Chime & Slack Placement

This week I made a quick post on LinkedIn after listening to Sid Rao interviewed by Corey Quinn on the Chiming in on Slack with Sid Rao episode of Last Week in AWS. In thinking about it further, some expanded thoughts.

Last week, Slack announced a partnership with AWS, notably Amazon Chime. Briefly, Chime's AV and meeting functionality would be integrated into Slack (replacing what they'd previously done themselves, bespoke or through purchases). Amazon would be purchasing Slack seats for all their employees, and Slack would be moving or consolidating much of their workloads to the AWS cloud.

As a side note, I suspect this Slack Case Study AWS released in 2015 will need to be updated...

While my own work's evolution has been from IRC based (and evolved) collaboration, into the Microsoft space, I've been a user of Slack as well - fundamentally as a consumer. And I've looked at Amazon Chime, a product that's been kicking around in AWS for some time, though I've never turned up someone in my real life that has knowingly used it.

That's where this gets interesting. In the interview with Sid Rao, he emphasizes several interesting points.

• Each collaboration tool has a focus (e.g. a heritage, a topic I'll come back to another time) - Slack's is from a messaging standpoint, Chime's is from a AV/Meeting standpoint. Bringing the two together only strengthens the former product.
• Per Rao, Chime's strongest play (and his point of pride) is not their customer facing product. It's the Chime SDK work they've been doing over the last couple years.
• The client is effectively their testbed for the SDK. When a customer has a need - it goes into the SDK first, then gets integrated into the product - the Chime apps being "the ultimate sample code". Both sides of the product are in an owner-operator relationship.
• The SDK is getting more pick-up - Rao provides examples of an Electronic Health Record provider that has integrated Chime for telehealth, so the medical staff has the full record in front of them for review and update with the client in video embedded. Or an integration for health and yoga coursework by Mindbody.
• The integration of the Chime SDK into Slack is perhaps the most public and largest of these to date.

A further interesting topic which Rao mentions is how the Chime ecosystem determines where a meeting is terminated within the infrastructure. The service identifies the most-central topographic location for participants (e.g. for participants in North America and APAC, the best termination may be in Europe). As different meetings have differing populations, this may shift. And Chime can move termination points for a conversation if it proactively detects path degradation between an endpoint and the Chime service in a particular region. This all feels like a bit of voodoo (c.f. AC Clarke); Microsoft Teams, by contrast, is documented as hosting the meeting in the region closest to the first participant.

Rao mentions other interesting tidbits during the course of the interview, including that internal Amazon use of Chime doubled since the COVID-19 period started, and they've seen significant (orders of magnitude) customer growth as well.

As for everything - more to learn, more growth to come.

For another perspective on this, see Samir Diwan at Geekwire's take on the collaboration