The battle to reign China's communications industry began on Monday when Chinese tech firm giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. officially kicked off its Qiye Weixin, or Enterprise WeChat, app.

The new app is Tencent's attempt to maintain and protect the success of WeChat franchise and fend a threat from Alibaba Group. It also aims to help its potential clients to draw a distinct line between work and life.

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The app allows basic chat messages just like Facebook Messenger and WeChat itself, but what sets it apart is that it is particularly designed for businesspeople. The app offers reminders for employees including clocking in and out, making leave requests, and jotting expenses for reimbursement.

Although Alibaba is the king of China's e-commerce, it had little success in terms of messaging and social networking apps. In 2015, it launched an office-oriented app called DingTalk, underscoring its intent to dominate the country's business software market.

The competition between the two firms is heated and not one wants the other to gain an upper hand on the emerging potential market.

"The enterprise software market is still taking shape. The sooner Tencent jumps in to the market, the more time it will have to build its reputation and cultivate users," Ma Shicong from Analysys International told China Daily.

Alibaba is marketing its app that will "return office to work," taking a subtle swipe at Tencent's WeChat that could allegedly cause distractions to many employees. In fact, if viewers were keen to notice Alibaba's recent promotional ad portrayed that subtle swipe at WeChat, according to The Wall Street Journal.

One of the problems brought by WeChat's popularity is failing to establish clear boundaries between business and personal lives, as evidenced by a number of Chinese who no longer exchange business cards or phone numbers and instead add each other as WeChat friends.

This brought Alibaba, which now has gained over 1 million enterprise users, to take a step in introducing a  work-only app. But even though it has a first-mover advantage, Tencent still has ample time to catch up.

"It is not difficult for cash-thirsty small enterprises to use such apps because the cost for them to develop their own office automation systems is high," Ma said.

"But convincing deep-pocketed companies to use apps provided by third-party developers remains a challenge due to concerns over information security," he added.

TagsTencent, WeChat, WeChat Enterprise, Qiye Weixin, Alibaba, DingTalk