Atlassian and 8x8 confirm collaboration - UPDATED

Collaboration will extend feature sets of proprietary UC apps

CORRECTIONS: This article originally stated that the companies would be merging; Atlassian and 8x8 have contacted us to confirm that that is not the case.

Cloud communications company 8x8 is working with Atlassian, owner of Trello, HipChat and now Stride, to create applications that will work in many areas of the unified communications market.

The companies will develop and go to market with solutions for integrated unified communications; contact centres; collaboration; and team messaging. While all of these are currently offered, it is thought that offering them together will speed adoption of both in the mid-market and enterprise-scale firms.

8x8 and Atlassian will integrate the 8x8 Virtual Office UCaaS with Atlassian's HipChat. Customers will then be able to use team collaboration tools in addition to meetings and telephony, all from within HipChat rooms, with notes synchronised with Confluence content collaboration software. This might explain why, as we commented at the time, the new Stride application is missing telephony.

The firms will also work to enhance customer support, by integrating 8x8 ContactNow with JIRA Service Desk. The integration will help IT support staff to work more productively with consumers, in several ways; for example, they will be able to make and receive calls from within a ticket; and record call details into a ticket at call completion.

Bryan Martin, chairman and CTO of 8x8, said, "Customer engagement is everyone's business and this is driving convergence in the fast-growing collaboration and cloud communications markets, enabling midmarket and enterprise companies to deliver an enhanced customer experience. Atlassian is well-recognised as a leader in the team collaboration space, especially in the world of DevOps (development operations)… 8x8 is ready to become the de facto voice for DevOps by teaming with Atlassian."