AWS and Slack Technologies have entered into a new multi-year agreement as part of which the latter 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.

The partnership is significant especially when Slack sees growing competition from Microsoft Teams.

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.

“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,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.

At the same time, 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.

The deal also means that enterprise customers can rely on Slack’s channel-based messaging solution, combined with AWS’s infrastructure and security services, for secure, reliable, and scalable communication. 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.

Highlights:

• Amazon Chime SDK (software development kit) will soon power audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities in native Slack Calls.
• For Enterprise Key Management (EKM), Slack leverages AWS’s security services, including AWS Key Management Service for distribution and control of cryptographic keys.
• The AWS Chatbot service, recently generally available, 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.
• The new Amazon AppFlow integration for Slack enables users to securely transfer data between Slack and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift.