AWS partners with Slack to take on Microsoft Teams

Slack will move its audio and video call functionality over to Amazon Chime

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Slack have announced a tie-up that will see the pair take the fight to Microsoft Teams.

The multi-year deal will see Slack migrate all of its audio and video call capabilities to Amazon's Chime platform, which competes with the likes of WebEx and Zoom. Slack already used AWS as its "preferred cloud partner".

A regulatory filing revealed that Slack will pay AWS at least $425m for hosting between now and May 2025

AWS will adopt Slack internally as part of the deal, and encourage developers to manage their AWS environments on Slack's messaging platform.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy said: "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.

"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."

Slack is seen by many as the poster child of workplace collaboration, but has come under increasing threat since Microsoft Teams.

Meanwhile Amazon Chime has not gained the same traction seen by WebEx and Zoom throughout lockdown.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said: "The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools.

"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."