Atlassian Acquires HipChat Collaboration Service

Atlassian, a provider of collaboration software for product teams, recently announced its acquisition of HipChat, a hosted private chat service for companies and teams.

San Francisco-based HipChat has more than 1,200 customers, including Groupon, HubSpot and WIRED. Atlassian will incorporate HipChat into its portfolio of software that helps teams at more than 18,000 companies work better together and build software faster.

€œAtlassian provides the perfect environment to scale the HipChat business,€ said Pete Curley, CEO and co-founder of HipChat, in a statement. €œThe no-friction business model, the customer base, the culture, the free beer€”all things that are perfectly aligned with where we want to take the business. We€™re excited to join Atlassian to change the way teams work together.€

HipChat is a group chat platform that helps teams, or even entire companies, to collaborate in real time. HipChat provides a dynamic environment for real-time communication, file sharing and group collaboration, accessible through a Web browser, native Windows and Mac clients, and native applications for popular mobile devices. Conversation histories are accessible and searchable, making it easy for new team members to get up to speed and never miss an important conversation, Atlassian officials said.

€œHipChat is incredible€”perfect for product teams but fantastic for any team,€ said Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian, in a statement. €œIts use absolutely exploded at Atlassian, demonstrating the viral adoption potential of a modern communication system for teams. Connecting and sharing ideas in real-time helps teams move faster, and HipChat does this better than any other product I€™ve used.€

HipChat offers a broad set of integrations to popular products and Internet services that publish targeted notifications from other products directly into relevant team chat rooms. Integrations are available for Atlassian Bitbucket, a free source-code hosting service, Atlassian Bamboo, GitHub, MailChimp, Heroku and many more. New integrations are being released today for Atlassian JIRA, the industry-leading project- and issue-tracking software, Confluence, its content collaboration product, and two popular developer tools, FishEye and Crucible.

HipChat€™s three co-founders€”Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers€”will all join Atlassian to continue to grow and develop the HipChat product and business. HipChat is available for a free 30-day trial or can be purchased for $2 per month per user.

€œWe use HipChat, and love it€”it€™s a really easy way for our team members to build closer connections on a day-to-day basis,€ said Mike Volpe, CMO at HubSpot, in a statement. €œAnd we use JIRA and several other Atlassian products to help build HubSpot. Now that Atlassian and HipChat are the same company, I can€™t wait to see what they can do together.€