Alibaba eyes enterprise chat market, launches Slack-kind-of product DingTalk in India

After winning China market, Alibaba launched DingTalk, a communication and collaboration platform for enterprises in the English version in India.

DingTalk can be used to book meetings and assign tasks. DingTalk claims to have more than 30 lakh organisations and organised customers. The app supports text, voice messages, translations, name cards, DINGs, images, video clips, check-ins, emails, audio/video conference.

After launching in 2015, this is a first concerted push by the company outside of China. Malaysia is another country where English version is available. The firm aims to grow its user count in India and Malaysia by the end of the fiscal year ending in March.

"Our endeavor is to empower SMEs so they can scale and become part of the global marketplace. With DingTalk, we will enable organisations to seamlessly communicate and collaborate across locations, thereby increasing productivity," Chris Wang, Head of Global Business Development for DingTalk, said to IANS.

"This is the future of the workplace, and we see immense potential in helping businesses redefine their organisational connectivity," Wang added.

At present, DingTalk is available on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows operating systems. DingTalk offers organisational-centric functions and features aimed at improving business-to-business communication and collaboration. It offers up to 100 GB storage absolutely free.

The app also allows third-party SaaS applications and services to be integrated with it and provide an enterprise service ecosystem for SMEs.

It will compete with professional chat apps such as Amazon Chime, Slack, Flock, Workplace by Facebook.

Slack launched in 2014, has raised more than a half a billion dollars, pushing its valuation to $3.8 billion. Slack success has led to entries of many new players.

In July 2017, Microsoft had launched a made-in-India communication and work management app Kaizala. The app has NITI Aayog as its first adopter. In the state of the Andhra Pradesh, more than 30 government departments and over 70,000 users are claimed to use the Kaizala product for daily work.

In Sept 2017, SaaS-based staff communication platform Noticeboard had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from former Myntra CTO Shamik Sharma and TaxiForSure founder Aprameya Radhakrishna.

Dingtalk: Website