Amazon Web Service is looking to chime in on the enterprise unified communications market.

With Chime, which AWS announced Feb. 13, the public cloud provider is looking to compete directly with two well-established enterprise UC brands -- Microsoft's Skype for Business and Cisco's WebEx.

It's not the first time that AWS has looked to take advantage of its prominence in the public cloud market to advance into different fields, such as productivity, as a way make itself more competitive with the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Google. In the past 18 months, it's launched WorkMail, as an enterprise email competitor. There's also the AWS WorkDocs suite.

With Chime, AWS is emphasizing simplicity, along with the usual array of UC features including online meetings, video conferencing, voice calls, chat and the ability to share content and documents with colleagues.

"This is a new unified communication service that is designed to make meetings easier and more efficient than ever before. Amazon Chime lets you start high-quality audio and video meetings with a click," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, wrote in a blog post. "Once you are in the meeting you can chat, share content and share screens in a smooth experience that spans PC and Mac desktops, iOS devices and Android devices."

Figure 1: Amazon is chiming in.
(Source: AWS)

Chime comes in three different flavors: The Basic plan is free; the Plus plan costs $2.50 per month, per user; and the Pro plan costs $15 per month, per user. Here's how AWS differentiates the three offerings:

As Telecoms.com points out, AWS Chime is not breaking much new ground in the UC space, but Amazon does have enough customers and the market pull to at least make it an attractive offer for those already using its public cloud platform. It has also made Chime compatible with Windows and Android -- two of the bigger rivals for the UC space. (See AWS Maintains Its Public Cloud Dominance.)

The other cloud players have also looked to add more features to their platforms as a way to offer value and move up the stack. Google, for example, recently added more support for a number of Microsoft products that are crucial to enterprise developers. (See Google Cloud Targets Microsoft Users.)

— Scott Ferguson, Editor, Enterprise Cloud. Follow him on Twitter @sferguson_LR.

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