Ant Financial has announced free access to its team collaboration tool Yuque to small businesses. The said free-charged services said to have been inspired by the latest work-at-home trend in China where unexpected opportunities arose for enterprise service providers.
According to Tech Node, new users of the platform were more responsive to companies who offer free services in China since the work-at-home trend this month. The report claimed that enterprises such as Tencent's WeChat Work, Alibaba's DingTalk, Bytedance's Feishu, and Huawei Cloud's WeLink have offered free communication and video conferencing features to businesses.
Last Tuesday, Ant Financial then announced its involvement with the trend. After the Spring Festival, the holiday was extended in China, the volume of traffic generated by users working from home in China temporarily put video conferencing services of major platforms at a standstill.
According to Ant Financial, it has then set Yuque to remain free of charge for an extended period. The services of the platform included professional cloud-based file sharing, editing, and management.
It was further discussed that the virtual workspace was specifically designed for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of up to 50 participants. The free services also included a no-cap rule on a number of text files and tables that could be utilized by teams on the platform. Yuque also announced that the platform also caters to non-profit organizations.
More Chinese firms have been asking their employees to work at home using online toolkits in recent weeks. According to a cloud service supplier affiliated with Huawei Data from Welink, enterprise users per day had reached about 50 percent in the last week alone.
Last February 3, it was found that the 120,000 online meetings were held on the platform. However, the explosive growth of users overwhelmed some online platforms during that day. It was revealed that a Tencent app that offered built-in office automation tools had to repair network glitches and improve its server capacities.
Other platforms such as WeChat Work also suffered similar problems. The company was overwhelmed by the explosive user growth that its built-in office automation tools had experienced errors as well. It had to repair network glitches and expand its servers to accommodate millions of users that flooded that day. Without the upgrades, the systems were said to malfunctions including the video services.
Similarly, DingTalk also welcomes over 10 million corporate users that prompted Alibaba, its affiliate, to add 10,000 cloud computing servers to ensure stable video services.
