Slack Grabs HipChat, Stride from AtlassianSlack Grabs HipChat, Stride from Atlassian

Longtime partners (and competitors) Atlassian and Slack are shaking up the team collaboration market with an agreement that has Slack purchasing the intellectual assets for and users of Atlassian's legacy HipChat Cloud app and its next-generation Stride tool, both of which Atlassian will discontinue early next year.

Moving forward, Slack and Atlassian will work together to develop a migration program to move HipChat and Stride users over to the Slack platform, as the companies discussed in their respective blog posts here and here. In addition, Atlassian said it will be discontinuing the on-premises HipChat Server, as well as the HipChat Data Center products.

While Slack has acquired Atlassian's team collaboration technology, Atlassian has made an equity investment in Slack -- "a small, but symbolically important investment," April Underwood, chief product officer at Slack, wrote. In addition, all 2,600+ Atlassian employees will begin using Slack, Joff Redfern, VP of product management at Atlassian, wrote on the Atlassian Blog.

Stride, announced not even a year ago, was a ground-up development meant to represent the next generation of team collaboration, blending team messaging, video meetings, and collaboration tools. At the time, Steve Goldsmith, then GM of HipChat, called Stride the "largest and most substantial thing Atlassian has ever brought to market in our 15-year history" (see related No Jitter post).

"Over the past year, however, the market in real-time communications has changed pretty dramatically," Redfern wrote in announcing Atlassian's decision to sell the technology to Slack, which has captured the viral mindshare for team collaboration. "... While we've made great early progress with Stride, we believe the best way forward for our customers and for Atlassian is to enter into a strategic partnership with Slack and no longer offer our own real-time communications products."

The partnership will result in both companies developing new integrations -- between Slack and Atlassian's Confluence, for document collaboration, for example -- and enhancing existing integrations between Slack and Jira Cloud, Bitbucket Cloud, and Trello. The companies promised the first set of new integrations at Atlassian Summit, the company's annual user conference that will take place in early September.

Even with the change brought about through this alliance, Atlassian claims it's not abandoning its original vision to "unleash the potential of every team," Redfern wrote. Instead, this frees Atlassian up to focus on other areas, like expanding its offerings for IT teams. "Hard choices help us reflect on what's most important to us -- our customers, our employees, our mission."

With one less competitor in the field, the deal should help Slack better compete against Microsoft Teams, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg.

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