A rather interesting battle has been ranging on in the communication space. Microsoft Teams has seen exponential growth lately, and Slack is the company that has felt the most heat as a result.
To take on this rising threat from Microsoft, Slack has joined hands with Amazon in a new collaboration focused on enterprise workforce collaboration.
Under this new multiyear agreement, Slack will be migrating its Slack voice and video calls together with screen-sharing capabilities to Amazon Chime. This being the AWS communication service that lets users meet, chat, and place business calls.
An undisclosed percentage of the 840,000 Amazon employees will also be given access to Slack.
In addition to adopting Chime, Slack will also leverage this partnership for analytics, AI, machine learning, compute, storage, and scale for the foreseeable future.
Brad Armstrong, VP Slack:
“For now, we’re just focused on shoring up the back end. 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. We have not used Azure. The vast majority of our service has always run on AWS.”
Logical.
Slack has been a long-time customer of Amazon Web Service for various cloud services related to the chat space, and this move makes sense given the nature of industries that the two firms preoccupy, which is the point made in the above statement.
Moreover, voice and video conference are two primary weak points of Slack when compared to Teams. This collaboration fixes that, putting Slack in a better position to take on this rising Microsoft threat.
According to the latest numbers, some 750,000 organizations are using the Slack chat service, out of which 122,000 are paid customers This has resulted in a 28% year-over-year increase.
Meanwhile, Microsoft reported 75 million daily active users a little over a month ago, pulling from a pool of 258 million paid Office 365 seats that have access to Teams.
Quite a nice little fight we have going on here!
