Australian enterprise communications developer Atlassian, and Slack, have a partnership dating back several years now. In a 2018 blog post by the company, Atlassian said it’s decided to discontinue Hipchat and Stride and have since offered a path to migration via Slack for all their customers.
As a part of the deal, Atlassian bought the intellectual property for Hipchat Cloud and Stride as well as made a small, yet ‘symbolically important investment in Slack.’ That 2018 deal also introduced Slack’s plans to create what they called ‘deeper and more powerful integrations between their family of products.’ At the time, this involved adding fresh functionality to the existing Slack integrations for Jira Server and Cloud, Trello, and Bitbucket, as well as developing new integrations.
Today, the duo say they’ve strengthened their alliance, announcing a joint product roadmap that involves ‘passports,’ a feature intended to reduce the time it takes logging into separate services. A spokesperson for Slack told me in an email statement:
“We are also announcing our new go-to-market plans, including co-marketing efforts and a special offer of 50 percent off new Slack plans for Atlassian customers”
Looking ahead at the duo’s joint development approach, they say they will keep working on ways to implement more seamless access to the Atlassian product suite via Slack and linked accounts. “Like a Slack passport, it’ll be even easier for our shared customers to access all of their Atlassian tools without ever leaving Slack.”
There’s also said to be more cohesive team communication, via new rich unfurls, and soon – all links to Atlassian content will appear as rich unfurls in Slack – across direct messages, public channels, and private channels. “The additional context saves time and boosts team productivity by helping team members quickly understand why a link was shared and what action they may need to take.”
Slack’s seen major upticks in its usage during the novel Coronavirus and continues to compete with the likes of Microsoft Teams, Cisco’s Webex Teams offering, and Zoom, which all continue to command the market when it comes to innovative features. Most recently, Zoom’s stock rose by nearly 25 percent, with its revenue increasing by 355 percent.
With so much success, Zoom’s story is almost one of ‘rags to riches.’ Pre-pandemic, Zoom was mostly known in the enterprise space as a tool used to collaborate, and so were other systems like Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Today, those tools have entered the mainstream, which makes them subject to more scrutiny. As such, scale becomes a point of contention. Ensuring uptime for all users, all the time – a big yet not impossible feat.
Advancing, this will remain one of the central challenges for the likes of Slack and Zoom – making sure the service is available when users need it most. Zoom experienced partial outages in both the US and the UK back in August. The popular video conferencing tool went down on the first day of school for many districts as well as universities across the globe, with the issue being fixed within two hours.
