Can SaaS Become a Remedy for China's Software Industry? Insights on API Standardization, Business Visualization, and Open Domain

Earlier, an article titled “China’s Software Industry Almost Completely Wiped Out” went viral, provoking heated discussion. The author, a veteran with over 20 years in the software field, questions whether SaaS could serve as a cure for the Chinese software industry.

The term “software industry” is overly broad; the public’s focus is on the “traditional software industry,” which mainly serves government, finance, energy, and manufacturing sectors. These sectors have long provided fertile ground for software services but are now labeled as “low‑growth,” “relationship‑driven,” and “slow to innovate,” highlighting an urgent need for transformation.

Finance, once a pioneer of software engineering and service‑oriented architectures, benefited from partnerships with international vendors (IBM, Oracle, SAP). The recent rise of the internet sector attracted talent away from traditional domains, and the withdrawal of foreign vendors (the “IOE” exit) left domestic firms lagging in innovation and cost control.

Consequently, the author asks whether the software industry still has opportunities after the decline of previous subsidies and market advantages.

Today, many firms that once focused on internet services are turning back to traditional industries, injecting new momentum and blurring the boundaries between the two. Teams working on risk control, data analysis, and infrastructure (databases, cloud‑native) have achieved notable success in finance, transportation, and government projects.

Key observations:

Client demands (the “甲方”) drive supplier capabilities (the “乙方”). Modern clients are increasingly tech‑savvy, favoring rational evaluation over personal connections, which raises the bar for service providers.

SaaS has become the dominant software business model after a decade of growth, but simply copying the U.S. model does not fit most Chinese enterprises.

The author proposes three practical approaches to make SaaS more adaptable to diverse, customized needs:

1. API Standardization – Establish business‑scenario‑driven standard APIs to reduce the effort of custom integration, improving development efficiency by more than threefold and also benefiting product design, testing, and integration.

2. Business Visualization – Create a “digital map” of which customers invoke which business modules in real time, allowing high‑value custom features to be identified and standardized, thus keeping custom code manageable.

3. Open Domain Architecture – Elevate common extension points to a domain‑level “open gateway,” strengthening domain modeling, preserving data‑asset value, and preventing fragmented, chaotic extensions.

AI assistance (LLM‑driven code generation) dramatically reduces the workload of mapping non‑standard interfaces to standard APIs, turning days of effort into hours. Tencent’s suite of SaaS products (WeChat Work, Tencent Meeting, Docs, etc.) already integrates the Tencent Hunyuan large model, enabling developers and enterprises to invoke APIs directly for intelligent upgrades.

In summary, through API standardization, business visualization, and open domain design, the author offers a feasible technical‑architecture solution for scaling SaaS customization while supporting the upgrade of traditional software systems. Although this is only one facet of local SaaS adoption, it points to a promising path for the Chinese software industry to seize emerging opportunities.