What you need to know
- Slack announced it is partnering with Amazon in a bid to appeal more to enterprise customers.
- The partnership will see Amazon's Chime infrastructure used for Slack calls, while Slack will also get AWS chatbot and Amazon AppFlow integration.
- The move is Slack's latest in challenging Microsoft Teams as the two companies fight for shares of the enterprise communication market.
Slack and Amazon announced a new partnership today that is meant to appeal more to enterprise customers. Through the partnership, Slack will take advantage of Amazon's Chime infrastructure for Slack calls, giving it a "high-quality" backbone for audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities through Slack's integrated calling experience.
"The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools," said Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield in a press release. "Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers. By integrating AWS services with Slack's channel-based messaging platform, we're helping teams easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack."
As part of the partnership, Slack will also get integration with AWS Chatbot and Amazon AppFlow. AWS ChatBot gives teams an "interactive agent" that can help them more easily collaborate and stay updated with alerts for specific events, workflows, and security findings. Amazon plans to have more than 175 services available through AWS Chatbot.
Amazon AppFlow integration will allow Slack users to more easily transfer information between Slack and AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Redshift.
The move comes as Slack and Microsoft Teams have been fighting for pieces of the enterprise communication market. Since launching in 2017, Microsoft Teams has surged to 75 million daily active users, helped in part by the recent overwhelming shift to work-from-home setups at companies around the globe.
Slack's partnership with Amazon shows that the company is serious about challenging Microsoft Teams among enterprises. With Amazon services, the company gains access to a proven backbone for calling and additional useful features for enterprise customers. That's likely to boost momentum for the company, as it just reported a revenue boost of 50 percent in its latest earnings report.
