Slack to acquire HipChat in push to compete with Microsoft, service will remain active until February

The popular cross-platform communications app, Slack, has announced that it will be acquiring HipChat, giving the company more ground to compete against Microsoft’s Teams.

Bloomberg reports that Slack will be paying an undisclosed amount for the app over the next year, and will acquire the IP for both HipChat and Stride products. Unfortunately, HipChat didn’t take off the way the Atlassian was hoping it would, partially due to the overwhelming success of Slack itself.

The deal lets each company focus on the area where they lead—Slack in chat rooms and Altassian in project management software.

Atlassian is expected to talk about the agreement in more detail in its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. The company says its lack of revenue will pay for itself over the next three years as Slack begins to make payments on the acquisition. It says the failure of HipChat is mostly due to Slack adding more features over the years, thus attracting more customers.

HipChat will remain in service until the cloud services are shut down in February. Customers who use HipChat with their own dedicated servers will be able to continue to use the service for up to two years, depending on the version.

Both HipChat and Slack will be focusing on making the transition as easy and as painless as possible, but they say they will not be forcing it down users throats.

Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: