With Facebook chasing business and customers for WhatsApp, Microsoft may have just beaten the social juggernaut. Recently, the Skype owner launched Kaizala, a messaging app which is designed to ‘get work done’; the app has already garnered interest from various Governments and businesses across India. A messaging app in 2017 should do more than just allow a few friends to talk to one another. With this pitch of Kaizala, a made in India app, the owner garnered users and attention. The app is available only on mobile for Android and Ios.

One of the biggest limitations of WhatsApp has been the inability to handle the large groups of people. First, there is a cap on the number of people you can add to a group and then there is a major challenge of making any sense from the conversation that goes between the dozens of people. Microsoft is effectively tackling these two challenges. It allows you to add as many people in the group as you want. In addition, you can also add those groups to other groups. The app also offers the ability to create polls, surveys and documents that could be generated from within the Kaizala app and then shared to the group to get a response from the masses.

Kaizala had its origin as a Microsoft Garage Project, its features are not really meant to make conversations between friends convenient but it wants to serve those customers who have to talk to dozens, hundreds, thousands and lakhs of people at once. Microsoft has been testing the Kaizala with governments and business for many months in the country. During this period, more than 30 government departments have signed up for the platform. More than 70,000 people from the State Government are already using Kaizala for their day to day work.

During the state election in Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission used Kaizala when it wanted to survey people efficiently in the state. The State Government of Andhra Pradesh is also one of the major users of the service. Several major businesses have also signed up for the service. Republic TV, a newly launched media outlet is using the app. It is exploring more applications for Kaizala, one of which is using the location data of the people to offer them texts from the nearby groups. Kaizala, also comes with a pro version which allows the organization advanced admin and user group rights. This pro version is priced at Rs.130 per user each month. Both the versions are integrated with the Office 365 subscription, they offer online support and work swiftly on the slow internet network.

At a time when Facebook is increasingly looking at enterprises and businesses to make WhatsApp relevant to them and to find a source of revenue, Kaizala comes into play as a major competitor. WhatsApp is still working on a service to make its application open to businesses while Kaizala already has many businesses hooked on the app.