Fueling Industry Vitality Through Talent: GBase Continues Expanding Its Industry Ecosystem

Talent is both the primary driver of innovation and the cornerstone of industrial development. In Tianjin's High-tech Zone, the upstream and downstream of the IT application innovation (ITAI) industry chain are filled with technology-intensive enterprises, making the cultivation and attraction of specialized talent particularly crucial.

How can we break out of siloed thinking

and attract talent from all directions?

How can we onboard more young professionals?

How can we fuel industrial vitality starting from talent?

GBase, an IT application innovation enterprise in the High-tech Zone,

has provided its own answers.

Starting from the “seedbed”: attracting, developing, and retaining talent
 

In early March, 13 senior students from the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science and the School of Science at Hebei University of Technology joined GBase for a joint graduation design program. Over the following two to three months, these students will tackle technical challenges under one-on-one mentorship provided by the company, completing their graduation projects.

Jiang Dong, who joined GBase from Northwestern Polytechnical University last July

Xu Hong, Recruitment Manager at General Data Technology Co., Ltd. (GBase), explained: “In recent years, GBase has extensively partnered with universities across China to promote industry-academia-research integration. Starting from the campus ‘seedbed’, we actively bring in young technical talent. We have collaborated with Nankai University, Tianjin University, Hebei University of Technology, Lanzhou University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and others, offering summer internships, winter internships, and credit-bearing internships, as well as joint graduation design projects and database source code study sessions that help students gain a deeper understanding of the database industry and Tianjin's IT application innovation sector.”
 

“The company’s R&D department hosts weekly technology sharing sessions. Through cross-project exchanges and expert interpretations of international cutting-edge technologies, we R&D staff can rapidly upgrade our skills,” said Jiang Dong, a junior engineer who joined GBase from Northwestern Polytechnical University last July and is now working on database kernel R&D. He shared that in just over half a year, he has gone from being a newcomer to gradually understanding core business in the database field and developing a product mindset—an experience he finds immensely valuable.

Workplace scene

“For this year’s campus recruitment, we are mainly hiring for technical positions. We plan to fill 70–80 openings with 2022 graduates. To help new employees get up to speed quickly, each will be paired with an experienced mentor for one-on-one coaching. After one year, we will evaluate each new hire’s technical level and adjust their salary accordingly,” said Xu Hong. She added that last July, after the 2020 cohort completed their technical evaluations, some saw substantial salary adjustments. These outstanding 2020 hires are now able to work independently and assist mentors in guiding the next round of new graduates.
 

This year, in addition to actively conducting online and offline spring recruitment events, GBase is shifting its approach by offering more small-scale company visits for students interested in the database industry, enabling more targeted hiring. Through internship programs and campus recruitment, GBase continuously infuses young talent and has supplied a large number of professionals to Tianjin's IT application innovation sector, effectively energizing the industry.

Focused on ecosystem building: expanding the industry network

Since the beginning of this year, GBase has been actively linking upstream and downstream resources in the IT application innovation chain to continuously expand its industry ecosystem. One example is the Kunpeng Joint Lab co-built with the Tianjin Kunpeng Ecosystem Innovation Center, where both parties deployed senior technical staff to form a joint R&D team. By carrying out hardware-software adaptation and optimization, the resulting localized joint solution achieved a significant performance boost over the original baseline.

“GBase now has over 600 employees, more than half of whom are R&D staff. Thanks to the continuous breakthroughs of our technical team, our independently developed GBase series database products have kept pace with international mainstream technologies and overcome the bottleneck imposed by foreign database products in high-end core application domains,” said Wei Wei, Technical Director of the Ecosystem Development Department at GBase. He gave an example: GBase 8a, GBase 8s, and other GBase products have been successfully deployed in over 70 banks, including Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Tianjin Rural Commercial Bank, and China Bohai Bank, breaking the monopoly of foreign database products in the banking sector and steadily advancing the shift of domestic database products from merely usable to truly excellent.

Students from the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science and the School of Science at Hebei University of Technology visit GBase

“Developing the IT application innovation industry cannot rely on individual enterprises fighting alone; we must integrate all upstream and downstream partners to create joint solutions and deliver higher-quality services to customers,” Wei Wei emphasized. As one of the first members of the national IT Application Innovation Working Committee, GBase has always regarded promoting the homegrown ecosystem as a key strategic pillar. It has completed compatibility certifications with over 1,000 products from major domestic software and hardware vendors such as Kunpeng, Phytium, Hygon, Kylin, and TongTech. The resulting localized solutions have been widely adopted in the market. Today, the GBase database series is deployed at scale in finance, telecommunications, government, energy, transportation, and other sectors, spanning 34 countries and all 32 provincial-level administrative regions in China, managing over 300 petabytes of data.
 

Wei Wei said that in 2022, GBase will vigorously promote the industry adoption of its new GCDW Cloud Data Warehouse, helping customers seamlessly migrate from major international database systems and fostering better compatibility within the IT application innovation ecosystem. At the same time, the company will remain rooted in Binhai New Area, working with upstream and downstream ecosystem partners to contribute to the building of the “China IT Application Innovation Valley.”