Amazon targets unified communications sector with Chime
'The tech people will want to use,' according to AWS
Amazon is entering the unified communications market with AWS' launch of Amazon Chime.
Offering what the company calls a "secure, easy-to-use application" for online meetings, Chime is pitched to function for video conferencing, calls, chat and content sharing "both inside and outside your organisation".
It runs inside a single, platform agnostic application for all functions.
If Chime sounds a little like Skype, that's because it probably is, although Amazon seems to be using the app's "noise cancelling" technology as a major hook, alleging that its "wideband audio" helps cut out background noise.
Up to 18 users can join a meeting on desktop or laptop, while six can conference using the mobile app.
Amazon is attempting to fit the service into an increasingly crowded comms landscape by insisting there is currently no existing technology enterprise customers actually want to use.
"It's pretty hard to find people who actually like the technology they use for meetings today. Most meeting applications or services are hard to use, deliver bad audio and video, require constant switching between multiple tools to do everything they want, and are way too expensive," said Gene Farrell, AWS VP.
"Amazon Chime delivers frustration-free meetings, allowing users to be productive from anywhere."
Farrell also bigged up the products's lack of "ongoing maintenance or management fees", before again concluding that Amazon Chime would be "a great choice for companies that are looking for a solution to meetings that their employees will love to use".
Computing recently found that most UK IT leaders still feel they're unable to offer their end users better messaging and collaboration applications than can be offered by consumer-grade applications such as WhatsApp or Skype.
With the likes of Yammer and Skype for Business still being used under duress by most, Amazon and AWS will have their work cut out for them with Chime, which seems at this stage simply an also-ran product to most other offerings on the market.