Both Microsoft Teams and Slack provide enterprise customers with remote communication services. And no matter how close they seem when it comes to helping each other in difficult times, both competition and rivalry between these two seem to be heating up these days. The reason could be fairly straightforward: Both Slack and Teams consider each other competitors although neither Microsoft nor Slack has officially said so.
‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend…’
“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” says Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and CEO 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.”
Slack has now come to terms with Amazon Chime to power its voice and video calling services, developing broader and deeper ties with Amazon AWS, the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing infrastructure. The deal between Slack and Amazon comes at a time when the former is facing intense competition from Microsoft Teams.
Well, over the last few weeks, the overall consumption of remote and video communication services continue to increase. Nearly all video and remote communication services such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom has noticed exponential growth in terms of their userbase and usage.
However, the Slack-Amazon deal is much beyond a strategic partnership. In a nutshell, Microsoft is kind of a threat to both Slack and Amazon. We will explain why:
While Slack competes with Microsoft Teams, Amazon AWS faces direct competition from Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise cloud-computing service that powers data centers. Hence, it makes sense for both Amazon and Slack to secure their business interest while at the same time, they are also trying to maintain a safe distance from Microsoft.
The Slack-Amazon partnership also promises better product integration and interoperability for the AWS Chatbot service. The deal is likely to improve the Amazon AppFlow integration for the bidirectional data transfer between AWS services and Slack channels.
Previously, Slack announced the launch of an app called Microsoft Teams Calls, integrating Teams’ calling feature into its own service. The app allows Slack users to receive Microsoft Teams calls.
