Slack Announces Second Acquisition This Month with Hipchat and Stride

Slack is on a path to consolidate as many workplace communication platforms as they can.

The latest announcement comes with Slack’s acquisition of Atlassian’s Hipchat and Stride. Slack has outlined their purchase of the IP of both workplace communication platforms in a blog post, calling the deal a partnership between the two companies.

“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,” Slack’s post reads.

“What’s fuelled this camaraderie is that we both share an orientation toward customer service: as the world transitions to best of breed software to run their businesses, it’s up to us to help make sure it all works as well as possible for our mutual customers.”

Atlassian will discontinue Hipchat and Stride and offer a migration path for those users to go to Slack. Along with this will come new functionality for the Jira Server and Cloud, Trello, and Bitbucket, along with new built-out integrations with Confluence and other products.

The products mentioned above all belong to the family of Atlassian platforms. The Australian company builds and provides tools for enterprise-level companies to increase their workflow and productivity.

Stride was Atlassian’s answer to Slack and functioned as a complete team communication tool. It could handle group chats, phone calls, video chats, document sending and more. Hipchat was a private online forum to chat and instant message others within a company.

“Over the past year, however, the market in real-time communications has changed pretty dramatically,” a blog post from Atlassian reads. “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.”

Along with this announcement, Atlassian has also made a small equity investment into Slack and will shift their 2,600-plus workforce onto the Vancouver-based company’s platform.

Earlier this month, Slack announced they acquired the Missions add-on.