Slack, Amazon Team Up for Dual Integration

Need to Know

• A new multi-year deal will see all Amazon employees begin using Slack, though it’s unclear when the 800,000+ workers will all be onboarded.
• Slack will migrate video and voice calling capabilities to Amazon Chime; Amazon Web Services will remain Slack’s preferred cloud platform.
• The partnership will allow both companies to face off against major competitors such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
• Prior to this announcement, Slack’s largest client was IBM with close to 350,000 users.

Analysis

In a move that could mark chat platform Slack’s biggest market win to date, the company yesterday announced a major partnership with Amazon that would see the pair teaming up to bolster and improve its video and voice calling capabilities, in a move that allows both to directly square off against major competitors Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Slack will migrate its voice- and video-calling capacities to Amazon Chime; Amazon, meanwhile, is rolling out Slack to its 840,000-strong workforce, though it’s unclear how many of those will actually be using Slack.

The partnership also doubles down on Slack’s commitment to Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform which, while neither company has said so explicitly, potentially shuts out other major cloud competitors such as Google Cloud and, again, Microsoft, with its Azure platform.

“Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said in a statement. “By integrating AWS services with Slack’s channel-based messaging platform, we’re helping teams easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack.”

The two companies are also promising better integration for features such as AWS Chatbot — a move that is designed to make Chatbot more appealing to enterprise customers, as Slack continues to grow its enterprise business. In addition, the shift to Amazon Chime will also eventually enable Slack to explore new capabilities such as secure mobile video calls.

The move benefits both companies, as Amazon will now benefit from Slack as a powerful and significant partner for its AWS and Chime platforms: “Together, AWS and Slack are giving developer teams the ability to collaborate and innovate faster on the front end with applications, while giving them the ability to efficiently manage their backend cloud infrastructure,” Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.

The integration is just the latest win for Slack, which recently partnered with IBM to roll out its services internally to that company’s 350,000 customers. Slack’s reported earnings, revealed this week, clocked the company at 120,000 individual paid users, an increase of 28% year over year.