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Video? That's so not what we care about, says Slack, as it signs video deal with AWS

All Amazon staff are slackers now as AWS chat backend Chime's in

Slack has reported strong growth for the first quarter of FY 2021 and declined to measure its performance by comparing adoption rates with Microsoft Teams.

The San Francisco-based company's revenues jumped 50 per cent year-on-year to $201.7m largely thanks to the working from home surge.

The company now has more than 122,000 paying customers, an increase of 28 per cent compared to a year earlier. 12,000 of those signed up in the quarter past, and 90,000 signed up overall. The number of those who spent more then $100,000 jumped almost 50 per cent to 963. Pandemic-provoked work-from-home adoption drove the growth.

Notably, the company did not enumerate its daily active user base. Microsoft, which has compared Teams' growth against Slack as its yardstick for success, reported last week that its usage had jumped 70 per cent to 75m daily active users and uses that metric to describe success.

CEO Stewart Butterfield was at pains to distance the company from a direct comparison with Teams. "I think what you really saw from Microsoft and from Teams was the emphasis on voice, the emphasis on video calling product, moving people over from Skype for business still."

"What you saw with Zoom, what you saw with Teams is a great indication that this is not apples-to-apples and that the products are not truly competitive with one another," he said.

Alongside the results, Slack also unveiled a new multi-year partnership with Amazon, which will see its chat software rolled out across the whole enterprise. The move will likely make Amazon, which has 840,000 employees, the company's largest customer, beating out IBM, which has a 350,000 strong workforce.

The deal would also commit Slack to using AWS as its preferred cloud vendor, enabling it to use a raft of AWS products, including its audio and video call service, Chime, to power the back-end of Slack calls. ®

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