Slack partners with Amazon to take on Microsoft Teams

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.

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.

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