Will Amazon Buy Slack?
The war for video meetings heats up, and Slack lines up with Amazon Chime.
It looks like Slack and Amazon are slow-dancing their way toward what could become a deep alignment in the work technology space. Amazon has developed an almost-unknown product called Chime which includes a variety of capabilities, such as video conferencing and chat. Because Chime is built on AWS it is highly reliable and scalable, and Slack has announced that Chime will become the platform for Slack video calls, along with Amazon licensing Slack for the company’s 840,000 full-time and part-time employees:
Under a new deal announced Thursday, all Amazon employees will have access to Slack’s workplace collaboration tools. In addition, Slack will deepen its reliance on AWS, revamping its video-calling feature to take advantage of an AWS service called Chime.
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Amazon and Slack have a long history. Slack has run its service on Amazon Web Services infrastructure since launching in 2014, and it has continued to lean on AWS to accommodate additional demand during the pandemic.
So this sounds like a tactical deal, at first glance. Slack needs to scale demand for video conferencing, and Amazon technologists may have suggested that Chime will accomplish that more easily than rebuilding…
