Huawei Cloud has unveiled to the public its homegrown teamwork collaborative platform WeLink on Thursday, stepping up the rivalry against China’s top dog enterprise messaging tool DingTalk, powered by Alibaba, and competitors such as Tencent’s WeChat Enterprise and ByteDance’s Lark.
WeLink, which was was originally launched in 2017 as an internal communication and collaboration tool for Huawei’s staff, is now available to governments and enterprise customers on Huawei’s official website, said the company.
The “all-in-one” platform supports basic functions such as messaging, email, clock-in-and-out, to-do approval, and multiscreen connections. It also provides value-added services like live-streaming, cloud data storage, encrypted messaging and an AI-powered voice assistant, dubbed “Xiao Wei.” Besides, the platform also supports mini-programs to enable more functions, said the company.
According to Huawei, WeLink already has 195,000 global users (most of whom are Huawei employees), with a daily active user (DAU) rate of 99.8%. Thanks to the platform, overall Huawei employees’ global collaboration efficiency increased by 30%, said the company, without disclosing how this number was calculated.
Huawei WeLink’s is a latecomer in China’s enterprise collaboration service market, where several major Chinese tech companies have been vying for domination. DingTalk, the teamwork platform launched by e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba in 2015 is the sector’s leader, providing its services to over 200 million users and more than 10 million companies by the end of June.
Social media giant Tencent also came up with a solution called WeChat Enterprise in 2016, a special variant of the super app WeChat, designed for work purposes and business communication. The platform has since then grown to have 60 million monthly active users and 2.5 million companies registered, the company announced Monday when it released the latest version of the platform. The updated version provides better integration with WeChat, allowing users to share posts in WeChat’s Moments, among other functions.
In April, TikTok’s owner ByteDance also launched its enterprise messaging and productivity application Lark, or “Feishu” in Chinese, tapping into the global enterprise SaaS (Software as a Service) market and mainly targeting clients outside China, KrASIA reported. According to Pingwest, the Lark team has grown quickly to 800 members, and the company has plans to expand it to 1000 employees by the end of 2019.