Slack and Amazon recently announced a significant partnership where Slack will shift to Amazon Web Services’ Chime infrastructure for voice and video calls on its platform.
In addition, Amazon has licensed Slack for use across all of its businesses, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said as he announced record quarterly results.
This deal is significant for several reasons — on the surface, it will help Slack enable video calls on mobile and provide text transcription. But digging deeper, it’s clear that a robust calling investment is critical in driving Slack’s growth and adoption.
Voice and video calls have become essential to organizations while employees work from home during the pandemic. Zoom became a household brand overnight, driven by record 169% year-over-year growth over the past quarter.
The expanded partnership with Amazon further aligns the two companies against a common rival. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform competes with AWS and Microsoft Teams has been going head-to-head with Slack in collaboration technology.
Slack was already a heavy AWS user, committing to spend $50 million annually on Amazon’s cloud platform under a previously negotiated deal.
By adopting AWS Chime infrastructure for user calls, Slack will be shifting away from a system based on technology from its 2015 acquisition of the startup Superhero.
In addition, Slack will integrate AWS Key Management Service for security, AWS Chatbot for developer messaging and system monitoring, and Amazon AppFlow for secure data transfer.
Slack’s revenue grew 50% to $201.7 million for the three months ended April 30 as workers relied heavily on collaboration technologies for remote work under COVID-19 lockdown orders.
“We believe very strongly the impacts that the COVID crisis will have on the way we work are of generational magnitude and are just beginning to be felt,” Butterfield said on the company’s earnings call.
“It’s too soon to understand the impact with any precision, but it reinforces our conviction around this business and our long-term trajectory.”
