An overview of Slack Actions with Asana. (Slack Image)

Not even a year after challenging Slack with the debut of Atlassian Stride, Slack has agreed to acquire the intellectual property behind Stride as well as the venerable Hipchat collaboration tool while accepting a strategic investment from Atlassian, the companies announced Thursday.

Stride and Hipchat will be shut down, and Slack and Atlassian will work together to migrate users to Slack, the companies said in a rather unusually cordial set of blog posts between two technology competitors. In exchange, Atlassian will invest in Slack, one of the more promising enterprise software companies to emerge over the last few years, and Atlassian employees will begin using Slack.

Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield weighed in on the deal:

Atlassian is a well-known company among software developers around the world. Its Jira, Trello, and Bitbucket tools are used in the software development process to manage projects and code, and
Hipchat was one of the earlier collaboration tools used by techies at the dawn of the Web 2.0 era.

Last year Atlassian took aim at Slack’s popular collaboration product with Stride, which attempted to bridge text and video chat alongside other workplace productivity tools. We haven’t heard much about Stride since it launched last September, and that’s likely because it didn’t get much traction, in the wake of today’s announcement.

Atlassian said that it would integrate Slack more closely with Jira, Bitbuckyet, and Trello as part of the partnership between the two companies. Slack announced earlier this year that it now has 8 million daily users, 3 million of whom are paying the company for extra features and users on its collaboration product.

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