Slack to acquire Hipchat, Stride, as pressure from Microsoft Teams mounts

Laurent Giret

In a surprise announcement yesterday, Slack revealed a new partnership with Atlassian, owner of several popular enterprise-focused apps such as HipChat, Stride and Jira. Slack will purchase the IP for HipChat and Stride (a successor to HipChat), and help customers transition to Slack before Atlassian’s apps are discontinued next year.

The partnership will allow Atlassian to focus on its other assets such as its issue tracking solution Jira and the project management app Trello, and the company will also be making a “small, but symbolically important investment” in Slack. On the other hand, the latter will be able to boost its user base thanks to users migrating from HipChat and Stride, something that the company will need to compete with the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a free version of Teams, which is now available worldwide in 40 languages. The Redmond giant says that more than 200,000 businesses are now using Teams across 181 markets, while Slack claims it’s already being used by 500,000 organizations. With its free tier, Slack quickly become popular among startups and small businesses, but the company can’t really afford to underestimate Microsoft Teams and all its synergies with other Office 365 apps.

“Hundreds of thousands of teams are already using Slack with JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, etc. — this will have a big impact,” said confidently Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. It’s true that Slack is still enjoying some great momentum this year, but the footsteps from Teams should certainly get louder in the near future.