Slack and Atlassian Collaborate Then Axe Hipchat and Stride!

Collaboration giant Slack and Atlassian join forces, with Hipchat Cloud and Stride to be discontinued

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Collaboration

Published: July 27, 2018

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

Big news in the collaboration world as industry giant Slack announce a strategic partnership with software specialists Atlassian.

The collaboration industry has been become increasingly competitive with the rise in popularity of Microsoft Teams, further focus from Cisco in their proposition Webex Teams and proliferation of other alternative products.

Slack are arguably the forefather of the collaboration genre and the innovative startup captured a large section of the developing market. They recently announced they they had reached more than eight million daily active users and of those, three million are on one of their paid for subscription plans.

Atlassian have worked in partnership with Slack for many years, most recently collaborating on the launch of Slack’s task management tool, Actions. The latest news deepens the working relationship between the two companies and reaffirms their shared beliefs about the future of the technology landscape.

April Underwood, Slack’s Chief Product Officer, explained.

“This deeper partnership exemplifies our shared belief that the world of enterprise software is moving to a model in which people are building their own technology stack with the highly specialised, interoperable tools that best suit their needs.”

The main result of the latest announcement is that Slack have purchased, outright, the intellectual property rights for Stride and it’s predecessor Hipchat. Hipchat was developed by Atlassian as a its original web service for online chat and instant messaging between individuals or groups. Stride was a team collaboration and communication application for business, and was due to become the successor for Hipchat after its launch at the end of 2017.

The End of Hipchat

The announcement declares that Atlassian will discontinue Hipchat and Stride in early 2019 and both companies will assist current users in migrating to Slack. The logistics for the migration are yet to be confirmed.

The platforms, Hipchat, Stride and Slack do offer similar functionality so the transition for users may not be too traumatic. Many of Atlassian’s software tools have already been integrated into hundreds of thousands of Slack’s existing team platforms. Some Slack teams utilise both Jira and Trello which are task and project management applications. Some also incorporate Atlassian’s Bitbucket which enables source code, development and collaboration for projects. Customers that use these tools include Autodesk, CapitalOne, Liberty Mutual and Nasa JPL.

Vice President of Product at Atlassian, Joff Redfern, elaborates further on the benefits of the closer relationship.

“Knowledge workers want best-in-class tools to get their work done, which is why millions of people use both Atlassian and Slack. This strategic partnership between us reinforces our commitment to interoperability and a customer-first philosophy.”

Other aspects of the closer alliance between the two companies have also been made apparent. The collaboration between the two, in terms of integration, will increase with the companies developing tighter native interaction and integration between their product sets.

Atlassian have also made an ‘equity investment’ in Slack. Although the value of this investment has not been revealed it has apparently been made to Slack as a representative of Atlassian’s intention to partner with them over the long term.

Both parties are at this stage unwilling to divulge the financial and logistical terms of the deal. UC Today have approached both parties for further comment.

More to follow.

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