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.
