Slack and Amazon have partnered up in a multi-year agreement which means that Amazon employees will now be using Slack. Earlier, Slack began to face massive competition from Microsoft Teams so Amazon decided to collaborate with the company. This merger will also feature Slack’s migration of its voice and video calling feature over to Amazon’s Chime platform alongside Amazon Web Services. 

Source: The Verge

After the agreement, Amazon sent out an update to all its employees. Right now it is unclear whether all 840,000 of Amazon workers will be using the service or not because the company has not commented on the matter. Previously, the biggest client that Slack had was IBM, which had an employee base of 350,000.
So this deal means that we might not see Slack turn to Microsoft’s Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power its own service.

“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.”

One of the major parts of the deal is that Slack voice will move to Amazon Chime. “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.”

Source: The Verge

Slack and Amazon are also confident about better product integration and interoperability especially as far as features like AWS Chatbox are concerned.

Even though Microsoft Teams gave Slack a tough competition, the business within the company continued to grow. CEO Stewart Butterfield has been focusing on this point a lot during the interviews as he said that 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.”

 This deal will bring perks to both Amazon and Slack. While Amazon secures an important partner for AWS and its Chime platform, in return, Slack gets the insurance for better voice and video calling services in the form of AWS.