EXCLUSIVE | One System, 187 Plazas and 50 Billion Information Spots: How Did Wanda Group Drive Innovation Via Systematic Forces?

来源:钛媒体

原标题：EXCLUSIVE | One System, 187 Plazas and 50 Billion Information Spots: How Did Wanda Group Drive Innovation Via Systematic Forces?

(Chinese Version)

Editor’s Note:

Compared with internet companies, there isn’t much room for trial and error for real estate companies like Wanda Group, though it has already been trying to get rid of the “label” and promote innovation via technology. Recently, TMTPost had an in-depth interview with Wanda’s senior executives including Feng Zhongqian, standing vice manager of Information Management Center of Wanda Group, and attempted to draw a full picture of the brand new “smart” industrial ecosystem it has been building up.

As a matter of fact, it’s hard to link Wanda’s moves in the past two years with a real estate company, though the effort to get rid of the label started a long time ago.

As early as 2013, Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, has already listed cultural industries and transnational enterprises as the course of its fourth restructuring. As the momentum for “internet plus” gathered, Wanda even debuted its own e-commerce platform Feifan in 2015.

In October 2016, Wanda again restructured and announced the establishment of “Wanda Internet Technology Group” in Shanghai, adding a new business sector to its existing business landscape, comprised of commerce, culture and finance businesses. Half a year later, Wanda entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with IBM, won the technical support from IBM IaaS, PaaS, Watson, blockchain and IoT, and officially entered the public cloud sector.

“Wanda entered the internet and technology sector because we are confident of the potential in ‘combining real industry with internet’ and have both strong real industry genes and strong real economy resources,” Qu Dejun, president of Wanda Internet Technology Group, said during the 2017 IBM China Forum held this April.

He told TMTPost that to revitalize, China’s real economy had to be connected to the internet ASAP and that the widespread application of internet technology had provided the best opportunity for real industries.

Qu Dejun, president of Wanda Internet Technology Group (left) & Chen Liming, chairman of IBM Greater China Region (right)

Beneath the booming development of Wanda in new sectors, however, it is rarely known that details like the heating, air-conditioning, lighting, fire control and background music in all the 187 Wanda Plazas across China are all guided by a comprehensive management system. In fact, such information integration is also a key part of Wanda’s restructuring.

How did Wanda build and improve its own IBMS within three years?

From 2011 to 2015, the very period of its most rapid expansion, Wanda opened almost half a hundred new Wanda Plazas every year. Wanda Plazas are known as commercial complexes integrating various business forces, from shopping, restaurant to entertainment, etc. Every time it opened a new plaza, Wanda has to add around 3,000 sets of air-conditioning, heating, drainage and elevator equipment.

Such large-scale “maneuver” of hardware and servers inevitably makes Wanda Plazas into a gigantic data center. Beneath the 3,000 sets of equipment in every Wanda Plaza, there are over 10,000 information spots in areas such as patrol, maintenance management. Therefore, there will be altogether over 50 billion information spots in nearly 200 Wanda Plazas.

Traditionally, engineers have to be assigned to commercial complexes to maintain the variety of facilities. Therefore, Wanda used to assign 43 engineers to each Wanda Plaza. However, with so many plazas to maintain often in one city and so limited number of engineers, it’s hardly a feasible plan to rely solely on engineers’ manual work.

At the beginning of 2012, Wanda began to consider the possibility of “Talent Cloud”. At first, it was referred to as “one-click mechanism”, that is, the entire weak electricity system is controlled by a click of different buttons. After conducting a research over all the IBMS (Intelligent Building Management System), Wanda launched its own solution, Talent Cloud Version 1.0, at the beginning of 2013.

With the system, Wanda was able to manage each plaza in a unified and intelligent manner for the first time, controlling over 30,000 information spots in 16 sub-systems, including fire control, heating and air-conditioning, public lighting and drainage, etc. At each Wanda Plaza, there would be a special “Talent Cloud Monitoring Room” where engineers could real-time monitor all the systems in a visual interface.