Jan. 8, 2007 (China Knowledge) – Alibaba Group announced Monday the launch of its fifth company Alisoft, an online business software provider serving small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in e-commerce in China.

Alisoft, which was developed out of an e-commerce software centre in 2004, will kick-start business by targeting 18 million SME users of Alibaba.com’s services.

Alisoft currently allows customers, which include more than 500,000 active users and more than three million registered users, to access and manage their CRM, inventory, sales, finance and marketing information and communications tools online. According to the press release, the company will start charging users for some of its business software services in the first half of 2007.