Dive Brief:

• Amazon is searching for talent to help it develop a "New AWS/Alexa Service" focused on enterprise collaboration, communication and document sharing, according to the company’s job postings, reports Geekwire.

• Amazon posted jobs for "senior solutions architects" in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. The company also posted ads looking for sales people to hawk the new service.

• Amazon said the service will fall under its SaaS offerings within Amazon Web Services, including Amazon Chime, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon WorkDocs.

Dive Insight:

Are we finally moving closer to the long-rumored AWS enterprise productivity tool? In February, AWS hinted it was considering creating its own enterprise productivity suite to compete with similar tools from Microsoft and Google.

Then in June, Amazon reached an agreement with a former employee it accused of violating a non-compete agreement by working at Smartsheet. The sticking point for AWS is that Smartsheet makes online collaborative tools, and the employee, Gene Farrell, was previously the head of AWS' workplace tools division. But the action also hinted that Amazon had something important at stake.

Offering its own productivity suite could give AWS another avenue into the enterprise. Though AWS leads in the cloud, productivity services are another beast altogether. Amazon’s existing business apps are currently considered less advanced and less popular than those sold by Google and Microsoft, but that could soon change.

Given the company is now looking to hire both senior solutions architects and salespeople, Amazon appears they may indeed be pursuing the productivity services space and could be getting quite close to revealing what such a product would encompass.