San Francisco, Jul 28 (IANS): After Microsoft made its professional collaboration platform "Teams" free in 40 languages earlier in July, its main rival Slack has announced to acquire workplace chat service HipChat from enterprise software giant Atlassian.

HipChat will stop working and all of its users will move over to Slack.

"As part of this partnership, Atlassian has made an equity investment in Slack, which has acquired the IP for Stride and HipChat Cloud -- both of which we will discontinue," Joff Redfern, Vice President of Product Management at Atlassian said in a statement late on Friday.

The Slack purchase covers only the intellectual property rights to both chat services.

"We will also be discontinuing HipChat Server and HipChat Data Center and work with Slack to provide a migration path for customers of all four products," he added.

Atlassian's over 2,600 employees will now use Slack.

Microsoft said more than 200,000 businesses across 181 markets globally use Teams -- a hub for chatting, sharing documents, video and voice calling in Microsoft 365 -- to collaborate and get work done.

The professional collaboration tool Slack claims it has 500,000 active organisations on its board.