Slack and Amazon announced a new partnership last Friday to try and improve their chances of winning the war for enterprise communication supremacy.
The partnership sees Amazon deploying Slack as its internal communication tool across the company. In addition, Slack has migrated its voice and video call functions over to the infrastructure of Amazon Chime, Amazon’s communication service.
By migrating its video and calling features to Amazon’s infrastructure, Slack can eliminate the cost of maintaining them in its systems. In addition, Slack integrates Amazon’s cryptographic key management and AWS chatbot functionalities.
In an interview with CNBC, Matt Garman, vice-president of sales and marketing at Amazon, attributed Slack’s rich experience and higher functionality as the reasons for adopting Slack for Amazon’s internal teams.
Slack, which has been running on AWS since 2015, saw its usage rise sharply during the pandemic. The Verge reported that on March 10, Slack’s concurrent user count exceeded 10 million, and reached 12.5 million on March 25. The company has yet to update its daily updated user count since October 2019.
It’s no mystery that the new partnership is a direct attack against Microsoft Teams, which has been gaining traction since its release in 2017, three years after Slack launched. In March 2020, Microsoft recorded 44 million active users on its chat platform. At the end of last month, the number increased to 75 million.
Slack will continue to choose AWS as its preferred cloud provider, according to the press release.