Slack turns to Amazon to beef up its services

Facing overwhelming competition from Microsoft Teams, Slack has been forced to turn to cloud behemoth Amazon AWS to improve its services.

In a press release, the companies announced a new multi-year agreement to deliver solutions for enhanced enterprise workforce collaboration.

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. Slack will migrate its Slack Calls capability for all voice and video calling to Amazon Chime, AWS’s communications service that lets users meet, chat, and place business calls. 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. Slack will continue to rely on AWS as its preferred cloud provider and will use a range of AWS services, including storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning, to develop new collaboration features. Additionally, AWS has agreed to use Slack to simplify the way teams at AWS communicate and work together.

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. These integrations include:

Amazon Chime infrastructure with Slack Calls: Amazon Chime SDK (software development kit) will soon power audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities in native Slack Calls. By relying on Amazon Chime to power its real-time communication, Slack will leverage AWS’s proven infrastructure to deliver high-quality and reliable user experiences while eliminating the cost and complexity of maintaining its own unified communications infrastructure.

AWS Key Management Service with Slack Enterprise Key Management (EKM): For EKM, Slack leverages AWS’s proven security services, including AWS Key Management Service for distribution and control of cryptographic keys. Designed for security-conscious or regulated enterprise customers who seek increased visibility and control over their data in Slack, over 90 companies are now using the solution to manage their own encryption keys. Enhancements, such as EKM for Slack’s Workflow Builder automation tool were released last month.

AWS Chatbot integration with Slack: AWS Chatbot is a service that uses an interactive agent to help development teams stay updated, collaborate, and respond more quickly to operational events, security findings, workflows, and other alerts for applications running in AWS accounts. Only recently generally available, AWS Chatbot is already in use by many thousands of teams around the world to improve the application development process. 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.

Amazon AppFlow integration with Slack: The new Amazon AppFlow integration for Slack enables users to securely transfer data between Slack and AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift, simplifying tasks such as analyzing trends in customer engagement from helpdesk requests or measuring sentiment data. In the coming months, AWS and Slack will enhance this capability, enabling customers to transfer data bi-directionally between multiple Slack channels and AWS services in a single flow.

“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. “Strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers. 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.”

“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, CEO of AWS. “AWS customers gain a powerful new means of managing their AWS resources that will help teams collaborate and build more applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services. We look forward to working with Slack to expand the ways we can help our customers innovate in the cloud.”

The unanswered question of why Amazon has not merely purchased Slack remains, but Slack says their partnership will guarantee companies can rely on AWS’s proven infrastructure and security services, for secure, reliable, and scalable communication.

via the WC