Slack joins Amazon to take on Microsoft Teams

Seattle, June 5 (IANS) 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.

Slack will migrate capability of its video conferencing platform Slack Calls for all voice and video calling to Amazon Chime, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) communications service that lets users meet, chat, and place business calls.

Slack and AWS will strategically partner to help distributed development teams communicate and become more efficient and agile in managing their AWS resources from inside Slack, Amazon said in a statement late Thursday.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.

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,” he added.

After claiming that Microsoft Teams is not a real competitor to Slack, Butterfield said last month that the success of Slack threatens Microsoft’s entire Office 365 empire.

Slack is also leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure to support enterprise customers’ rapid adoption of its platform and to offer them data residency – the ability to choose which country or region their data is stored at rest in while fulfilling compliance requirements.

Additionally, AWS has agreed to use Slack to simplify the way teams at AWS communicate and work together.

“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,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO.

Enterprise customers can rely on Slack’s channel-based messaging solution, combined with AWS’s proven infrastructure and security services, for secure, reliable, and scalable communication.

Slack and AWS will also extend product integration and deepen interoperability to help developer teams manage their AWS resources in Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms with greater flexibility, said Amazon.

Going forward, the AWS Chatbot service will incorporate AWS’s more than 175 services to give developers the ability to collaborate with their teams to manage all of their cloud-based services without leaving Slack.

In an earlier interview with The Verge, Butterfield said that the company feels that “Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that.”

While Slack also has voice and video calling features, they are not the focus of the app, Butterfield said, adding that Teams is more of a competitor to Zoom.

–IANS

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