Alibaba’s Office Communications Software DingTalk Appoints New COO

DingTalk, an office software product owned by Alibaba Group, has recently completed a round of personnel adjustments, 36Kr reported on Thursday. Ku Wei, general manager of the IoT business unit within Alibaba Cloud, has taken up the post of COO of DingTalk, becoming responsible for the large-scale customer group strategy and commercialization of DingTalk.

How to commercialize and make profits is the key question for DingTalk, which has garnered 500 million users in the past seven years. The new COO is expected to speed up this process.

Before joining Alibaba, Ku served as deputy general manager of China Unicom’s marketing department and Unicom VSENS. At the end of August 2016, Ku joined Alibaba and has served as general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s IoT business and Tmall Genie.

Previously, Alibaba Cloud’s customers were mainly from large enterprises, while DingTalk was mainly for small and medium-sized enterprises in need of quick response functions. In September 2020, after Alibaba promoted the strategy of integrating Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk, DingTalk expanded the serving scope of Alibaba Cloud, while Alibaba Cloud brought more complete digital service capabilities for DingTalk, especially for large and medium-sized customer groups.

“In the past six months, about 40 or 50 consumers of Alibaba Cloud such as Country Garden, Muyuan and Risen Energy have received DingTalk’s services,” said DingTalk president Ye Jun.

Regarding commercialization, Ye once said in an interview that Chinese enterprises still have a long way to go in the digitalization of organizations and businesses. About 43 million small and medium-sized enterprises in China invested between 100,000 yuan to over tens of millions in IT, generating significant market space.

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DingTalk has made many attempts in commercialization, including launching software, hardware, commercial versions and so on. Ku Wei’s joining will lead DingTalk to release more commercial products in 2022.