Slack buys HipChat with plans to close it and migrate users to its chat service

Slack made a surprise announcement today announcing the acquisition of HipChat, a former competitor of its workplace chat service, by giant Atlassian software company. As part of the partnership between Slack and Atlassian, HipChat will close and the two companies will work together to migrate all of its users to Slack. The same goes for Stride, the cat's successor and collaboration at HipChat launched by Atlassian last year.

Atlassian clarified that Slack only buys the intellectual property behind the two products, and that the two companies will work together on future integrations.

In exchange, Atlassian takes a small stake in the start-up, while Slack pays undisclosed amount over the next three years to fully acquire the basics of HipChat and Stride users. The partnership comes at a crucial time for enterprise chat software, with Microsoft ramping up with a competing product called Teams that is immediately available to 135 million Office Cloud subscribers. There is even a free version of Teams available to attract new users, a strategy similar to that of Slack. Facebook also has its own point of view on the product, called Workplace.

Prior to this partnership, Atlassian was trying to remain competitive in the discussion space by moving its HipChat customers to a new product of the year. team, called Stride. The service offered audio / video conferencing and project tracking services, as well as standard chat and communication features. Unfortunately, like HipChat, Stride has not managed to get the traction needed to stay profitable, especially since big names like Microsoft have entered the company. # 39; discussion space of the company.

As for existing users of HipChat, they will have the opportunity to use the service until February, by which time they will be encouraged to move to Slack. To date, Microsoft claims that 200,000 organizations use teams, while Slack claims 500,000 active organizations.