Huawei Cloud opened its teamwork platform, WeLink, to its clients. Similar to Slack, WeLink is a tool for enterprise internal communication and cooperation. From the Cloud to teamwork, Huawei is walking on a similar track to Alibaba Cloud.
Showcase of Huawei an an expo. Image credit: Yeqing Qi/iyiou.com
Huawei Cloud published smart teamwork platform WeLink in Beijing on December 26, 2019. WeLink was originally the internal communication and collaboration platform of Huawei. With 194,000 employees worldwide operating in over 170 countries and regions, Huawei’s massive cross/internal team communication is supported by Huawei Cloud and WeLink.
The platform has over 195,000 users, with a DAU of 99.8%, which is close to the number of Huawei employees. With evolving tech and against an increasingly complex business landscape, team communication and cooperation become significant in optimizing the efficiency of the company’s daily operation.
Apart from WeLink, China also has DingTalk from Alibaba, Enterprise WeChat from Tencent and Lark from ByteDance. The US has Slack, Microsoft Teams and G suite. Many famous team communication and collaboration platforms have a common history background and similar development track – the platform is created to meet internal needs and then opened to public to solve the commonly-existing teamwork communication pain points.
For mega-size organizations with thousands of employees like Huawei, Alibaba and ByteDance, their internal communication cannot be satisfied by standard teamwork platforms. They have a strong incentive to improve their efficiency in daily operation by developing perfect-match teamwork tools. Lark is a typical example that ByteDance created to assist employees located across different time zones to communicate and coordinate projects. The frequent internal use helps the product team to polish the product and makes it available for public use at the end.
Another take is Slack, originally a tool that the founding team created to collaborate on gaming development projects. However, the gaming business dimmed but Slack entered the market to acclaim. The company reported an annual revenue of USD 401 million from more than 600,000 enterprise clients in over 150 countries. From 2017 to January 2019, Slack’s paid users increased from 37,000 to 88,000. The trend implies a blue sea market for the teamwork platform business.
Inside Huawei’s own tech ecosystem, Huawei Cloud gives a strong support to WeLink. From IaaS to SaaS, Huawei is able to provide a favorable developer environment and close the loop from infrastructure of terminal use, which is similar to Alibaba’s ecosystem – Alibaba Cloud and the teamwork platform DingTalk. “DingTalk had over 200 million individual users and 10 million enterprise users on June 30, 2019,” said the DingTalk CEO Chen Hang (陈航). Comparing to the grown-up DingTalk, WeLink is a toddler that is waiting to grow.