In its attempts to tackle the major competition from Microsoft Teams, Slack has partnered up with Amazon in a multi-year agreement. The partnership covers both cloud services and product integrations, and comes right after Slack delivered solid first-quarter results and strong revenue growth.
According to the announcement made by Slack, the agreement will allow both organizations to use their services in collaboration. An undisclosed percentage of Amazon’s 840,000 employees will be given access to Slack, while the workplace collaboration firm will migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon’s Chime platform.
For those who don’t know, Chime is Amazon’s video conferencing and communications focused on business users. Apart from VoIP calling and video messaging, Chime includes virtual meetings, allowing users to host or join a remote meeting through the service.
Additionally, Slack will also have access to a number of other AWS services. The company has been a long-time customer of AWS for various cloud services. Hence the multi-year deal seems logical.
Based on the announcement, Slack will be using AWS as its preferred partner for storage, computing, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features.
Brad Armstrong, VP Slack, said,
For now, we’re just focused on shoring up the back end. As Chime has additional features, we’re looking at bringing the mobile experience to include video, which it doesn’t today. We’re also looking at transcription.
We have not used Azure. The vast majority of our service has always run on AWS.
Moreover, voice and video conferencing is a particularly weak point of Slack as compared to Teams. This new integration will give Slack a way to greatly improve its services in the future. It’s a deal that will benefit both Amazon and Slack.
