Interview with Tong Yongyue: Will CDN that advocates "standard size" have bigger moves in the future?

As the infrastructure of the Internet, CDN has been tepid for many years, but with the multiple rounds of changes brought about by the continuous evolution of the Internet, the changes in user usage scenarios and habits have brought about a reshuffle in the CDN industry, and many emerging CDN service providers have taken turns to squeeze into the center of the stage. Today's CDN market structure presents a multi-party force, including traditional CDN service providers such as Wangsu Technology and ChinaCache; cloud service providers such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud that are focusing on CDN; and emerging CDN service providers such as Yunfan Accelerator.

Beneath the prosperity lies the extremely fierce competition in the industry. How can one break out of this red ocean? Tong Yongyue, founder and CEO of Yunfan Accelerator, summarized the answer in eight words: "Deconstruct CDN and return to the original intention."

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Tong Yongyue, Founder and CEO of Yunfan Accelerator

Malicious price wars are harmful to the industry

As the CDN industry is developing rapidly, it is also facing many problems. Tong Yongyue reflected on the current problems of the entire CDN industry: operator monopoly, cloud system entry, broadband sublease, lack of industry standards, price cuts, simple profit model, chaotic charging...

Recently, the price war in the CDN industry has escalated again. Not long ago, a cloud CDN service provider lowered its prices again and announced that it would definitely lower prices again in the future. At the same time, the prices of traditional CDN service providers have been cut in half, and many new CDN service providers have already played the "free card".

The further reduction in CDN prices has given many people in and outside the industry the illusion that the CDN industry is about to undergo another reshuffle, but Tong Yongyue disagrees. He emphasized that providing customers with better value does not mean how low the price is, but a stable and complete platform and better services. Price reductions that reduce costs through self-innovation are more worthy of promotion, while the practice of suppressing competitors through price wars will hurt the industry. He believes that being responsible for the company's brand and the industrial chain is a return to the original intention.

It is true that short-term price wars can help companies achieve the goal of grabbing customers, but price wars are not a long-term solution after all. In the long run, they will lead to vicious competition among companies, and the harsh competitive environment will not be conducive to promoting technological progress in the industry.

Tong Yongyue is not worried about Yunfan Accelerator being forced into a price war, because Yunfan Accelerator is not a company that is aggressively expanding, and its business scope is limited to the field of streaming media. "We have not extended our business to the CDN field too far, such as finance, games, sports, etc. These are actually high-profit customers, but we did not do them for our strategic purpose. Our team's genes come from the original Qvod technical team, and we have a deep technical accumulation in the field of streaming media, so we chose to do streaming media based on our own capabilities and focus on the vertical field of streaming media."

Tong Yongyue introduced that Yunfan Accelerator's strategic goal this year is to become the standard in the field of streaming CDN, which is roughly divided into three sectors: the first is the vertical field of interactive live broadcast; the second is the field of new media and OTT; and the third is the short video community. Yunfan Accelerator needs to make its technology and services recognized by top customers in these three fields.

Tong Yongyue revealed that Yunfan Accelerator has signed cooperation agreements with five of the seven Internet TV licensees. Televisions across the country are becoming Internet-based, and Yunfan Accelerator has already made arrangements in the OTT field as early as the end of 2015. In addition, the short video community sector has shown an explosive trend this year, with Kuaishou's new round of financing, Meitu's listing in Hong Kong, and Pear Video's emergence, which has led Yunfan Accelerator to decide to make efforts in the short video field.

"It is precisely because our strategy is focused and we only expand the customers we have defined that the price war in the market will have an impact on us, but we are able to cope with it." Tong Yongyue emphasized that he is not against price wars, because normal price changes in any industry and field will promote the normal development of the entire industry. But the important thing is whether this price war is a profit-making price war or a malicious loss-making price war. The former is very healthy and beneficial to the entire industry chain, but the latter is irresponsible and not only easily harms the industry, but also causes immeasurable damage to the initiator's own brand.

Tong Yongyue once surveyed the CTOs of 20 companies, and these CTOs all admitted that price was not their primary consideration, but the overall customer experience was what they cared about the most. High-quality customer experience largely reflects the strength of a CDN service provider, and also largely reflects how high it can stand and how far it can go in the future.

Improving the quality of CDN services

From static acceleration such as simple web page downloads in the past to dynamic acceleration industries such as games, Internet TV, mobile live streaming, short videos, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence; from simple services such as content distribution, caching, and acceleration to value-added services such as cloud computing, traffic management, and big data, all of which are urging the CDN industry to develop rapidly and also putting forward higher requirements on the stability and real-time performance of CDN.

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Tong Yongyue uses three aspects to measure the quality of

Tong Yongyue said that Yunfan Accelerator will make some forward-looking, regular and logical deductions for the evolution of future user needs, and reserve technical solutions in this direction. Think about whether customers can use it? Is it easy to use? Is it sufficient? He believes that these three aspects are the yardsticks for judging the pros and cons, and the specific implementation in the work is "one big and four points":

One is to provide customers with higher value from a strategic perspective and save costs for customers, but this does not mean lowering prices, but using some technical means to reduce the overall bandwidth.

Four points focus on service quality: completeness of functions; performance compliance rate; platform stability; and service responsiveness.

Tong Yongyue believes that for the CDN industry, a balanced proportion of stable architecture, complete functions, excellent performance, demand exploration, rapid response capability, and reasonable prices are important indicators for measuring a CDN company. Just like a person's body shape, a pear shape is thin on top and wide on the bottom, while an apple shape is wide on top and thin on the bottom. Neither is very healthy. Only a balanced and coordinated body shape can be a healthy body shape, and the same is true for CDN companies.

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Tong Yongyue expressed his desire to return to his original aspirations and create a standard "CDN body"

In addition to focusing on building a standard "CDN body", Yunfan Accelerator has been constantly learning and improving in order to provide better services to customers. In addition to learning from Wangsu Technology, which has a very high reputation among customers in the industry, Tong Yongyue also tried to learn from other service industries. He recently read "Four Seasons Hotel Cloud Dream", which is a management book and an entrepreneur biography. "Four Seasons Hotel has always been a model in the hotel industry. I have also gained a lot from reading this book from the perspective of a CDN service provider."

Delivering immeasurable value

With the rapid development of the Internet, whoever can continuously innovate technology will maintain continuous competitiveness in the future competition. The CDN industry is also no exception. Only by continuously innovating technology and achieving product upgrades can we meet the ever-increasing customer needs; at the same time, products with high technical content will also have higher profit margins and product added value. Only by improving the technical content of products and achieving product differentiation can the company maintain a competitive advantage in the CDN industry.

In the past few years, wherever the hurricane of the sharing economy passes, there are subversive changes. The shared CDN that Yunfan Accelerator first proposed last year has been accepted and recognized by many customers after a year of testing and operation. This way of helping customers reduce costs through technological innovation and model innovation has enabled Yunfan Accelerator to gain recognition from 40+ top industry customers in less than two years since its establishment.

Tong Yongyue said that the hot words in the industry are: dream, subversion, innovation; but they keep silent about: operation, cost, efficiency, which is an unhealthy development model. Next, the competition in the CDN industry will transition from the past "extensive" competition based on resources to the competition of technical details and service stability. The CDN industry will enter a new round of stable victory.

"We should do the right thing at the right time," said Tong Yongyue. Yunfan Accelerator's current clients are enterprises in the top fields. In the future, with its own development, enhanced capabilities, and the convergence of personal resources, it is not ruled out that it will provide services to small and medium-sized customers in a wider range of fields. "It mainly depends on the competition. If the external environment allows, we hope to speed up a little. If the external environment is relatively bad, we will expand and expand in a relatively safe way."

As CDN enters the licensing era, the various chaos in the market, such as sublease, chaotic content, and irregular video services, will be cleared up. At the same time, the industry entry threshold will be gradually raised to avoid disorderly market competition and stabilize the industry structure. By then, whoever can truly solve the "pain points" of customers will be able to take a step ahead in the development of CDN.

Yunfan Accelerator has been committed to solving customers' "pain points" and transmitting immeasurable value. In the future, with its stable and secure technical advantages, it will definitely give greater momentum to the CDN industry. In the context of the hot development of cloud computing and the cloudification of CDN, Yunfan Accelerator will definitely not be limited to the CDN field, and may have greater breakthroughs in the field of video cloud computing in the future. Stay tuned.