In a bid to disrupt the growing enterprise chat and collaboration app market in India, Alibaba-owned platform DingTalk on Monday unveiled an English version that caters to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The English version of the app, also available in Malaysia, is the first concerted push outside of China since launching three years ago. Over five million enterprises and organisations in China are already using the Chinese version. DingTalk aims to ramp up its user count in India and Malaysia by the end of the fiscal year ending in March.
“Our endeavour 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 in a statement.
The company is also considering to launch the app in other South-East Asian countries and a Japanese-language version is currently in development as well.
“We believe that this is the future of the workplace, and we see immense potential in helping businesses redefine their organisational connectivity,” Wang added.
Currently 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 supports audio, video and/or conference calls for up to 3,000 parties in a single call and integrated emails, chats and message reminder features. Voice and video services are currently only available via VoIP for users outside of China.
The app allows businesses to manage attendance, make approvals, maintain business reports and send files of up to 700MB in size. Businesses can book and host meetings, manage CRM information, create tasks and service tickets and set up private chats.
It “allows third party SaaS applications and services to be integrated with DingTalk and provide an enterprise service ecosystem for SMEs.
Microsoft recently launched ‘Kaizala’ app designed for large group communications and work management. Other such professional chat apps are Workplace by Facebook, Amazon Chime, Slack, Cisco Spark and Yammer.