The end of workplace messaging platform wars.
The battle for dominance between workplace messaging platforms has come to a close, and Slack has emerged as the winner.
As a cloud-based set of team collaboration tools and services, Slack Technologies has acquired both Stride and Hipchat platforms from Atlassian.
Joff Redfern, Vice President of Product Management at Atlassian, said in a July 27th statement about the new acquisition, “As part of this partnership, Atlassian has made an equity investment in Slack, which has acquired the IP for Stride and HipChat Cloud, both of which we will discontinue.” Atlassian is encouraging all of its customers to migrate to Slack’s platform.
The new acquirements may have been an easy decision to make considering that Slack is up against some very tough competition with Microsoft launching Teams, its own workplace collaboration tool, earlier this month. Microsoft claims over 200,000 organizations use Teams, while Slack is used by 500,000 active organizations.
Slack’s other competitors include Google’s Hangouts Chat, Cisco’s Webex Teams, and Workplace by Facebook. Research firm IDC projects that these competitors will have a valuation of $3.2 billion by 2021.
From a wider perspective, Slack Technologies will gain significant leverage in building its presence from these new acquisitions as Atlassian is a well respected brand in the many sectors Slack wants to be in. The financial markets could be a challenge as it fights to hold off its chief competitor, Microsoft.
The announcement of these acquisitions was the first update on Slack’s company since September 2017 when the company announced that it had 50,000 paying organizations, 6 million active users, and 2 million paid users.
“Slack and Atlassian have worked closely together for many years, and Atlassian’s tools, including Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket have already been installed by hundreds of thousands of Slack teams,” Slack’s Chief Product Officer April Underwood, said in a statement. “This deeper partnership exemplifies our shared belief that the world of enterprise software is moving to a model in which people are building their own technology stack with the highly specialized, interoperable tools that best suit their needs.”
As part of the deal, Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years for the intellectual property rights of Hipchat and Stride. Atlassian will continue to manage both products until February 15, 2019, after which it will offer customers the option to migrate to Slack.
