When we announced Stride in September 2017, we said, “It’s time we rethink the way we’re working. We believe that teams can stay connected and keep moving forward.” We still believe that. 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. And we believe we were on that path. Stride was a bold project, and we’re very proud of the product we created and the team that created it.
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. 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 have always had a spirited yet friendly competition with Slack (and have even sent each other congratulatory cookies and cake!). Across our product portfolio, we have long shared many integrations, which hundreds of thousands of teams use every day. Through this new partnership, both companies will lean into building better integrations together and more sharply define the modern workplace experience for companies everywhere. We’ll deepen existing integrations between Slack and Jira Cloud, Bitbucket Cloud, and Trello, and create new integrations with other products. We’ll showcase the first set of these integrations at our user conference, Atlassian Summit, in Barcelona, September 3-5, 2018.
As part of this partnership, Atlassian has made an equity investment in Slack, and Slack has acquired the IP for Stride and Hipchat Cloud, both of which we will discontinue. We will also be discontinuing Hipchat Server and Hipchat Data Center and working with Slack to provide a migration path for customers of all four products. Slack has been a user of Atlassian products for many years, and Atlassian’s 2,600+ employees will begin using Slack. We’re committed to making this same move as easy as possible for our customers. For details on migrations and timing, please see this page.
Even with this change, we are not abandoning our original vision. 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. Hard choices help us reflect on what’s most important to us — our customers, our employees, our mission. We’re deeply grateful for the trust our customers place in us daily and humbled by the many Atlassians who continue to create better ways for teams to get work done.
Special thanks to Sarah Goff-Dupont for her contribution to this article.