Atlassian acquires Hipchat

Atlassian just acquired group chat service Hall to expand its HipChat user base beyond people who aren’t developers.

It’s the company’s second acquisition in a month after it improved its video chat offering by adding BlueJimp to its arsenal .

“We have ambitious plans for the coming year, and our new teammates will help us deliver,” the company said.

A four year-old startup based in San Francisco, Hall has raised a total of $6.1 million in the years prior to today’s acquisition. The terms of the Atlassian deal have not been disclosed.

From today, the Hall team will join Atlassian and existing users will be migrated across to HipChat. Hall will shut down on June 30.

Launching its HipChat Server version earlier this year, the move meant Atlassian could reach a wider business audience as it was designed to operate on private networks and meet the requirements of heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare.

TechCrunch reported Atlassian has seen its non-technical users increase by 50% in the past six months.

The business collaboration space has become fiercely competitive with new entrants like Slack which has doubled its userbase since January and was recently valued at almost $US3 billion.

Business software company Jive, worth about $US400 million, also this launched its own messaging app, Jive Chime.

This year Atlassian has upped its HipChat game, revamping the collaboration tool’s web experience by introducing a version which can be used behind firewalls and launching integrations with Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting and Twitter.

It also launched an Apple Watch app for the chat tool.