The End of Stride and Hipchat

The End of Stride and Hipchat

If you can’t beat them, join them.

On Thursday, Atlassian announced the following in a public statement:

Atlassian today announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Slack. Atlassian currently has two offerings in the real-time communications market: Stride and Hipchat. With this partnership, Atlassian will exit the communications space. Slack has acquired the intellectual property for Stride and Hipchat Cloud, both of which will be discontinued. Atlassian will also discontinue Hipchat Server and Data Center and will be working with Slack to provide a migration path for customers of all four products.

Back in September 2017, at its release Stride was announced to be replacing Hipchat Cloud (and possibly Hipchat Server / Data Center). In fact, it was even touted as the “Slack killer” according to Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-atlassian-stride/atlassian-launches-stride-the-latest-would-be-slack-killer-idUSKCN1BI1R6.

How did we get here? What made Atlassian change course?

Atlassian has decided to focus on what they do best: organizing teams through their JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket (and other) tools, while discontinuing their real-time chat tools. The adaption of Stride among not only our clients, but across multiple teams has been lackluster.

There are several possible reasons why, being full-time Stride users internally in our firm:

  • Adoption: many clients and users have been hesitant to adopt Stride, citing lack of general add-ons/apps/extensions, and Atlassian storing data in the cloud. While definitely not a downside to small times, large organizations and government agencies prefer to control their data. This is why most have stayed with the Hipchat tools. Stride was only intended to be a cloud-based chat tool and was not planned to move a server / self-hosted environment anytime soon.
  • Usability: Stride’s user interface was simplified from Hipchat, however, because it was a relatively new tool and still under development until recently, users found its lack of integration with JIRA Server / Confluence server to be
  • Ever Present Defects: We love Atlassian, and all the great functionality they have provided through their tools. However, after Stride came off its Beta and was released into production, it has had bugs. Common for any new application hitting the marketplace. However, this puts a damper on customers adopting Stride.

With all this said, Stride and Hipchat helped make Atlassian the collaboration powerhouse it has become. Atlassian will now be focusing on improving its tool suite, and moving even further into the collaboration space. The relationship they established with Slack will only strengthen their position as they go to take on the tech giants Microsoft and IBM.

Now is the time to begin planning your migration to Slack. Atlassian will be reaching out to customers identifying this migration process.

Are you looking to migrate to Slack or another tool off Hipchat or Stride? As solutions partners, we can definitely help you, as there are plenty of add-ons available in the marketplace. Feel free to reach out to us!

Authored by Michael Brown – Atlassian Solutions Expert & Founder: Ascend Integrated. www.ascendintegrated.com