Skip to main content

Slack partners with Amazon to take on Microsoft Teams

Slack is switching to Amazon Chime for voice and video calling Slack is partnering with Amazon in a multiyear agreement that means all Amazon employees will be able to start using Slack. The deal comes just as Slack faces increased competition from Microsoft Teams, and it will also see Slack migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon’s Chime platform 
alongside a broader adoption of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon’s roll out of Slack to all of its employees is a big part of the deal, thanks to an enterprise-wide agreement. It’s not immediately clear how many of Amazon’s 840,000 employees will be using Slack, though. Up until today, Slack’s biggest customer has been IBM, which is rolling out Slack to its 350,000 employees.

While Slack has long used AWS to power parts of its chat app, it’s now committing to using Amazon’s cloud services as its preferred partner for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. The deal means it’s unlikely we’ll see Slack turn to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power parts of its service in the foreseeable future.

“We have not used Azure,” says Brad Armstrong, vice president of business and corporate development at Slack, in an interview with The Verge. “The vast majority of our service has always run on AWS.” Armstrong says it’s “not likely” that Slack will be looking to use Azure in the future.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The move to Amazon Chime for Slack voice and video calls is also a significant part of the deal. Voice and videoconferencing is a particular weak point of Slack

compared to Microsoft Teams, but this new integration should mean it will be vastly improved in the future. Slack has already started the migration, and it’s looking into new features. “For now, we’re just focused on shoring up the back end,” says Armstrong. “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.”

Slack and Amazon are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like AWS Chatbot, a service that pushes out Slack channel alerts for AWS instances. In the coming months, Slack and AWS will improve its Amazon AppFlow integration to support bidirectional transfer of data between AWS services and Slack channels.

All of these integration points and Slack’s embrace of Amazon are designed to make the chat app far more appealing to enterprise customers. Slack has been steadily growing its enterprise business, despite Microsoft’s big push with Teams recently. It’s a point that CEO Stewart Butterfield has been keen to stress in recent interviews, even if he thinks Microsoft is “unhealthily preoccupied with killing” Slack.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” says Butterfield in a statement today. “Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers.”

It’s a deal that will benefit both Amazon and Slack. Amazon gets an important partner for AWS and its Chime platform, and Slack gets the reliability and security of AWS with a better voice and video calling service underpinning its service.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Adam Can Be The DCEU’s Wolverine

The upcoming Black Adam movie could position its title character as DC's equivalent to Wolverine. Though Black Adam has taken quite a long time to get rolling, the first day of DC FanDome gave a peak at what audiences can expect, from name-dropping several Justice Society of America members who make appearances to Dwayne Johnson stressing the harsh origins of the title character. Johnson's description of Black Adam himself also may offer a sense of just what role he'll occupy in the world of the DCEU. Johnson would place particular emphasis on Black Adam having been a slave who achieves his freedom after being granted power from the gods and who now seeks to unleash his own brand of justice on the world. Aside from the moral ambiguity of Black Adam, Johnson has also repeatedly spoken of him as a game-changing figure in the DCEU with the power level that he operates at. Meanwhile, with the way Black Adam is being presented as a character, he could carry some notable parallel
Post a Comment
Read more

The Earth is making the moon rust

(CNN)The moon is getting rusty. Scientists had the same reaction you probably did when they reached this conclusion. It shouldn't be possible -- after all, there's no oxygen on the moon, one of the two essential elements to create rust, the other being water. But the evidence was there. India's lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1, orbited the moon in 2008, gathering data that has led to numerous discoveries over the years -- including the revelation that there are water molecules on its surface. The probe also carried an instrument built by NASA that could analyze the moon's mineral composition. When researchers at NASA and the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology analyzed the data recently, they were stunned to find hints of hematite, a form of iron oxide known as rust. There are plenty of iron-rich rocks on the moon -- but rust is only produced when iron is exposed to oxygenand water. At first, I totally didn't believe it. It shouldn't exist based on the
Post a Comment
Read more

Studio Ghibli Meets The Legend Of Zelda in Stunning Breath of the Wild Poster

The Legend of Zelda  is  one of Nintendo's longest running, and most popular, game franchises , with the recent title of  Breath of the Wild  giving us a fresh new take on characters such as Link, Zelda, and Gannon, as one fan has decided to show what this game might look like as a product of  Studio Ghibli . Ghibli, which is often considered to be one of the most legendary animation studios, having created anime feature length films such as  Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away , and many others that have propelled the studio's brand across the world. Studio Ghibli is set to release a new movie later this year in  Earwig and the Witch , taking the opportunity to venture into the world of computer graphics for this upcoming anime. Following this entry, Ghibli is looking to adapt the popular story known as " How Do You Live ", meaning that there is still plenty of work for the legendary animation house to do.  Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement
Post a Comment
Read more