Atlassian Unfurls Stride Collaboration Cloud Service

There’s no shortage these days of ways people can share information online and yet most projects are still hampered by a failure to communicate. To address that issue, Atlassian has launched Stride, a unified communications platform delivered as a cloud service that spans everything from video conferencing and file sharing to meetings and messaging.

Steve Goldsmith, general manager for Stride at Atlassian, says Stride is designed to unify communications around any given specific project a team of people are working on. Rather than being required to correlate messages being sent over multiple mediums, Goldsmith says Stride provides access to a broad range of mediums that allows end users to more naturally collaborate within the context of a specific project. In contrast, most end users today are required to keep track of multiple conversations using different tools that are in the main disconnected from one another.

“The issue people have with collaboration today is that all the tools are fragmented,” says Goldsmith.

Stride builds on the core HipChat collaboration software that Atlassian developed to make it possible for teams of people to share messages about projects using a chat room. Among other features, Stride includes a Focus mode that allows end users to turn off messaging alerts as well as tools to highlight when a final decision has been reached by the project team.

Goldsmith says Atlassian views the primary competition for Stride as being legacy project management tools. Existing collaboration software such as Slack, on the other hand, represent future opportunities for integration, says Goldsmith.

Priced at $3 per user per month, Atlassian is initially making Stride available to existing HipChat customers before making it generally available. Naturally, Stride is only the latest in a series of cloud-based collaboration frameworks promising to unify communications. Today, most IT organizations often find themselves being asked to acquire and manage a disparity of communications services that often do as much to confound end users as enlighten them. The challenge and the opportunity now is to find a way to unify all those communications mediums in a way that creates more signal than noise.