UPDATED 09:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 07 2017

APPS

Team communications apps are out of control. With Stride, Atlassian aims to fix that

You’re on Slack every hour of the waking day, or maybe it’s HipChat, or Microsoft Corp.’s Teams, or even Facebook Inc.’s Workplace. You do Hangouts or Zoom or WebEx video conferencing several times a day. And you’ve still got an email inbox that never stops growing.

That’s the time-consuming, scattered situation for workers that Atlassian Corp. Plc today is aiming to fix with a new unified team communications service called Stride. It brings together text chat rooms, voice and video meetings and collaboration tools such as screen sharing into one place.

Atlassian should know about the runaway proliferation of team apps, since it has about a dozen of its own, such as HipChat, Jira, Confluence and Trello. But with Stride, it’s making a bold bid to envelop the most important broad communications modes needed on a daily basis at work.

It’s not intended as an immediate replacement for Atlassian’s core HipChat service, but the direction is clear. “Customers can use HipChat as long as they like,” Steve Goldsmith, general manager at HipChat, said in an interview. “But Stride is the future of our communications team.”

The idea, said Goldsmith, is that these basic communications services need to be much faster and easier to use, and they need to be all in one place to make that happen. Currently, he said, “your technology is driving the team rather than the other way around.”

Besides the familiar base of messaging, Stride enables instant voice or video meetings (pictured) with participants in a chat and beyond in a room with a persistent Web address. These meetings can be one-on-one videos, voice calls or screen sharing across any device, and new people can be added with a click without having to use invites, dialing codes, software plug-ins and the like.

Messages also can be marked as “decisions” or “actions” to make sure the intent of collaboration — getting work done — doesn’t get lost in the plethora of messages. Not least, there’s a “focus mode” that lets individuals mute all notifications and messages for a specified period of time to get actual work done.

Raul Castañon-Martinez, a senior analyst at 451 Research, said in a recent report that new approaches are critical to deal with the proliferation of communications apps, which often distract people in the mistaken belief that they’re promoting higher productivity.

“I think providers of business communications and team collaboration technologies should pay more attention to capabilities for managing information overload and help knowledge workers engage with ‘deep work,’” he told SiliconANGLE. “As far as I know, Stride is among the first to do this with features like ‘focus mode’ and the sidebar notifications.”

Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

If it sounds appealing, the challenge will be a very competitive landscape, littered with many failed services. Atlassian has always contended with plenty of competition for HipChat and its other services such as the project tracking tool Jira and the document collaboration software Confluence. But Stride pits it against more and bigger competitors.

They include Cisco Systems Inc. and its Spark meeting and collaboration service, Google Inc. with Hangouts and Docs and Microsoft Corp. with Outlook, Skype and more. The latter two companies are taking a different approach with cross-app integration and machine learning to tie them together more intuitively. Then there are newer but fast-growing such as Slack Inc. and, in videoconferencing, Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Blue Jeans Network Inc.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-chief executive of Atlassian, said in an interview that he’s counting on word-of-mouth to spread Stride just as with its other products. “The paradigm’s quite familiar,” he said.

“Atlassian has been very successful with the organic adoption of its products,” Castañon-Martinez said. “They now need to prove this can work for a brand-new product. This will not be an easy challenge.”

Stride, which has been used inside Atlassian for several months, will be rolled out gradually to HipChat Cloud customers. It will cost $3 a user per month. There will be a free version for an unlimited number of users but with limits on message history and file storage and more limited screen sharing and video access by guests.

On the business side, Atlassian has also sought recently to unify the licensing of its services for enterprises. In June, it announced Atlassian Stack, a suite that puts all its core products under a single subscription instead of requiring companies to license each tool separately. Starting at $186,875 a year, it provides a fixed number of licenses for Atlassian’s dozen or so offerings.

Images: Atlassian

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