Amazon's CPaaS: Sid Rao talks about the Chime SDK

TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests.  In this episode, we check in with Sid Rao, the  GM of Amazon Chime SDK. 

I fondly remember Biba, a WebRTC video/messaging startup . There was a lot of excitement over WebRTC about ten years ago. Biba was acquired by Amazon and relaunched as the Amazon Chime app in 2017. 

Chime was a lot like Webex and Zoom, but worked entirely in a browser. Both Vonage and CenturyLink (now Lumen) were early resellers of the meeting application.  The app worked well, but wasn't a bit hit. Vonage moved to its own video solution, and CenturyLink turned to apps such as Zoom and Teams. 

AWS discovered that its customers were more interested in Chime's underlying WebRTC than the meeting app. Amazon created WebRTC APIs,  effectively making WebRTC a service rather than a tech stack. This model was a better fit for AWS, so at its reInvent conference in 2018, AWS launched the Chime SDK.  

Then came the pandemic and a boom in most things video. AWS customers and partners used Chime to create all kinds of solutions. K-12 education, for example, needed video for remote education.  Chime obliged, and did so with simple hardware requirements for end users. Blackboard presented its success story at reInvent 2021. 

As for the original Chime app, it's been getting better thanks to new capabilities of the Chime SDK. The Chime app isn't particular popular,, nor marketed. It does well within Amazon, both as an internal meeting and chat app and with many of AWS's large customers.