Atlassian invests in Slack, kills HipChat and Stride

Atlassian has announced a new strategic partnership with Slack, the workplace chat behemoth.

As part of the deal, Atlassian makes a significant equity investment in Slack, although it’s keeping mum on how much money is on the table.

In return, Slack is purchasing the IP for HipChat Cloud and Stride (which Atlassian launched just last year). Atlassian plans to discontinue both products next year, and help customers on both platforms migrate to Slack.

Atlassian has also promised to build tighter integrations between its products. The company owns a number of properties, particularly in the devops and workplace productivity space, including Trello, BitBucket, JIRA, and Confluence.

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This is pretty significant news. Atlassian is essentially bowing out of the workplace chat space, and putting all of its money on Slack.

In a statement, Atlassian VP of Product, Joff Rodburn, said:

“Knowledge workers want best-in-class tools to get their work done, which is why millions of people use both Atlassian and Slack. This strategic partnership between us reinforces our commitment to interoperability and a customer-first philosophy. We believe this partnership is the best way to advance our mission to unleash the potential of every team. And it’ll allow us to improve our focus in other areas, including expanding our offerings for technical and IT teams.”

Slack remains top dog, but is threatened by new offerings in the chat space, particularly from Microsoft. Earlier this year, Redmond fired a shot across Slack’s bow with the launch of a free version of Microsoft Teams.

This partnership will help Slack cement its position, and ward off any new competition. The influx of new users, particularly from the stagnating HipChat, will all but ensure its market dominance for years to come.

That said, it’s a little sad to see Stride killed off so early, particularly given it showed so much promise. We covered it upon launch, and we were deeply impressed with its time-saving and focus-preserving features.