Software has become an important driving force of China's digital economy

"There is a saying that software defines the world. Software has become the most important driving force for the development of digital economy. Industrial Internet also focuses on software to a large extent, and needs the support of software." Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, recently pointed out at the Industrial Internet Eco-economic Forum of the Global Artificial Intelligence Product Application Exposition in 2019.

From the integration of the past two modernizations to the development of the industrial internet, the whole traditional industry has been greatly improved. "For example, the professional national root cloud platform has a great tractive effect on the development of the industrial internet. It can not only enable more than 200 leading industrial enterprises in the world, but also serve more small and medium-sized enterprises in the industry." Nie Guangnan said that the industrial Internet is largely focused on software, so software is playing an increasingly important role in traditional industries. The trend of "Software Definition World" reflects that software technology is ubiquitous and software talents are omnipotent. Software has become the main engine of the new generation of information technology and the booster of the successful transformation of traditional industries. Taking root-connected root cloud platform as an example, there are more than 200 industrial software platforms, and the average number of software and industrial APP calls per month has exceeded 20,000 times, thus helping root-connected enterprise customers to better grasp the equipment operation status and data at any time and anywhere.

In 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the Interpretation of the Statistical Bulletin of Software and Information Technology Services in 2018, which shows that in 2018, China's software and information technology services industry has maintained a steady and rapid development, the scale of the industry has further expanded, and the profitability has steadily improved. In 2018, the total revenue of software business was 6306.1 billion yuan, and the total profit of software and information technology services was 807.9 billion yuan.

From 2000 to 2018, the total sales of software increased 112 times. "Why has it been since 2000? Because we know that the national software industry has developed on a small scale before. By 2000, the state issued document No. 18 to implement preferential policies for software. The Chinese government has increased its preferences for software, including integrated circuit industry, and GDP has doubled at least last year, so this trend will continue to intensify. China will move from a big software country to a powerful software country, "Ni Guangnan said. The development of industry will inevitably lead to the scarcity of precise talents and the further cultivation of talents. In Ni Guangnan's view, the proportion of software talents in human resources is increasing. In 2016, the number of software practitioners reached 8.557 million.

"In the future, the dividend of China's largest population in the world will gradually disappear, and the prospect of engineer's dividend is bright." Ni Guangnan introduced that China now has the largest scientific and technological talent resources in the world. R&D personnel have reached 3.759 million full-time equivalent, ranking first in the world for nine consecutive years, accounting for 31.1% of the global total. In 2016, China's R& D expenditure reached 227.54 billion US dollars, continuing to rank second in the world, accounting for 15.6% of the global share. Domestic patent applications and authorizations for inventions rank first in the world, accounting for 37.9% and 37.5% of the global total. In 2016, China's domestic patent holdings exceeded 1 million for the first time, making it the third country in the world with a domestic patent holdings exceeding 1 million. More than 70% of the engineers and technicians needed for the new generation of information technology (including robots) are software engineers. Therefore, there will be a huge demand for software engineers in the future. Talking about the development status of Chinese software engineers, Ni Guangnan admits that the advantages of Chinese software engineers are strong innovation ability (software copyright, open source contribution, double-creation quantity, APP production quantity, R&D efficiency, contest quantity), hard work and high efficiency, but the disadvantage is the lack of team spirit. In the future, in order to better meet the needs of the new generation of information technology, such as artificial intelligence, robots, big data and so on, the training methods in the past need to be improved urgently.

"If we can do a good job in training software talents, then China can rapidly develop a new generation of information technology and enjoy the benefits of software engineers." Ni Guangnan stressed that in the future, with the gradual replacement of the traditional demographic dividend by the software engineer dividend, China should attach importance to research and development, create a new business card, and use software to support China to build world quality.