Atlassian Acquires Helpdesk Tool Halp
Atlassian has acquired US startup Halp, a real-time helpdesk tool that integrates with Slack. While no purchase price was released, Halp was valued at $9.5 million in April 2019.
Halp already integrates with Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence. Furthermore, this acquisition brings both Atlassian and Slack closer together, following their strategic alliance formed in 2018.
For the meantime, Atlassian intends to keep Halp as a standalone product with no rebranding. However, Atlassian plans to expand Halp’s capabilities, anticipating integrations with Microsoft Teams.
Atlassian has recently seen a surge in growth due to increased remote work from COVID-19. Atlassian’s expected revenue growth is 31% on FY2019, approaching $1.59 billion.
Source: IT Service Management Data Quadrant at SoftwareReviews. Accessed May 14, 2020
Our Take
Is there more than meets the eye with Atlassian’s acquisition of Halp? The broader context here is Atlassian and Slack’s strategic alliance. With Halp as a bridge to bring these two organizations closer together, it is not out of the question that a merger may be on the horizon in the next few years. Atlassian is clearly moving to grow its collaboration capabilities – with over 50 million users on its Trello solution acquired in 2017, a sleek instant messaging system to match would position Atlassian as a serious option in the collaboration suite space. After all, Info-Tech predicted earlier this year that Slack is in a likely position to be acquired by a bigger organization.
Either way, Atlassian’s move is playing out one of the key trends Info-Tech identified for the team collaboration market in 2020 and beyond: greater interoperability between vendor solutions. For the end user, and the IT teams needing to implement these platforms, this acquisition is welcome news.