Alibaba groups's SME-fouced enterprise chat and collaboration platform DingTalk has rolled out its English version that caters to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the company annouced via its news site Alizila. With this, DingTalk will reportedly expand its presence in India as well. All enterprise messaging apps are now Slack competitors, so this is another addition. The website Alizila writes that DingTalk is rolling it out in Malaysia, and going ahead it wants to ramp up its user count in Malaysia by the end of the fiscal year ending in March. The company is also considering launching in other Southeast Asian countries, and is also developing a Japanese-language version currently. The platform enables one-on-one and group chats, as well as audio and video conferencing and integration with clients’ internal email systems. The platform can also be used for cloud-based customer relationship management, approval processing and document storage. DingTalk was started three years ago and since then it was available in China in Chinese language. The platform claims to have 5 million business and organization clients till date. Besides the chat app, DingTalk also has a range of hardware for SMES, and also has an Open Platform that allows third-party developers to build related services that work within DingTalk and help support different business functions for SMEs. For example, there is a travel app that books and pays for plane tickets, rather than employees paying first and expensing later. Competition Dingtalk will be largely competing with biggies likes Microsoft, Google, Slack, Yammer, Avamoo, Flock…
