Amazon unveils Chime conference service, taking on CTRX GoToMeeting and MSFT Skype service head on
Amazon is looking to transform just about every industry. Now, the Seattle tech juggernaut wants to reinvent how you conduct meetings and conference calls.Amazon Web Services today unveiled Chime, a new service that it says takes the “frustration out of meetings” by delivering video, voice, chat, and screen sharing. Instead of forcing participants to call one another on a dedicated line, Amazon Chime automatically calls all participants at the start of a meeting, so “joining a meeting is as easy as clicking a button in the app, no PIN required,” the company said in a press release. Chime also shows a visual roster of participants, and allows participants to pinpoint who exactly on the call is creating annoying background noise.
From the outside, Amazon (AMZN) is what you could call a consumer company, with its eCommerce services dominating not just the online shopping world, but overall commerce across the globe. Suffice it to say, there’s probably not too many people left that haven’t either purchased an item on Amazon or had their local UPS delivery man ring their doorbell and hand them an Amazon box (or in our case ring the doorbell and run!
Looking beneath the hood however at Amazon’s financials, we find that it’s Amazon Web Service (AWS) as the main contributor to the company’s operating profits. AWS is the leading cloud services provider, but for the most part, very few end users have any idea that they are actually interacting with AWS servers either through hosted websites or shared documents. Unless you are a member of your company’s tech team you probably know very little about AWS.
With Amazon Chime that could be changing as it looks to take on the corporate conference call / meeting business dominated by CITRIX (CTRX) owned GoToMeeting and even web-calling service SKYPE owned by Microsoft (MSFT). This is yet another news story of Amazon taking on a new segment of the market. For those keeping score at home, it was recently announced Amazon is diving into the auto-parts, women’s lingerie, and groceries just to name a few.
We’ve downloaded the app and will start testing it in the coming days and weeks as it offers a 30-day free trial. We’ll share more after a few tests, but truth be told, if it’s anything like everything else Amazon has touched recently, it will likely be a very favorable review.
