But I think Slack really comes into its own when it's also a lightweight fabric for systems integration.

The movement from inboxes to channels, as you've heard me talk about probably too much at this point, that's an inevitability. As Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield explains: These integrations have turned Slack from a messaging layer into an alternative user interface for many of the functions these other applications provide. There are many other similar integrations, into enterprise applications such as Salesforce and Workday, customer-facing apps such as Zendesk, Intercom and Hubspot, other collaboration tools such as Atlassian, Box, Dropbox and Zoom, workflow from Workato, and much more. Slack's AWS Chatbot, introduced a few weeks ago, allows developers to receive notifications, retrieve diagnostic information, issue AWS commands or create support cases, and initiate workflows that invoke Lambda functions, all from within a Slack channel. In fact, if you look at how a lot of enterprises actually use Slack, its most significant value is as a conversational access layer to a whole range of applications that headlessly plug into it, including AWS itself. Part of the confusion is down to the conventional wisdom about Slack, which is that it's just a messaging app, a modern version of IRC with a few bells and whistles bolted on. What it's really about is integrating applications into Slack. The conventional wisdom about Slack's partnership with Amazon, announced yesterday, is that it's all about video and voice calling in Slack and competing with Microsoft Teams.

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