Liu Wei: Future of SAAS is hopeful

Liu Wei, partner of China Broadband Capital (CBC), expressed his opinion of the future of software as a service in a Thursday interview at the Chinese Enterprise Service Session.

"Our investments are mainly business-oriented and focus on technology, bid data, cloud computing, AI and IOT," Liu said. "We hope our clients can develop themselves better to offer us more choice in return."

Liu added the industry was entering a decisive moment.

"It can be seen from the market that the whole SAAS industry is at a bottleneck in its development. The bottleneck can be caused by customers, technologies or other things. In China, AI companies with revenue more than $10 million are quite rare. But I still think highly of SAAS, the core part of IT cloudization.

"The whole industry of SAAS is not declining. The thing is that its speed of growth is slowing down. In fact many companies are on the path of development. We used to have very high expectations of SAAS companies, and now we see the gaps. In my opinion the development of SAAS has its own regulations, which we are studying and trying to find out," explained Liu.

When asked about his opinion on the development of AI, Liu said AI nowadays is applied in many areas of our lives.

"I know now AI is even trying to be helpful in translation and interpreting. Some robots are specially designed to do interpreting jobs — a simple job, but when it comes to speeches or conversations with special terms or simultaneous interpreting, human interpreters are still irreplaceable.

"AI is of great value and importance, but for business beginners, they should realize it is first a technology, not a commercial mode. They have to think clearly whether AI is really helpful for their business before they run blindly into it. Identifying the goal of the business is the basis for developing it," Liu said.