Amazon now offers Slack as an option for its 800,000+ employees around the world

Last Thursday, Amazon AWS and Slack announced a major partnership to take on Microsoft Teams. Both the companies revealed several new integrations like Amazon Chime infrastructure with Slack Calls, AWS Key Management Service with Slack Enterprise Key Management (EKM), AWS Chatbot integration with Slack and Amazon AppFlow integration with Slack. Slack also revealed that Amazon will be deploying Slack for its employees internally. We spoke with Amazon about the Slack deployment and got the following information.

• Slack will be made available as an option for all Amazon employees. As of the last earnings call on April 30, 2020, Amazon announced that it had 840,400 employees.
• Amazon employees, including AWS employees rely on Amazon Chime for online meetings and video conferencing. Slack is a great collaboration solution and Amazon Chime is a great audio/video meetings communications solution. Slack does not replace Amazon Chime. The combination of Slack plus Amazon Chime will give users the best of both worlds and create a new, compelling experience.

Basically, Slack can be now used by Amazon employees as it is officially supported by their IT team. But it is not necessary for them to use it everyday. My guess is that most of the AWS and Amazon.com tech employees will start using Slack in the coming months. When we asked Amazon whether there are any plans to make Slack the default communication tool inside Amazon, Amazon gave the following reply.

We can’t comment on any plans beyond Amazon’s plans to deploy Slack.

I think Amazon and Slack partnership is a great idea to take on Microsoft Teams in the productivity space.

Source: Amazon