Slack has agreed to enter a partnership with Amazon. This means that all Amazon employees will be able to use Slack. This comes just after Slack has to deal with a lot of competition from Microsoft Teams. We will also see how Slack will migrate its voice and video calling features to Amazon’s Chime platform, together with the broader adoption of Amazon Web Services.
The decision of Amazon to offer Slack to all of its employees is part of a big deal, and it’s all thanks to an agreement. We’re not quite sure how all of Amazon’s employees, 840,000, will actually be using the app. The only customer of this app customer has been IBM, which uses the app for 350,000 employees.
Slack has used Amazon Web Service in order to power parts of the chat app, but they are now committing to using the cloud services when it comes to storage, database, security, analytics, and compute. This means that we’re probably not going to see Slack turn to something bigger, like Google Cloud or Azure anytime soon.
Brad Armstrong, vice president of business at Slack, stated: “We have not used Azure. The vast majority of our service has always run on AWS.” He also said that they will probably not use Azure in the future.
The move to Amazon Chime is also part of the deal. In comparison to Microsoft Teams, voice and video conferencing is not the strongest part of Slack, but the new integration shows that it will be improved in the future. According to Slack insiders, “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.”
