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Atlassian partners with Slack, discontinues HipChat Cloud and Stride

Atlassian partners with Slack, discontinues HipChat Cloud and Stride
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Atlassian partners with Slack, discontinues HipChat cloud and Stride

Atlassian just announced a strategic partnership with Slack, discontinuing HipChat Cloud and Stride from 15 February 2019. 


Atlassian have
 dramatically pivoted their direction within the real-time communications market, with their latest announcement to partner with Slack. Here is what you need to know, written by Simon Haighton-Williams, CEO of Adaptavist. 

Atlassian sold their communications products, HipChat Cloud and Stride, to Slack who will discontinue their cloud incarnations from 15 February 2019. Users will be encouraged to migrate to Slack before next year and given a preferred path of migration. 

This is a bold decision, one underpinned by Atlassian's core values, chiefly not to #@!% the customer. Atlassian have recognised that playing catchup with the market leader in this case is in nobody's interests and have made the hard decision to relinquish the space.

Sometimes in business, pragmatism wins out

With this latest announcement, Atlassian have shown us - sometimes the right thing to do is NOT to build. They've taken a very different path to the one they were on which may surprise some in the industry. After almost two years of developing Stride, Atlassian have walked away. 

We here at Adaptavist aren't all that surprised. I certainly see why they have decided to partner with Slack as at the heart of it, Atlassian are pragmatic: a value we share. Pragmatism is not always easy, but adapting to the demand of the market as new trends emerge is critical to the success of any organisation.

Atlassian has clearly committed itself to it's core products and a cloud-driven future. We believe it's great to experiment with areas outside your comfort zone as it is an important part of growing. Fundamentally: focusing on your core strengths is sensible behaviour, and it seems the stock market agrees.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's co-CEO and co-founder says,

"The partnership enables us to offer our customers the best of both worlds - Atlassian's leading collaboration products combined with Slack's business communications platform. This decision also supports Atlassian's broader product and investment strategy in fiscal 2019..."

In announcing this decision the team have also stayed true to another one of their core values - open company, no bullshit. 

Joff Redfern, VP of Product Management explained,

"While we’ve made great early progress with Stride, we believe the best way forward for our customers and for Atlassian is to enter into a strategic partnership with Slack and no longer offer our own real-time communications products.

We believe that this partnership is the best way to advance our mission to unleash the potential of every team. And it will allow us to improve our focus in other areas, including expanding our offerings for technical and IT teams."

The future of HipChat Cloud and Stride

Practically, Atlassian have said existing groups will be able to continue to use HipChat Cloud and Stride until February 2019. There will be a preferred migration path to Slack and existing customers will have support for both products through the end of their license period. 

At Adaptavist, we are committed to ensuring our customers continued success and will be looking at ways we can not only assist users with migrations but also look to see how this feeds into their technology strategies more holistically.

Expanding the functionality of the ScriptRunner family of products, already available across the Atlassian estate, is one of many areas we will be looking at. Our view is to empower customers with the right tools as they seek to maximise the potential of all of the products they use daily. 

This is an exciting time for teams, collaboration, and the way we work and we look forward to what the future brings. 

Every silver lining has a Cloud

What is still uncertain is the future for clients using HipChat Server and Data Center - Atlassian's behind the firewall offering for the larger enterprises. In the coming months, we expect quite a few questions from Atlassian's largest enterprise customers, whom have made strategic decisions to keep their infrastructure in-house.

Will Slack bring a self-hosted solution to market? Or will another player rise up in this space? How should enterprises who can't use the cloud think about their communications and ChatOps strategies in the light of yesterday's announcement? 

There is at least a little more time to consider the options and answer these questions with Hipchat Data Center (v3.1) shutting down on 26 September 2019 and Hipchat Server remaining until June 30th, 2020. 

**Update** Here is the full list of end of life dates for each Atlassian communication product (taken from Atlassian.com)

  • Stride: February 15th, 2019
  • Hipchat Cloud: February 15th, 2019
  • Hipchat Data Center (v3.0): June 22nd, 2019
  • Hipchat Data Center (v3.1): September 26th, 2019
  • Hipchat Server (v2.1): December 8th, 2018
  • Hipchat Server(v2.2): May 30th, 2019 
  • Hipchat Server (v2.4): June 30th, 2020

Keep an eye out for updates from the team here at Adaptavist. We'll be looking at the options and sharing our thoughts on the best way forward in the near future. 

Like this post? Read more from the team on our blog.

Resources:
Bloomberg | Goodbye HipChat: Slack and Atlassian Team Up on Chat Software
Atlassian Blog | Announcing our new partnership with Slack
Slack Blog | Atlassian + Slack - Announcing an exciting new partnership and welcoming Hipchat and Stride users to Slack. We’re glad you’re here!

 

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