Atlassian announced that they are entering into a strategic partnership with Slack on July 26, 2018, and will no longer offer their own real-time communications products. The partnership enables them to extend existing integrations between their tools and co-build new ones.
Joff Redfern, VP of product management at Atlassian, stated the expected benefits of this partnership in the announcement:
Through this new partnership, both companies will lean into building better integrations together and more sharply define the modern workplace experience for companies everywhere.
As a result of the partnership, Atlassian has decided to discontinue their products Hipchat Cloud, Hipchat Data Center, Hipchat Server, and Stride.
At the at the Atlassian Summit Europe 2018 Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, presented the plans for the Atlassian and Slack integration. There already exist integrations between Confluence and Slack, Jira, Trello, Bitbucket, and Slack, and users can export their archive from Hipchat and import it into Slack. Atlassian is currently developing an export capability for Stride, expected to be ready by October.
Atlassian has set up a webpage to support their users moving to Slack, and Slack has created a webpage with information about migration to Slack for Atlassian tool users. Atlassian users can ask questions about the Hipchat and Stride announcement in the Atlassian community.
The Atlassian Slack partnership FAQ provides detailed information about the effects of this partnership, for instance about the support of the discontinued products:
Existing groups will be able to continue to add users and use Stride and Hipchat Cloud products until February 15th, 2019. Existing Hipchat Data Center & Hipchat Server customers will have support through the end of their license period.
There are no plans to migrate Stride or Hipchat apps to the Slack platform. Existing Atlassian Apps will have to be rebuilt with the Slack developer tools on the Slack platform:
The Slack developer team is already ramping up with resources to help Stride and Hipchat developers onboard quickly to build real-time messaging apps using Slack APIs.
The strategic partnership is one of the recent announcements from Atlassian, more announcements can be found in the InfoQ news Atlassian expands the Jira Ecosystem.
InfoQ is covering the Atlassian Summit Europe 2018 with news, articles, and summaries. Previous articles covered psychological safety in post-mortems, building the roadmap for Portfolio for Jira, and keeping distributed teams in sync.