November 4, 2015 – HipChat, the popular team communications service, today announced the launch of HipChat Connect beta, a new API that enables third-party developers to create full-featured apps directly within HipChat and build rich experiences through integrations with their existing apps. The introduction of HipChat Connect will fuel a significant transformation in the team messaging category by providing teams the ability to message, collaborate and now take action all in a single platform.
Businesses across every industry are fighting for screen time with customers, making it crucial to build feature-rich experiences in the platforms where people are spending the most time. Team messaging is growing at a tremendous pace and HipChat Connect provides developers with complete control to build highly customized experiences inside HipChat in the form of full applications or as integrations with other third-party services. HipChat is the only team messaging platform to provide this capability. Many leading businesses are using HipChat Connect to integrate customized versions of their services into HipChat, including Meekan, New Relic,PagerDuty, StatusPage.io and Zendesk.
“We’re building a business app store that will be able to transcend any operating system or device, so developers can quickly and easily extend their reach as customer time shifts to the next hot platform,” said Steve Goldsmith, General Manager of HipChat. “When Apple opened iOS to developers, it accelerated people’s ability to take direct action on phones, and in the process completely changed how we think about and use mobile devices. HipChat is giving developers the same opportunity and power to create a new phase for team messaging by placing greater emphasis on taking action, not just sharing information.”
Third-party apps powered by HipChat Connect are accessible through Atlassian’s Marketplace, one of the largest enterprise app stores. With HipChat Connect and the Atlassian Marketplace, HipChat is extending an already thriving ecosystem into the team messaging space, providing developers with opportunities to reach a large set of new customers and increase brand presence with existing customers. Additionally, the ecosystem will enable a continuous stream of innovative team messaging tools to help teams achieve their full potential.
HipChat First to Enable Actions within Team Messaging
HipChat Connect is the first and only team messaging platform to allow users to take actions using third-party apps from directly within the messaging window. All other team messaging services require users to take action with third-party apps outside of the platform, forcing them to switch back and forth between services. This results in teams losing valuable context, creating a time-consuming process to get things done. HipChat Connect has been designed to specifically combat this time-consuming process.
“HipChat has become a home screen app for teams across the world by simplifying the process of collaborating and taking action. We’re helping teams fight back against the signal-to-noise ratio that has spiraled out of control creating a huge, unnecessary challenge. HipChat Connect is Atlassian’s latest response to solve this challenge for teams everywhere,” continued Goldsmith.
Through the introduction of HipChat Connect, teams can chat, collaborate, assign tasks and take action in real-time, all in a single platform. Teams using HipChat are able to maintain crucial context and get business done faster and more effectively. For example, DevOps teams can receive incident alerts, collaborate on solutions, assign tasks and communicate with additional internal and external teams all within HipChat.
A Leading Enterprise Marketplace for Developers
HipChat Connect apps are available in the Atlassian Marketplace, which includes add-ons made by third-party developers that are installed by Atlassian customers to enhance the products they’re using with specialized features, integrations, and additional applications. Teams can use the Atlassian Marketplace to add capabilities to collaboration products at a fraction of the cost typical with enterprise software customizations.
Since it’s inception three years ago, Atlassian’s marketplace has exceeded more than $100 million in sales and includes nearly 2,000 add-ons, making it one of the largest enterprise software marketplaces in the world with Amazon’s AWS Marketplace, and Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Sales of a single Atlassian Marketplace add-on can impact hundreds or even thousands of users across a company. Just like in the early days of consumer app marketplaces when developers quit their jobs and built companies selling apps for iPhone and Android, more and more successful companies are being built entirely around Atlassian Marketplace add-ons.
HipChat bas become the team communications platform of choice for companies ranging from start-ups to market leaders including American Express, EMC, Homeaway, Marriott, NASA, Time Warner Cable, and Whole Foods. Messages sent in HipChat have doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion since the beginning of 2015.
For more details about HipChat, including details for developing integrations, visit www.hipchat.com.
