The video-conferencing industry has seen a major increase in usage as social interactions are now forced to go online since the coronavirus wave hit.Consequently, companies have also shifted to remote work and the world’s tech giants have since committed to allowing most of their staff to continue doing so till the end of the year.
Within the enterprise collaboration market, Slack is seeing stiff competition from Microsoft Teams who reported an increase in their daily users to 44 million – up by 12 million in the preceding week – via their website back in March. This came together with an announcement of their new features such as the Real-time noise suppression and a Raise-Hand function.
On the other hand, Slack shared that their concurrent users have reached 12.5 million on 25th March. This is not to be confused with daily active users which Slack have not disclosed since reporting having 12 million back in October 2019. More recently, Slack announced on its blog that they will be partnering up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would see both companies working “to deliver tightly integrated, enterprise grade tools”. Amazon has 840,000 employees but it has not been clarified how many of them will be using the platform. Prior to the multi-year partnership with Amazon, Slack revealed IBM as its biggest customer with 350,000 employees.
Slack CEO and Co-founder, Stewart Buttterfield went on to note that “The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools.” Furthering his comment, their partnership with AWS would enable “both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers,” as well as help teams “easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack.” via its channel-based medium.
In view of the partnership, Slack Calls will be integrating with Amazon Chime’s voice and video-calling systems, with the latter driving the audiovisual and screenshare features in Slack. Initiatives like mobile video is also reported to be in the pipeline.
This is not the first collaboration between the two companies though, as both Slack and Amazon have worked together in 2019 to launch the Enterprise Key Management which provides encryption tools for companies to store sensitive data within Amazon’s Key Management Service.
Chiming in on the partnership, AWS CEO Andy Jassy comments “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.”
With the history of collaboration supporting Slack’s and Amazon’s new partnership and as the global health emergency evolves, the strategic alliance between Slack and Amazon would be one to watch as the video-conferencing industry continues their dominance for market share.