The cloud provider just entered the unified communications business with a new service
Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services.
On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime , a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. It’s a powerful swing at some very entrenched enterprise software players by the public cloud provider.
AWS launched the service with native applications for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android. Chime’s infrastructure is based in the U. S., but Gene Farrell, AWS’s vice president of enterprise applications, said that the service can be accessed worldwide.
One of Chime’s interesting features is a visual roster of meeting participants that includes information about any people who have distracting background noise interrupting the call. In a meeting without a moderator, any user can choose to mute one of their fellow participants so that the rest on the call don’t have to listen to a barking dog or the sound of typing.
People who get muted in that way will get notified that their mic has been blocked, and can choose to unmute themselves whenever they want to.
In addition, users can call into a Chime conference call using a regular phone number, in the event they can’t access the service’s app for one reason or another.
