Atlassian Corp. PLC has acquired Halp Inc., a venture-backed startup with a cloud service that allows enterprise help desk teams to answer employee support requests inside Slack.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a blog post announcing the deal today, the Halp team said the startup’s namesake service will remain available as an independent product and is “here to stay for the long haul.”

Halp, which counts the likes of Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub among its customers, allows a company’s employees to submit technical support tickets directly inside messaging platforms such as Slack. Users can write a request just as for a standard message and, by appending a special emoji, have it automatically sent to the help desk. They’ll then receive an answer from a service agent directly in the Slack interface.

On the backend, Halp provides settings that allow help desk teams to customize the workflow. There’s a feature that makes it possible to route tickets to specific departments, such as the information technology or finance group. More pertinently to the acquisition announcement today, Halp also provides an integration that allows support agents using Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk product to answer questions via its interface.

Atlassian plans to expand integrations between Halp and its products significantly. This morning, Halp unveiled a new tool called Halp Answers that can automatically handle support requests by fetching answers from Confluence, an Atlassian service that allows enterprises to build internal knowledge bases. The companies are planning even deeper integrations further down the road. 

“We’ll also develop a deeper integration with the Atlassian suite — improving our existing Jira and Confluence integrations and discovering the possibilities of Halp generating alerts in Opsgenie, cards in Trello, and much more,” the Halp team wrote in the blog post.

It’s possible Atlassian will look at extending Halp to additional workplace collaboration platforms besides Slack and Microsoft Teams, the services it currently supports. One potential candidate could be Workplace by Facebook, which had 3 million paying users when Facebook Inc. last shared adoption figures in October. There are also other services out there such as Cisco Systems Inc.’s WebEx Teams.

At the competitive level, the acquisition of Halp takes aim at ServiceNow Inc., whose platform competes with Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk. ServiceNow already has an integration with Slack and also provides a feature called Virtual Agent that can automatically answer questions similarly to the Halp Answers tool unveiled today. 

Atlassian’s acquisition of Halp may prompt ServiceNow, as well as other players such as Zendesk Inc., to enhance their own support for messaging platforms. The recent surge in adoption recorded by major players such as Slack makes that all the more likely. Slack gained about 2.5 million concurrent users between March 10 and March 25 alone, while Microsoft Teams recently hit 75 million daily active users. 

Photo: Atlassian