Yesterday, Slack and Atlassian announced that they are joining forces as part of a strategic alliance.
According to the organisations, they both hope to build on the success of existing collaborations, they also aim to co-develop tighter native integrations between their products.
Slack is purchasing the IP for Hipchat Cloud and Stride, which Atlassian will discontinue early next year, and together they will provide a migration program to help customers move to Slack.
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April Underwood, Chief Product Officer at Slack, said: “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.”
“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 specialised, interoperable tools that best suit their needs. “
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Joff Redfern, Vice President of Product at Atlassian, said: “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.”
No one-horse race
Beyond being able to join resources, this partnership has one other obvious benefit, as they both look to compete with Microsoft.
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Microsoft, who released its own chat app, Teams, in 2016 has been locking horns with these two organisations for supremacy in this space.
Earlier this month, Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams which was reported to have more features than the free version of Slack.
