Evan Yang of OceanBase: How a Tech Product Leader "Evolves" into a Global Business Operator?

The 17th Double 11 Shopping Festival arrived as scheduled, with e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Tmall remaining popular. During key milestones such as the kick-off of pre-sales and the official sales period, hundreds of millions of users flooded in instantly, causing a surge in data volume. Yet consumers experienced seamless browsing, search, order placement, and payment as usual-all backed by the reliable support of high-performance databases. OceanBase, a leading distributed database vendor, has been an indispensable "gatekeeper" in this process for more than a decade.

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Born out of Ant Group in 2010, OceanBase has honed its capabilities in extreme scenarios like Double 11, Alipay's Five Fortunes campaign, and the Spring Festival red envelope campaigns. In 2016, it successfully supported Alipay's core systems, matching the capabilities of other leading database products. In June 2020, the 10-year-old tech company officially entered independent operations. Today, OceanBase has joined the first-tier database ranks and is accelerating its march into the global market.

Shortly before last year's Double 11, OceanBase CEO Evan Yang was named to the "2025 Forbes China 100 Most Influential Chinese Elite" list-his second time receiving this honor after 2023. In his view, this recognition belongs not only to him personally but also to a tech team that persists in deepening its roots in a "track with long-term growth potential and substantial opportunities."

"Customers in various sectors such as public services, banking, and telecommunications entrust their core business systems to us-that is the greatest trust in OceanBase," Evan Yang said. "What we need to do is deliver value to a higher standard."

Since the beginning of 2025, OceanBase has achieved impressive performance results.

In customer expansion: OceanBase has not only gained further recognition from leading customers in its traditional industries but also made a name for itself in new tracks and secured new orders.

In the financial sector: In China, OceanBase serves almost all top-tier banks, 70% of leading insurance groups, 75% of top securities firms, and 50% of leading fund companies. The number of banking customers with assets exceeding 100 billion yuan has surpassed 100, and it has also made breakthroughs among international financial institutions. According to IDC reports, OceanBase has ranked first in the on-premises distributed database market for the financial industry for two consecutive years.

In the telecom sector: OceanBase serves China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom-the three major operators. It supports one-third of provincial-level mobile core systems in China, covering nearly 20 types of core business systems and over 400 clusters, serving 60% of China's mobile users.

Beyond that, OceanBase has successfully tapped into customers in sectors such as apparel, retail, consumer electronics, and smart manufacturing. Brands like Anta, Pop Mart, Xiaomi, Coros, and CATL have all adopted OceanBase's solutions.

"If 100 points is the full score, I'd give the company 80 points for its performance in 2025," Evan Yang said. "The remaining 20 points will be used to fulfill our commitments next year."

The unclaimed 20 points are mainly attributed to the exploration in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market, localization during overseas expansion, and the cultivation of a global developer ecosystem. "We've already started working on these aspects in 2025, and we can do even better in the next year," he added.

01. The Great "Convergence" in The Database Market in 2025

The database market in 2025 is undergoing a profound "convergence."

On one hand, enterprises in key sectors such as finance and public services are embracing comprehensive digital transformation, which has brought a new phase of competition.

"In the past, there were many database vendors, just like the 'Hundred Databases War,'" Evan Yang said. "Now only a few remain."

A consequent paradigm shift is that when making choices, customers are not just selecting suppliers to buy products from, but long-term partners with strong sustainable development capabilities. Additionally, the AI era has raised new demands for applications and infrastructure, and customers expect suppliers to have strong innovation capabilities to jointly explore new, time-sensitive solutions tailored to specific scenarios. These shifts have led customers to conduct more in-depth assessments of database vendors' comprehensive capabilities.

In this new industry environment, in addition to extensively exploring various industries, OceanBase has also expanded its product portfolio to meet customer needs in different scenarios and development stages.

"A database is a foundational product that won't be frequently changed once selected. Our comprehensive product line can provide integrated solutions, allowing customers to use them with greater confidence over time," Evan Yang said. "We also offer products and solutions suitable for a wide range of mid-tier, small, and medium-sized enterprises as well as startups, to serve a broader market."

In terms of market expansion, OceanBase has a unique advantage: it is both a startup and backed by the Ant Group ecosystem. This enables it to take on highly complex and challenging projects like Double 11, while leveraging Ant Group's ecosystem to engage with leading enterprises.

Evan Yang believes that China's database industry is entering a new phase of innovation dominated by "convergence."

From the supply side: The data explosion driven by AI has brought new reshuffling opportunities, but the Matthew Effect is prominent-larger enterprises benefit from stronger network and scale effects and develop faster. Moreover, when underlying technologies mature, vendors will shift to niche markets, further accelerating the "convergence" process.

From the demand side: Customers also need database vendors' integration capabilities. "No matter in China or globally, the mainstream approach is to build integrated large-scale platforms that can not only support traditional businesses but also integrate AI and large models, with the ability to accommodate both models and data comprehensively," Evan Yang said.

He believes that the general trend of "convergence" will inevitably lead the database market to converge to a few leading vendors. "Everyone has relatively comprehensive capabilities and is addressing their shortcomings-and OceanBase is also moving in this direction. The key in the future is how to form unique differentiation by combining our own technical strengths, industry know-how, and AI capabilities while building a 'large and comprehensive' platform."

02. Riding the AI Wave: From Technology Provider to AI Value Co-Creator

In addition to the industry trend towards integration, the rising AI wave and rapid growth of enterprise demand have also profoundly reshaped how database companies compete.

Evan Yang observed that most of OceanBase's customers manage massive volumes of both structured and unstructured data. With the arrival of the AI large model era, these customers are among the first to explore how to mine and utilize data and integrate it into AI large models-bringing significant opportunities for OceanBase to fully embrace AI.

In his view, enterprises face two major bottlenecks in AI implementation: first, how to truly embed AI into business processes rather than keeping it in the demonstration phase; second, how to efficiently use internal data to train custom models. As a platform supporting enterprises' data management needs, OceanBase is naturally positioned to empower AI adoption.

As a 100% independently developed native distributed database, OceanBase already has key data processing capabilities for the AI era, such as support for vector databases, hybrid SQL and AI retrieval, TP/AP/AI mixed workloads, and unified multimodal data processing. Customers across sectors-including financial services-have deployed its products in AI-driven scenarios.

Beyond traditional structured data, OceanBase has focused its R&D efforts on unstructured data, driven by the characteristics of AI large models, including hybrid retrieval of multimodal, vector, and relational data.

Previously, enterprises faced cumbersome and inefficient processes when storing and developing data for AI Agents or AI-native applications. Through a series of technological and product innovations, OceanBase has realized unified storage and retrieval across diverse data types, addressing pain points such as data silos and helping enterprises reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Over the past year, OceanBase has focused on implementing its " Data times AI " strategy, continuously enhancing technological and product capabilities-especially in real-time analysis, multimodal storage, and hybrid retrieval-laying a solid foundation for serving enterprises' AI needs.

AI applications place high demands on real-time performance. For example, once TP (transactional) data enters a system, real-time analysis is required. Evan Yang explained that, building on its original multi-workload integration capabilities, OceanBase has comprehensively upgraded its performance and product offerings.

"First, there has been a significant improvement in performance; second, we have enhanced materialized view capabilities to enable complex data combinations with real-time updates; third, we have connected 'data lakes' and 'data warehouses', so that customers can not only analyze data stored in OceanBase but also integrate data from other 'lakes' through external tables for integrated queries," Evan Yang said.

In addition, OceanBase has also invested heavily in multimodal storage.

Evan Yang noted that in 2025, OceanBase won several major projects, including a comprehensive data management solution for a leading internet content community and an IoT data solution for intelligent automotive enterprises, supporting data types such as JSON and Key-Value. In response, the company has made numerous optimizations, achieving significant advantages in terms of performance and storage costs.

While traditionally OceanBase excelled in relational SQL queries, AI scenarios increasingly require "three-way hybrid semantic retrieval" combining text, vectors, and relational data, raising the bar for hybrid search capabilities. To address this, OceanBase unveiled its self-developed vector engine last year, and its performance and range of algorithms have now caught up with industry leaders, along with major improvements in full-text indexing.

With OceanBase's latest database retrieval and search engine technologies, developers need just a single SQL query to access complex multimodal data when building AI applications. "We have already supported numerous use cases, including knowledge base construction, intelligent Q&A, AI chat, image-to-image search, and text-to-image search," Evan Yang said.

In April last year, Evan Yang announced that OceanBase had fully entered the AI era, focusing on building core "Data times AI" capabilities. During its 3rd Developer Conference in May, the company unveiled a series of AI database products and technologies, reaffirming its vision of providing a "data foundation for the AI era."

"A few years ago, over 80% of customers' inquiries were about the database itself; now 50% or even more are about AI," Evan Yang said. "Our role is transforming from a technology provider to an AI value co-creator."

He emphasized that core database system upgrades create opportunities for technology refresh, while AI introduces new workloads, new use cases, and new growth avenues. "This has been a defining trend over the past two years."

03. Accelerating Globalization: From "Overseas Business" to "Localized Collaboration"

In addition to capitalizing on the AI wave, OceanBase has made global expansion another strategic priority in 2025.

"When international customers evaluate our technologies and products, they look at not only how advanced the performance metrics are, but also at who is using them and the calibre of the users," Evan Yang said. "If the users are world-class enterprises, customers are more likely to view our technologies and products as industry best practices worth adopting."

OceanBase previously proved its mettle by powering Alibaba's Double 11 and Alipay. Today, an increasing number of industry leaders across sectors are choosing OceanBase.

The company has established a presence in markets such as Southeast Asia, Japan, and Latin America. Leveraging its strength in fintech, OceanBase initially focused on digital payment and internet banking use cases, and has since partnered with multiple unicorn companies in Indonesia, Singapore, and beyond.

OceanBase fully supports 7 major global mainstream cloud platforms including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, enabling a consistent multi-cloud native experience. Its services span more than 170 availability zones across over 50 regions worldwide, and the company is actively pursuing local compliance certifications.

As part of this journey, OceanBase is embracing "localized collaboration." "In the past, our teams were predominantly Chinese; now we are gradually entering a new phase of building a truly international team," Evan Yang said. Overseas hiring now emphasizes diversity and cross-cultural collaboration, targeting young talent who demonstrate entrepreneurship, adaptability, and agile thinking.

On October 22, Evan Yang announced the launch of the "GO GLOBAL GO Program" in an internal memo, selecting internal talent worldwide to accelerate OceanBase's global rollout across products, services, sales, and marketing. The program also includes supporting measures such as cultural adaptation training, language support, and specific career development pathways, to create a win-win mechanism for both the company and its people.

"Globalization is not an option, but a must-win path," he urged, calling on employees to actively participate.

To date, OceanBase has deeply engaged with more than 70 international customers from fintech, banking, and broader internet sectors, 40 of which have signed contracts or placed orders. Some have already leveraged OceanBase for most of their business scenarios and found it comparable to or even better than that of other leading databases.

04. Role Transition of Evan Yang: From A Tech Product Leader to A Global Business Operator

In recent years, Evan Yang's role as CEO of OceanBase has undergone a subtle yet significant transformation.

Early in his career, he was a typical tech product leader-deeply immersed in code, architecture, and performance, guided by the principle of "winning customers through technology." Today, his focus has broadened to building a sustainable global business model, standardizing and productizing the service system, and elevating OceanBase's brand on the global stage.

This shift stems from real-world pressures. In 2025, OceanBase expanded its multi-cloud strategy by adding Baidu Smart Cloud, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to its original "four clouds," such as Alibaba Cloud and AWS. Evan Yang played a pivotal role in negotiations with cloud vendors and worked closely with the sales team to operationalize these partnerships.

In advancing OceanBase's AI initiatives, Evan Yang and the company's CTO operate under a dual-leadership model: the CTO drives technologies and products, while Evan focuses on business scenarios and resource orchestration. "From product definition and pilot selection to go-to-market strategy and customer delivery, we must plan everything through from start to finish," he said.

"The intersection of AI and databases remains one of the most ambiguous frontiers-the boundaries are still being defined. We will intensify our exploration here and allocate more resources to strengthen our marketing, product delivery, and infrastructure capabilities to meet future demands," Evan Yang said.

Against a backdrop of rapid global tech shifts,OceanBase has scaled past 1,000 employees, a growth that has sharply increased organizational complexity. Evan frankly acknowledges that new talent bring both fresh ideas and challenges. "Many perspectives differ from, or even challenge, our past assumptions. But they also inspire us and propel us into the next phase of transformation. That's why our organization must become more inclusive and agile in its evolution."

His management philosophy centers on "knowing people and placing them where they excel"-not seeking perfect individuals, but designing teams where strengths are amplified and gaps are covered through collaboration. "A few years ago, minor shortcomings were acceptable given our scale and challenges. Today, seamless teamwork is non-negotiable."

Over the past year, Evan's most profound realization has been his own evolution-from a tech product leader to a global business operator.

"In the past, I asked: Can this product solve the customer's problem? Can our technology lead the industry?" he said. "Now, I focus on sustainability and long-term growth: Is our service system scalable and replicable? Does our brand have global appeal? Is each product line's go-to-market path clearly defined?"

It is this evolution in mindset that has allowed OceanBase to accelerate the development of a standardized, productized, and globalized service system, laying a solid organizational foundation for international expansion.

Yet Evan stressed that while the path has changed, the original aspiration remains steadfast. "OceanBase's vision has always been the same: to simplify the management and use of massive data through technological innovation," Evan said. "Guided by this vision, we aim to become one of the world's leading database companies and build the next-generation data platform for all industries."
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