Hi, welcome to the ThoughtWorks podcast. I'm one of your regular hosts, Neil Ford.

And I'm Mike Mason. I'm also one of your regular hosts. Hi, I'm Sean Chi. I'm a technology advisor

working at the South China. My name is Huanha. I'm the head of Technology of Southern China.

And today we're going to talk about a fascinating subject that came up during our most recent

tab face-to-face meeting. As many of you know, we meet twice a year face-to-face to produce the

radar. And very often fascinating conversations and topics come up. And in fact, this

time, this topic actually came up a couple of radars ago with a tough translation and we had a full

presentation on it this time because we're in China. And today we're going to talk about a

subject that you can't even Google in the West because when you try, you get something that doesn't really mean anything. And so it's this concept that we first heard a couple of radars ago as something called the middle end. And it was described as us as, well, you have a front end and you have a back end and you have the middle end. But then it was also

called Zong Tai, which is the thing that we heard about now. And it turns out there's a lot of

interesting nuance around platforms. But let's let the two native folks who know about this thing

and are building it everywhere talk about it. And I just want to make sure that we get the name right as well, because I think all the Westerners who are seeing this written down are going to be pronouncing this Zong Thai, and that's wrong, right? Close enough. Well, no, no, no, let's try and get it right. So how do you say it? So in Chinese we call it Zhong Tai.. Zhong Thai. Yeah, Zhong Thai.

Because probably I can give a little bit background because even today, so we don't even have a clear definition for what actually Zhongtai is.

So the idea kicking, I think, is back to you four or five years ago.

So Alibaba, so most people know that, this is the largest e-commerce

website like in the world. So one day they announced, we're going to starting a totally new

BU. So the totally... BPU being business union. Yeah, BINNU. Okay, it's a business group.

A business group. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they say, we're going to start a total new business

group. So that's targeting small enterprise. So they say, we're going to start a total new business group.

So that's targeting small enterprise.

So they're actually talking about, say, in the digital world, the most important thing

is no longer your like ERP, your internal system.

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