From 1999 to 2008, a company dedicated to providing information service to SMEs had gone through many hard times from the emergence of Internet to Internet bubbles. However, it is overwhelmingly affecting hundreds of thousands of Chinese SMEs today, with service coverage to most of the areas in China. CE Dongli Technology Group Company Limited ("CE Dongli"), currently enjoys the prestige of expertise in the field of information operation.

As a respectable company in SaaS, CE Dongli's nine-year efforts on the information market of SMEs have once again proved that SaaS is an effective solution for Chinese SMEs. As the ninth anniversary of CE Dongli is approaching, Ms. Chen Dan, GM of the company, accepted our interview, and pointed out one more time that the nine-year practice of CE Dongli fully proved that SaaS mode could not only accelerate the informatisation of SMEs, but also overcome their problem of insufficient capital for informatisation construction. CE Dongli will continue to work on SaaS localization, and promote the application of SaaS in informatisation products. The company will also adopt the most advanced information technology to build an information application platform to meet the needs of company business and management and provide all-round, standard and one-stop information operation service. The platform will be maintained and upgraded continuously.

From concept to application

In 1999, many SMEs were still ignorant about informatisation and Internet as Internet began budding. For the growing SMEs, informatisation was still a very abstract concept. Exactly in the same year, CE Dongli penetrated the power of Internet and set its mind on the information service for SMEs.

By then, one resolute name was added into the meritorious record of Chinese enterprise informatisation. One step at a time, CE Dongli looked thoroughly into the information needs of SMEs and successfully applied the idea of "Operation" to the realization of enterprise informatisation. To this day, informatisation has gone far from a single concept to real application, and CE Dongli has been firmly on the road of enterprise informatisation for nine years, with trust from 300,000 clients. Currently, there are totally 1,200 experts and over 6,000 employees in CE Dongli's over 70 branch offices cross the country. On average, daily company mailboxes in operation on CE Dongli's platform total 50,000, daily emails reaching company clients through CE Dongli sum up to 1.5 million, and daily emails sent by enterprises running on CE Dongli platform reach 100,000.

IDC is a world famous marketing advisory institution of IT and telecom. Its research report "2007 IT Service Tracker" shows that, with excellent performance, CE Dongli was at the top of the 2007 China IT Outsourcing Market Ranking, taking place of international giant IBM.

We have to admit that this marks a great success of CE Dongli. This is also the progress of informatisation moving further and further from concept to application. Actually, several years ago, there were still doubts about the survival and development of companies like CE Dongli. Through the reform in 2004, CE Dongli interpreted the localization of IT application service with practice, which was an incredible contribution to the informatisation of SMEs. In 2007, CE Dongli made an upgrade of this idea and began the endeavor of SaaS localization.

Witness the success of localization

In July, 2007, a report titled "SaaS - Shortcut to informatisation for SMEs" issued by world prominent research institution IDC started the long journey SaaS Sinicization. Based on survey of the hundreds and thousands of SMEs clients of CE Dongli, this report proved that SaaS was the right mode for SMEs informatisation in China.

After more than one year, SaaS gradually progressed from idea to actual application. It's no exaggeration at all to say that 2008 was a year of fierce competition and rapid development in SaaS market, which can be seen from the series of conferences themed with SaaS, such as "SaaS Application and Development Forum 2008" and "SaaS in China - the Second China Software Operation Service Conference". According to the recent "2008 White Paper on the Development of SaaS Market Situation in China", the overall market size of SaaS has reached RMB15.75 billion, a sharp contrast to the RMB6.8 billion in 2006. What can not be underestimated behind the rapid growth is the driving force of all the operators.

In 2007, CE Dongli set off a wave of SMEs informatisation. CE Dongli played a vital role in the process of SaaS localization, as it were. By then, the Chinese style growth of SaaS had been redefined. In 2008, while sticking to SaaS service model, CE Dongli creatively positioned itself with the brand of Information Operation Expert. Meanwhile, SaaS was embedded to the product chains of those companies more deeply, and several Z products were introduced, which brought tremendous convenience to the SMEs with "financing problem and rising cost" in informatisation. This was another successful practice of CE Dongli's localization strategy which was also said to be implied in the Z-Mail coming soon onto the market.

According to Iresearch statistics, the market size of domestic company mailbox reached RMB680million in 2007, and is still increasing at an annual growth rate of 30%. With the rising number of SMEs and their increasing acknowledgement of IT business, what kind of effect will the SaaS model Z-Mail bring to the company mailbox market? Let's just wait expectantly.

The Fit is the Best

2008 is an eventful year: we had the Olympic opportunity, yet also global economic downturn, ice and snow disaster, and earthquake. All these lead to the undeniable fact that the SMEs have fallen into recession.

The statistics recently released by State Development and Reform Committee shows that, under double influence of international economic slowdown and domestic macro-control, a considerable number of SMEs will face the difficulty of funding chain break. 10% of the SMEs achieved industry added value growth rate of 30% in the first half of the year, 15% lower than that of last year. The SMEs are going through a tough test of “financing problem and rising cost”.

Faced with challenges from macro-environment, SMEs will be more inclined to see the advantages of enterprise informatisation, such as cost optimization, technology innovation and management creation. Nonetheless, in consideration of survival pressure, they usually don't want to input too much fund to build their own informatisation system. With SaaS service mode, enterprises can save a lot of money on hardware and its maintenance and their need for cost control is greatly satisfied. All they need to pay is a certain amount of service rental fee, and then they can enjoy service of corresponding hardware, software and their maintenance. They also have the right of software use and upgrade.

With nine years' experience in serving SMEs informatisation, CE Dongli is able to provide SMEs in difficult situation with a more suitable product - localized SaaS service mode, which is now regarded as one of the key CE Dongli modes in their informatisation service to SMEs. CE Dongli will keep improving and enhancing its technology operation and service capability in light of clients' different needs at different phases, and provide informatisation solutions that most fit them.