I’m thrilled to announce that Atlassian has acquired Hipchat — a transformative hosted group chat service that helps teams, or entire companies, collaborate in real-time. Hipchat’s amazing team, including all three co-founders — Pete, Garret and Chris — will be moving into our new San Francisco digs to continue to drive Hipchat’s growth.
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Our mission at Atlassian is to empower product teams everywhere with incredible products that help them collaborate and communicate better. Hipchat fits that mission like no other product we’ve found.
We always say that our best customer is ourselves — if we love something, it’s likely our customers will love it too. Hipchat is a great example of that. It has taken off virally within Atlassian’s teams and now, just a short 9 months after the first person signed on, nearly half the company uses it daily. Simply put — we love it, so we think you will too.
What is it?
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In case you’re not familiar with it, Hipchat is instant messaging built for business. It has no ads, obscure screen names, or failed file transfers. Instead, you can collaborate in real-time with colleagues and clients in persistent chat rooms — sharing information like chats, images, and automatic updates from integrated products, like Jira or Confluence. Hipchat stores full conversation history, so anyone new that joins a room can catch up and participate in the discussion. It also supports all the modern social conventions, like @mentions to help direct specific messages to specific people quickly and easily.
Oh, and Hipchat is simple enough for the whole company to use, not just the techies. Your team can access Hipchat from virtually anywhere — from any browser, from desktop apps for Windows or Macs or any Jabber (XMPP client) and from mobile phones through native iPhone, iPad and Android apps or SMS.
Hipchat also has a powerful API and comes loaded with integrations to popular products – including our own Bitbucket and Bamboo. Today we’re releasing awesome new integrations for our most popular products – Jira, Confluence, Fisheye and Crucible. These integrations allow you to get targeted notifications from our products into the relevant chatrooms for your teams.
Hipchat is free to try for 30-days, and pricing is just $2/user/month. Learn more about Hipchat or better yet give it a try. Or read the announcement on the Hipchat blog.
What does the future hold?
Together, we believe there’s a huge amount of great work to come helping shape how product teams work better together.
Hipchat has grown organically to over 1,200 organisations — a huge number of whom are already part of Atlassian’s 18,000 strong enterprise customer base. We’ll be expanding the team to tackle their growing feature backlog, improving each of their clients, adding our own support and service expertise and better integrating Hipchat with all of the most popular tools teams use today.
I’d like to welcome the Hipchat team to our family — I guarantee you they’ll help us achieving wonderful things over the next few years!