Enterprise-focused messaging app Slack is shutting down two of its competitors, HipChat and Stride, purchasing the IP for both products from owners Atlassian as part of a deal that will see the former owner making a “small but symbolically important investment” in Slack.

The acquisition was announced on the Twitter account of Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who said that Slack was purchasing both products to “better support those users who choose to migrate” to its own platform.

“Atlassian and Slack have been partners and friends for a long time (weve even publicly acknowledge our competition… not as youd expect, but with cookies and cake),” said April Underwood, chief product officer at Slack. “Whats fueled this camaraderie is that we both share an orientation toward customer service: as the world transitions to best of breed software to run their businesses, its up to us to help make sure it all works as well as possible for our mutual customers.

“Today Slack and Atlassian are takign even bigger steps to drive fundamental improvements to the experiences of hundreds of thousands of teams and millions of people around the world who use our products together every day. This partnership is about a joint vision of simplifying and automating the huge amount of effort that teams everywhere expend to stay aligned, coordinated, and productive.”

Slack will provide a migration path aimed at moving Hipchat and Stride users over to its own platform, and both firms are committing teams to build deeper and more powerful integrations between their respective families of products, including adding new functionality to existing integrations.

Stride and Hipchat are expected to shut down on 15 February 2019, providing users with roughly seven months to decide where they are moving to. Currently, it doesnt appear as if any of Atlassians other products such as Bitbucket or Jira will be affected by the deal, other than seeing increased connection with Slack.

Hipchat debuted in beta in 2009, preceeding Slack by around four years and acting as a leader in the enterprise messaging space until Slack outgrew the service. It was acquired by Atlassian in March 2012, and was rebranded and overhauled as Stride in September 2017, but still struggled to compete with Slack, which boasted more third-party integrations and better uptime.