Slack ‘Teams’ up with Amazon to take on Microsoft

Slack has just chalked in a multi-year agreement with Amazon. For starters, this means that all of Amazon’s employees will now use Slack. Then there is more that this deal brings in, we will get to that in a bit.

This partnership comes at an opportune time, Slack is facing increased competition from Microsoft Teams and thanks to the new team-up, the former will be migrating its voice and video calling feature to Amazon’s Chime platform and will also be adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Slack gets a huge new user base thanks to this deal. Amazon’s employees are going to start using Slack now thanks to this enterprise-wide agreement. While it is not very clear if all of Amazons 840,000 employees will be using Slack, one can expect that a significant number will. Till now, Slack’s biggest customer has been IBM - 350,000 IBM employees use Slack.

Slack has already been using AWS for its chat app, but this partnership is going to make the latter a preferred partner for storage, database, security, compute, analytics, machine learning and all future collaboration features. This will also keep Slack from turning to Microsoft’s Azure services or to Google Cloud to power any part of its services in the near future.

The use of Amazon Chime for Slack voice and video calls is significant since Slack has been weak in this domain as compared to Microsoft Teams. Slack has already started the migration and is looking into new features.

Brad Armstrong, vice president of business and corporate development at Slack, in an interview with The Verge said - “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.”

These two companies are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like the AWS Chatbot. They are also looking to improve Amazon AppFlow integration to support bi-directional data transfer between AWS services and Slack channels.

All of these integration points are designed to make Slack far more appealing to enterprise customers which it has steadily being growing despite Microsoft’s big push with Teams.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools. Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said in a statement.