Free software from Alibaba

CIO.com reports that Alibaba.com will launch itself into the software business with Alisoft, "a business software company aimed at China’s small and midsize businesses". The article says that "the company will initially offer five types of software: CRM, inventory management, sales force management, financial tools and marketing information management".

The company's press release quotes Jack Ma as saying "E-commerce is changing the way companies do business, from communications, to customer relationship management, to after sales services. Alisoft will provide easy solutions for customers to integrate e-commerce with their back-end systems."

Following the strategy used for all the other parts of the Ali-empire, Alisoft will start by giving the software aware but, the CIO report suggests, hopes to start charging in the first half of this year. That's a much quicker conversion to the 'paid-for' model than any other part of the business, much of which is still basically free to users.

The existing e-mail and instant messaging tools available to Alibaba.com users will be rolled into the Alisoft division the article says.

We recall that Alibaba's great rival, Global Sources (check out the new-look web site), tried to supply specialist software to trading companies for a number of years in the early 1990s. That seems to have disappeared from their range of product offerings as they concentrate on their core sourcing services and high tech media. I wonder if Alibaba will be any more successful?