As Cisco and Microsoft vie against one another with competing chatbot tools that are both called Teams, Slack isn’t ready to cede the real-time, chat-based communications market it helped popularize in modern workplaces.
Story by Jeffrey Schwartz, Channel Partners
Slack is looking to extend its reach by teaming with Atlassian. A partnership between the two companies, announced last week, calls for Atlassian to discontinue its competing chatbot offerings called Stride and Hipchat. Atlassian launched Stride nearly a year ago to compete with Slack, but less than a year later decided it would be better to join forces.
As systems integrators and service providers seek to deliver collaboration solutions, real-time communications with chat and bots are becoming the cornerstone of the modern digital experience. In return for exiting the market and turning over the intellectual property for HipChat and Stride, Atlassian is making a small investment in Slack. Atlassian will also encourage its customers to switch to Slack and will provide migration to ease the transition.
“We knew we were taking a risk by entering an already competitive, real-time team communications market, but we were willing to do the hard work necessary to build a great product,” said Joff Redfern, Atlassian’s VP of product management, in a company blog announcing the deal. “Over the past year, however, the market in real-time communications has changed pretty dramatically. And throughout that change, one product has continued to stand out from the others: Slack.”
