, many enterprises have actually grown completely on the cloud, and in the field of cloud-native network security, we have been deeply cultivating for many years and have a relative advantage."

Looking back at the decision at that time from today's perspective, Zhang Tao believes that TanZhen Technology "has taken a very correct path". At the same time, many network security companies were buying cards and launching GPT related to security, but in the case of the failure of the Scaling Law, they simply did not have the ability to pre-train a large security model.

In contrast, AI has ushered in the most suitable stage in enterprise network security: a real digital employee.

Through digital employees with learning and interaction capabilities, human thinking logic can be conveyed to AI, and human experience can be used to generate intelligent research and judgment. Especially in sectors such as security operation and maintenance, since human judgment is still the main factor at present, and the human efficiency ratio is not high, the auxiliary role of AI will create a large value space.

Today, TanZhen Technology has built a complete cloud-native application security protection platform (CNAPP) from code to cloud, including a cloud-native security platform, a zero-trust micro-segmentation platform, and a cloud security situation awareness platform. It is also currently the first service provider to build an intelligent security operation and maintenance platform from perception to cognition and response based on a large model.

Waiting for the Singularity

Before starting his business, Zhang Tao used to be engaged in enterprise-level network security-related businesses in companies such as Nokia, CheckPoint, and Palo Alto Networks. After accumulating many years of experience in protective products, he served as the CEO of Tingyun.

In the entrepreneurial process of Tingyun and TanZhen Technology, Zhang Tao had long-term contact with the Lenovo ecosystem and received investment from Lenovo Star. Since then, Lenovo has also begun to use its own business ecosystem advantages to open up a new path for TanZhen Technology, delivering mature domain capabilities, resources, and talents to this invested enterprise. "Lenovo has helped us a lot, both in terms of capital and resources," Zhang Tao said.

This time, in the roadshow held by Lenovo, TanZhen Technology presented a new business logic. What surprised Lenovo once again is that TanZhen Technology's trend insight into the AIGC infrastructure coincides with Lenovo's original intention of exerting efforts in AI and laying out the AI PC ecosystem: The environment and terminal of applications and architectures determine the entrance of AI value.

Zhang Tao noticed that currently, the CTOs and senior engineers of the mainstream large models are basically focusing on using K8s to do the system architecture and network management between intelligent computing powers. Therefore, in 2025, a major development direction of AI is bound to be the reconstruction of traditional ToB software in a cloud-native manner.

In addition, in the process of communicating with the Lenovo business ecosystem, Zhang Tao is also observing other early-stage projects in the ecosystem and companies controlled by Lenovo, and found that other entrepreneurs are also building their own computing power platforms and have received Lenovo's awards and resources. Therefore, Zhang Tao began to actively participate in Lenovo's plans and activities. He believes that a long-term cooperation with Lenovo will have a very significant effect on TanZhen Technology:

First, Lenovo itself uses a large amount of underlying cloud capabilities in dimensions such as servers, and at the same time is developing solutions from equipment to digitization for thousands of industries. Therefore, it is very suitable to introduce the strength of TanZhen Technology to jointly address the demands of large B-end customers.

Second, after the arrival of the AI PC era, PC-side applications will usher in an explosion. At the same time, as the most important productivity scenario, network security will also be a capability that AI PCs must "compete" for. And this is precisely what TanZhen Technology is best at.

"Even without talking about the roadshow part, I myself have gained a lot at the meeting. The analysis and sharing of the R & D head of AMD China, the chief business engineer of Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, and many technical-side senior leaders have allowed us to jointly feel that - the singularity may be closer."

Today, Zhang Tao is no longer just a network security entrepreneur, but also has an additional identity as an AI application entrepreneur. And the activity and stickiness of the AIGC ecosystem are much better than he imagined.

At least in the Lenovo ecosystem, everyone is down-to-earth in carrying out technological innovations around computing power and the ecosystem, such as communicating and complementing each other on the basic ecosystem of Lenovo Baiying Intelligent Entity and Baichuang Lab to form a common capability.

Ecology is a Two-Way Choice

According to Precedence Research data, the global AI-based cybersecurity market size has reached 17.4 billion US dollars in 2022. It is expected to reach 102.78 billion US dollars in 2032.

Therefore, as long as the technology and products are at the top, TanZhen Technology does not need to worry about business verification.

But from the perspective of the era of large models, Zhang Tao feels that AI entrepreneurs are still just "a group of children picking up shells by the sea", trying to dig out pearls from the numerous shells. And Lenovo is waiting for the moment when the pearls are picked up, to help them generate greater value.

"We will see that among so many entrepreneurial teams participating in the competition, most people are unknown about commercialization. But whether it is to break through the ceiling or to walk out of the no-man's land, we all need these large factories and enterprise customers like Lenovo to cultivate a new business ecosystem on the basis of common cognition to help small and medium-sized enterprises generate greater business value."

After many years of entrepreneurship, Zhang Tao still looks forward to seeing the stars and the sea with his own eyes. After feeling the determination and patience of the Lenovo ecosystem in this roadshow, he is more aware that these domestic large factories are indeed fulfilling their responsibility to promote AI and the popularization of technology.

TanZhen Technology is good at the business logic of network security and has a large number of standardized enterprise solutions, but the lack of private domain data is difficult to support its future development in the AI field. And industry data is one of the sharp tools of Lenovo in the era of large models. In the future, TanZhen Technology will also continue to make two-way choices with the Lenovo business ecosystem. It can be said that on the issue of the ecosystem, TanZhen Technology has never hesitated.

When asked how deep the service chain in the cloud factory is and how high the ceiling of network security applications can be, Zhang Tao also excitedly mentioned WIZ to 36Kr. This company can become a young star in the network security industry and rejected Google's $23 billion acquisition because it found the integrated demand of the cloud-native era - solving the last mile problem of enterprise security management.

In the AI era, a similar "miracle" may also appear in the Chinese market.