Slack snaps up Atlassian’s Stride and Hipchat Cloud IP

Slack strengthens user base in face of Microsoft Teams going freemium earlier this month

Slack has acquired the intellectual property for Atlassian’s Stride and Hipchat Cloud, which will be discontinued, as part of a partnership between the companies announced today.

As part of the deal – revealed in blog posts from both companies today – Atlassian has made a “small, but symbolically important” equity investment in Slack.

Stride was launched in September last year, a late entrant to the increasingly crowded team communication and collaboration segment.

”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,” wrote Joff Redfern, Atlassian vice president of product management.

“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,” Redfern added.

The two companies described their “spirited yet friendly competition” evidenced by the exchange of cake and cookies on notable milestones.

The new partnership will involve “committing teams on both sides to build deeper and more powerful integrations” between the two companies’ products, wrote Slack chief product officer April Underwood.

“This partnership is about a joint vision of simplifying and automating the huge amount of effort that teams everywhere expend to stay aligned, coordinated, and productive,” she wrote.

Atlassian has established a migration hub for users wanting to move their Hipchat data to Slack, while Slack is running webinars and developer meetups for new users.

The partnership knocks a key Slack competitor out of the picture, and boosts its user base in the face of strengthening competition from Microsoft’s copycat Teams product.

Teams was launched at the start of last year as a direct competitor to Slack. Microsoft launched a free version of the app earlier this month, which can be used without an Office 365 subscription.

Slack – which has offices in Melbourne’s CBD – has offered a freemium version of its product from the outset.

In May this year Slack revealed its platform had more than eight million Daily Active Users (DAUs) across more than 500,000 organisations.

Of those, some three million are paid users, forming more than 70,000 paid teams, many of which have multiple thousands of active users.

According to the company, that represents double the number of paid and daily users Slack had in the last quarter of 2016 making it the “fastest-growing business application in history”.

By comparison, at last count in March Microsoft Teams was used by some 200,000 organisations (up from 125,000 in September last year) significantly fewer than Slack.

User numbers for Stride are not publically available.

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Tags MicrosoftappssoftwareacquisitionMelbourneatlassianchatTEAMSslackStrideFacebook WorkplaceCal Henderson

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