- Productivity software company Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE: WORK) recently announced it signed a new deal with online retail giant Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN)
Productivity software company Slack Technologies Inc (NYSE: WORK) recently announced it signed a new deal with online retail giant Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). The multiple-year deal involves Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Slack’s software platform for employees. And Slack will move its voice and video calling technology from the Slack Calls feature to Amazon Chime.
“Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers,” 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.”
Amazon and Slack already had an existing cloud computing partnership. The Slack chat application is delivered through AWS. And now Slack is tapping into Amazon as its preferred partner for cloud computing, storage, databases, security, analytics, machine learning, etc.
“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,” added Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
It’s worth mentioning Amazon is not Slack’s biggest partner. IBM recently said it is rolling Slack out for its 350,000 employees.
This deal appears to be strategic as Amazon and Slack both intensely compete against Microsoft. Slack directly competes against the Microsoft Teams platform. And Amazon Web Services competes against Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business among other business units.
“We have not used Azure,” explained Brad Armstrong, vice president of business and corporate development at Slack via The Verge. “The vast majority of our service has always run on AWS.”
