The accelerating global digitalization process is reshaping the foundational logic of the business landscape. From smart manufacturing in industrial sectors to intelligent customer service in service industries, every facet of business operations is undergoing an efficiency revolution. Amidst this transformation, collaborative management software has evolved from a mere office automation tool to a cornerstone infrastructure supporting organizational agility.

As a leading enterprise in the domestic collaborative management realm, Seeyon, with its deep-rooted "Yonyou" genes, has constructed a comprehensive solution matrix spanning government affairs, finance, manufacturing, and beyond. According to IDC reports, Seeyon has consistently ranked among the top three in China's collaborative application management software market for several years. However, amidst the industry's shifts towards accelerated SaaS transformation and low-code platform proliferation, this established vendor now faces profound challenges, including escalating product homogenization and lagging ecosystem development.

Constructing an Ecosystem Moat

The essence of competition in the enterprise service sector lies in ecosystem confrontations. Seeyon's resilience amidst industry reshuffling stems not from isolated technological breakthroughs but from its construction of a tripartite value network encompassing "products, scenarios, and ecosystems." This systemic capability enables it to forge differentiated barriers within the industry's specialized domains.

Firstly, unlike standardized collaboration tools, Seeyon leverages a visual development platform to realize personalized empowerment tailored to "thousands of enterprises with thousands of faces." Currently, competition in the enterprise service market has transcended the initial stage of functional iteration, evolving towards a deeper understanding of industry scenarios and robust integration capabilities of ecological resources. Against this backdrop, Seeyon's low-code development platform serves as a bridge linking enterprises' personalized needs with standardized products.

In the realm of government affairs digitization, Seeyon's modular architecture swiftly responds to the process reengineering requirements of departments at various levels. For instance, in a provincial government cloud project, the platform condensed the delivery of a traditional approval system, which typically required months of development, into just three weeks through visual forms and process engines. This adaptable capability allows Seeyon to establish a unique technical discourse within in-depth industry scenarios.

Secondly, Seeyon has forged a value closed loop spanning from ERP to collaborative management. When manufacturing enterprises' production data is seamlessly linked with approval processes in real-time, and the financial accounting cycle is precisely aligned with collaboration nodes, this deeply integrated experience fosters an ecological stickiness that becomes "affordable to use and indispensable." The experience of a large manufacturing group underscores how the seamless integration of Seeyon's collaborative system with Yonyou's ERP significantly enhances cross-system data synchronization efficiency. This ecosystem-level collaboration has erected a formidable moat that a standalone product finds hard to breach.

Thirdly, over a decade of profound cultivation in the e-government field has allowed Seeyon to amass cognitive assets in this domain that are challenging to replicate. Years of deep engagement have endowed Seeyon with a profound comprehension of party and government organs' workflows. Its logic for official document circulation signing and approval, permission design for cross-departmental collaboration, and even meticulous control over security compliance have coalesced into cognitive assets that are hard to duplicate. Amid the wave of information technology innovation and substitution, this decade-long verified trust relationship has positioned Seeyon as the preferred partner for government customers' digital transformation endeavors.

The Dilemma of Innovators

However, past successes often morph into shackles for future transformations. Precisely these technical inertias and path dependencies in traditional advantageous areas sow hidden perils for enterprises' continuous evolution. As industry competition shifts from functional completeness to architectural advancement, Seeyon's shortcomings gradually come to light.

Firstly, there's the competition anxiety triggered by product homogenization. The current collaborative management software market exhibits a high degree of functional overlap, with customers increasingly prioritizing cost-effectiveness in their choices. Internet giants swiftly capture the small and medium-sized enterprise market with free tools, compelling traditional vendors to adjust their pricing strategies. This pressure results in a continuous decline in product prices, squeezing Seeyon's profit margins. Simultaneously, while excessive customization bolsters customer loyalty, it also prolongs implementation cycles and hikes delivery costs. Striking a balance between functional innovation and cost control has emerged as a pressing issue for Seeyon.

Secondly, there's the double-edged sword effect of ecological dependence. Yonyou Network is both a strategic partner and a potential competitor. When it launched its own collaborative product, YonSuite, the original symbiotic relationship showed subtle fissures. Instances of regional partner losses indicate that an overly concentrated channel structure is weakening market expansion autonomy. This model accelerates growth but may inhibit innovation during transformation phases.

Thirdly, there's the lagging integration and application of emerging technologies. Amidst the intelligence wave, Seeyon's pace of technology integration is somewhat sluggish. Compared to international vendors deeply embedding AI into business processes, Seeyon's current system's application of natural language processing remains at the basic instruction recognition stage. For example, the accuracy of knowledge base retrieval hasn't yet reached industry benchmark levels, and there's room for improvement in unstructured data processing. The metaverse office scenario deployment is also relatively conservative, with the three-dimensional collaboration function yet to form a mature solution, evincing a clear gap compared to Meta's virtual space.

Ecological Game Amidst Multi-Power Competition

The current collaborative management software market has evolved into a tripartite landscape comprising traditional ERP vendors, internet giants, and rising stars in vertical fields. This competitive terrain urges Seeyon to reassess its strategic positioning.

Confronted with comprehensive solutions from vendors like Yonyou and Kingdee, Seeyon opts to achieve system integration through open API interfaces. This strategy avoids direct conflicts while expanding the value chain. Typical cases demonstrate how a certain automotive parts supplier significantly enhanced inventory turnover efficiency by linking CRM data with MRP calculations using the platform connector. However, market education remains a pivotal challenge, as many enterprises haven't yet recognized the complementary value of collaborative management and ERP systems, leading to insufficient popularity for the hybrid deployment model.

Faced with the dimension-reducing strike of internet giants, Seeyon chooses to concentrate on vertical fields to construct a moat. Currently, DingTalk and Enterprise WeChat are swiftly eroding the small and medium-sized enterprise market with their vast user bases. Seeyon adopts a differentiated competition strategy, focusing on medium and large customers in vertical sectors like manufacturing and finance. Additionally, its hybrid cloud deployment solution, co-created with Huawei Cloud, has assisted multiple large-scale enterprises in completing system cloud migration. This approach of leveraging cloud computing vendor resources has proven effective, but breaking through the technology ecological blockade of giants remains a critical issue.

Furthermore, Seeyon is also forging a differentiated competitive moat and opening up new growth avenues through innovation. For instance, at the product development level, Seeyon continues to invest heavily in the integrated application of AI technology. The newly launched intelligent form-filling robot drastically reduces the time spent on expense reimbursement forms, and this efficiency boost has become a key selling point for attracting enterprises. In terms of ecosystem construction, the "Star Chain Plan" has attracted over 500 partners, forming a comprehensive service system encompassing consulting, implementation, and custom development. Notably, it has achieved breakthroughs in blockchain evidence storage. A government project has achieved full-process traceability of electronic signatures through smart contracts, and this innovation may herald new growth avenues.

Currently, digital transformation is progressing from initial penetration to in-depth development. Seeyon must not only navigate the perpetual tension between product standardization and customization but also seize the historical opportunities presented by information technology innovation substitution and globalization expansion. In the convergence zone of the consumer internet and the industrial internet, traditional vendors must not only safeguard the strategic depth of the government market but also cultivate agile genes to adapt to changes. For Seeyon, whether it can harmonize the three strategies of cloud-native, globalization, and ecologization will determine its ability to continue scripting a new growth legend in the depths of digitization.