Slack is a multi-year partner of Amazon, which means that all Amazon employees can start Slack. It also comes as Slack faces increased pressure from Microsoft teams. In conjunction with a wider acceptance of amazon web services ( AWS), Slack will now be able to update its voice and video communication capabilities to Amazon's Chime Platform.
Thanks to a corporate arrangement, Amazon's retirement from Slack of all its employees is a big part of the bargain. But how many of Amazon's 840,000 workers will use Slack is not immediately clear. To date, Slack has been the biggest client of IBM, with 350,000 Slack workers deploying.
While for a long time Slack used AWS to power the chat app, they are committed to using Amazon's cloud services as their preferred partner for storage , computation, database, security, analytics , machine learning and future apps. This deal will make it unlikely that we will see Slack turning to Azure Cloud or Google Cloud services in Microsoft's future to power its service.
Brad Armstrong, Slack's vice chairman of sales and business growth, says in an interview with The Verge: "We haven't used Azure. Armstrong says it is unlikely that Slack will be able to use Azure in future. "We have the vast majority of our operation always run on AWS."
A major part of the deal is also the move to Amazon Chime for slack voice and video calls. Voice and video conferencing is a relatively poor region in Slack compared with Microsoft teams, but it will be greatly enhanced in the future with this new integration. Slack has begun migration already, and is looking for new features. "We 're just focusing for now on shortening the back," Armstrong says. "We look to bring the mobile experience to include video, which it doesn't today, since Chime has additional features. Also the transcript is what we look at.
Slack and Amazon promise improved product integration and interaction for features such as AWS Chatbot, an alert service for AWS instances that pushes the Slack channel alerts out. In the next few months, both Slack and AWS will boost their integration with Amazon AppFlow to enable bi-directional data sharing between AWS and Slack channels.
All these points and Amazon's adoption by Slack have been designed to make the chat app even more appealing to business customers. Despite the recent strong push by Microsoft with teams, Slack has been steadily expanding its business.
It is a point that in recent interviews CEO Stewart Butterfield was interested in stressing, although he believes Microsoft "unhealthily worried" about killing Slack.
"There is a combination of cloud services and tools to workstream collaboration to help drive the future of company software," says Butterfield in a statement today. "Strategically, AWS partnership enables both companies to satisfy demand and to offer our customers enterprise-level offers."
This is an offer Amazon & Slack will benefit. Amazon is an significant partner for AWS and its Chime platform and Slack is able to achieve the trust and protection of AWS by offering a better voice and video calling service.
