Slack is partnering up with Amazon for a multi-year agreement. This deal comes at a very significant time for Slack when it facing immense competition from the Microsoft Team. It also a big enterprise deal for them because one can expect that Amazon’s 840,000 employees will be using Slack. Up until now, IBM was the biggest customer for the Slack with 3.5 lakh IBM employees using Slack.
Slack is already using AWS to power many parts of their Chat App. But they will be using AWS for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. So it is very unlikely that they will switch to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Service to power their platform.
Video and voice calling feature is the weak point of Slack compare to Microsoft Teams. But thanks to this deal Slack will use AWS Chime for voice and video calling. This new integration should mean it will be vastly improved in the future. In an interview with The Verge Brad Armstrong, vice president of business and corporate development at 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.”
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.
Slack is hoping that these new features and integration will make Slack more appealing to the Enterprize users. With this deal, Amazon gets a partner for its Chime platform and Slack gets a stable platform to power their Chat App.