Slack and Amazon announced an alliance with several important points. First of all, Jeff Bezos’ company is committed to having its employees use this popular corporate communication tool.
Another fundamental point is that Slack from now on will bet heavily on AWS (Amazon’s web services), in addition to migrating its voice and video calling service to Amazon Chime.
This announcement comes at a key moment since tools like Microsoft Teams have gained a lot of strength in recent years (the global pandemic has accelerated this growth). Interestingly, a few weeks ago Slack announced that they will integrate Microsoft Teams calls on their platform.
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Slack, ASW and Chime
It should be clarified that Slack had already been using AWS for some time to power different parts of its service, but with this agreement, they commit to using Amazon’s cloud services as a preferred option.
That means Slack is likely to rule out competing options (such as Microsoft’s Azure or Google Cloud) for storage, databases, computing, security, or machine learning.
This deal makes it unclear how many of Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of employees will use Slack to communicate at work. It is not the first major alliance reached by this communication service since earlier this year they reached an agreement with IBM for its 350,000 employees to use it.
Brad Armstrong, vice president of business and corporate development at Slack, offered an interview with The Verge, in which he assures that “they are focused on propping up the back end” and “as Chime has additional features, we are looking to bring the mobile experience to include the video, which doesn’t happen today. “
For his part, Matt Garman (vice president of sales and marketing for AWS) admitted that Amazon has not invested as much in Chime’s user interface as Slack has invested in his tool.
“We have a client with a user interface. It’s nice, but it’s not Slack. They are much better, it’s a richer experience.”
In addition to enabling video calls in mobile applications, Armstrong also revealed that Slack will add important functionality: call transcripts . In this way, it will be much faster and easier to share the content of a call so that other people can read it.
