Enterprise messaging platform Slack has joined Amazon in a multi-year agreement to take on its closest rival Microsoft Teams. Under the new deal, all Amazon employees will get access to Slacks office tools. Once Amazon’s rollout to its employees is complete, the company could potentially overtake IBM to become Slack’s biggest customer.
The e-commerce giant is already Slack’s preferred cloud service provider and the business tool will now benefit from its storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning capabilities. The partnership will see Slack utilize Amazon Chime for powering its voice, video, and screen-sharing features.
Amazon has also integrated its Key Management Service with Slack’s in order to attract regulated and security-conscious customers for distribution and control of cryptographic keys. Additionally, the communication tool will now offer improved team collaboration thanks to AWS Chatbot integration and will support secure bi-directional data transfer with AWS through Amazon AppFlow.
As per the firm’s recent earnings report, Slack now serves upwards of 122,000 paying customers, representing an increase of 28% over the previous year, but not reaching the dramatic heights of rival offerings such as Zoom. Slack will hope its new-look relationship with Amazon will help to minimize that gap.
