Slack Eliminates Competition, Buys Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian

As a Part of the Deal with Slack, Atlassian will Discontinue Hipchat and Stride from February 2019

Slack took the saying ‘make love, not war’ to heart and decided to take over Atlassian’s workplace messaging apps Hipchat and Stride. The love story started with Atlassian sending over a cake to celebrate Slack’s first anniversary and Slack returning the gesture with a box of cookies for the launch of Stride. The ‘happily ever after’ riding into the sunset was announced by Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield in a series of tweets.

The deal we’re announcing today with Atlassian is pretty amazing. Indeed, I tried to fit it all in one (280 character) tweet but I just couldn’t do it. So, I’ll lay it out in a few. But first, I wanted to thank Scott, Mike, Jay and the team: incredible to work with you.

— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) July 26, 2018

Hipchat, which launched in Beta 2009, dominated the workplace chat space for a long time before Slack, which launched in 2013, took over the throne. Atlassian then launched Stride in 2017 to regain the Hipchat glory. Unfortunately, it couldn’t do that. Now Slack, as it purchases the intellectual property rights for both Hipchat and Stride, is looking for complete workplace domination. (Psst! Facebook might try and stop Slack with Redkix, but more on that later).

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As part of this partnership, Atlassian will discontinue Hipchat and Stride, as of February 2019, and provide a migration path to Slack for all their customers. Atlassian is also making “a small, but symbolically important investment” in Slack.

“We’re also committing teams on both sides to build deeper and more powerful integrations between Slack and the Atlassian family of products, which includes adding new functionality to the existing Slack integrations for Jira Server and Cloud (which, by the way, Slack uses daily) Trello, and Bitbucket, and building out new integrations with Confluence and other products. More details about these changes are available on the Atlassian website,” wrote April Underwood, Chief Product Officer, Slack in a company blog officially announcing the partnership.

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Atlassian VP of Product Management, Joff Redfern called the move as the “best way forward” for its existing customers in the company blog. “Over the past year, however, the market in real-time communications has changed pretty dramatically. And throughout that change, one product has continued to stand out from the others: Slack. 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,” wrote Redfern.

Slack still faces steady competition from Microsoft’s Teams platform, Google’s Hangouts Chat, and Facebook’s Workplace.

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