Slack and Amazon Web Services agree on a multi-year deal

Slack has agreed on a multi-year partnership with AWS that will see its voice and video calling features integrated with Amazon Chime.

The partnership announcement comes a day after Slack reported its revenues increased 50% to $201.7 million in its first-quarter earnings. This also included a 28% rise in paid customers.

Its latest paid customer is tech giant Amazon, which has agreed to adopt Slack within its workforce as part of the deal. In the other direction, Slack will use a range of AWS services, including storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning, to develop new collaboration features.

The agreement will see 'Slack Calls', it's service for all voice and video calling, integrated into Amazon's video conferencing platform Chime, a service that has similar call functions to Microsoft Teams.

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

"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 will also use AWS's global infrastructure to support enterprise customers adopting its platform, making use of the recently announced data residency. Revealed in May, the updated zones allow Slack customers to select from a greater number of regions in Europe to help them store their data locally and fulfil compliance requirements. The deal will allow Slack to build on this offering by taking advantage of AWS infrastructure.

While Slack's first-quarter results beat expectations, the 50% jump was in fact lower than many investors had anticipated, according to TechCrunch. Immediately after its earnings report, an investor sell-off resulted in a 4.4% drop in shares.

The firm reported rapid growth following the outbreak of the coronavirus in March. The mass adoption of cloud-based services led some investors to expect a little more than 50%.