Amazon Chime is 'underwhelming' and merely 'enterprise FaceTime' says rival UC vendor

Daggers out as GCI launches tirade against AWS' new collaboration effort

Amazon's decision to launch Chime - its own unified communications suite - appears to be seriously riling the rest of the unified comms industry, as GCI has branded the software "underwhelming" and merely an "enterprise FaceTime".

The comments were put out in a blog by Jon Seddon, GCI's head of product management, so hardly a deep technical dive into the application's abilities.

The blog largely devolves, in fact, into an extended advert for Microsoft Office 365 - which GCI happens to vend as a Microsoft gold partner - but nonetheless, makes some decent points about what Amazon is and isn't offering.

The $2.50 a month "per user per month tier", observes Seddon, "does allow screen sharing, [but] it's for a maximum of two users… so not much of a meeting then!".

The next tier - of $15 per user per month - is "the only option that comes close to being ready for businesses," he continues.

But while this allows meeting recording, personalised URLs and the abilility to dial into a meeting on a phone line, "Chime is not bringing anything new to the UC party," says, Seddon, and is thus "a little underwhelming".

"It feels a bit like an ‘Enterprise FaceTime'", he spits.

"Nice interface and OK for video calling, but it's not ‘true UC'.

It's not a replacement for PBX, and "it does not cut it against a fully-fledged UC solution like Skype for Business," he concludes.

At this point Seddon really shows his hand, calling Office 365's E5 plan "already more feature rich than Chime" before saying its £30 ($37) "all in" cost "looks pretty compelling".

This obviously costs a good deal more per-user than Chime, so the argument begins to shoot itself in the foot. But Seddon does make a constructive general point:

"What the announcement from Amazon does reveal is the rapidly growing market for UC services," he says.

"More and more businesses are becoming aware of the benefits that cloud-based collaboration tools can deliver and the market needs innovation and competition to drive it forward. All of this helps to grow the market and this can only be a good thing."

And this is a good way to read Amazon's play - if unified comms is becoming less the preserve of specialised companies and more of a mainstream concern, we can start to expect UC environments with a pool of similar features, but potentially built with smarter, more consumerised interfaces plugged into more widely-ranging existing infrastructure from vendors' existing services.

Perhaps this is the reason for GCI's bile. As Avaya continues to insist its Chapter 11 filing is ‘just a scratch', it's possible to read a wave of change running through the unified communications industry as cloud continues to flip the table.