Alibaba has acquired Teambition, a real-time collaboration management platform. This new acquisition is the latest in Alibaba’s strategy for  making a foray into enterprise-facing technology. Teambition had earlier  raised $17 million in funding from investors including IDG Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, and Gobi Partners.

Teambition consists of cloud-based project management tools, with functions as a combination of Trello, an Atlassian brand, a web-based list-making application, and Dropbox, a file hosting service that offers cloud storage. Teambition provides users with mobile and desktop apps to interact with the service in this solution; users collaborate on projects and share or edit documents in real time across departments, locations, and business units. In addition to the planning interface, there is a design for CRM, called Bingo, as well as a knowledge base where businesses can keep extra documentation and other collateral.

Alibaba has built an e-commerce platform, which it has productized as a service for third parties that it calls Alibaba Cloud, which offers the cloud-storage to users. In the cloud, planning and project management are a key pillar in the collaboration space alongside cloud services, especially to store and serve files and real-time communication services. This acquisition would add definitive value to AliBaba cloud services.