Dive Brief:

• On Thursday, Atlassian introduced yet another tool to the already competitive enterprise communication platforms market. Stride is an all-in-one platform upgrade to its product suite with customizable notifications and Meetings, a video conferencing service, according to a Stride blog post.
• The update adds distinctive Stride features to organize users' chats. Focus Mode lets users turn off messaging notifications and mutes messages in order of importance upon the their return. The Actions and Decisions feature allows users to label individual messages as a task or decision to avoid directions being lost in translation; marked messages appear in the sidebar for continued reference. 
• Atlassian is slowly introducing Stride to existing HipChat Cloud users with a reservation for the Stride update. The upgrade will also include a migration of current files, chat rooms and message history, according to the announcement. 

Dive Insight:

Stride comes after Atlassian’s June launch of Stack, which combines Jira, Confluence, HipChat and Bitbucket. The tools are part of a crowded market, featuring products like Slack Enterprise Grid, which offers enterprises — as opposed to its original consumer and small business market — more collaborative and administrative tools. 

Despite innovations and ease of integration of chat platforms, email still reigns as the supreme tool of business communication. A recent survey found 73% of CIOs agree email is the preferred method of communication, offering a sense of security not felt in chat rooms.

Regardless of emails' dominance, the communications platform market continues to grow, and companies like Atlassian are taking on the competition. 

More vendors are moving towards a one-stop-shop approach for their suite of products and services with the goal of becoming sole providers of an enterprise's collaboration needs. In March, Google revamped its communication platform, Hangouts, with a videoconferencing feature. Hangouts is available in all Google products in the enterprise, pushing its presence in both hardware and software services. 

Similarly, Microsoft's communication platform, Teams, is available with an Office 365 subscription. Teams provides an enterprise with chat room features, cloud services and open APIs so developers can broaden its accessibility and appeal. 

The draw of chat rooms for businesses is their sense of familiarity to consumer-focused platforms. However, companies know some models of chat rooms are not ideal. A survey called the ever-popular Slack the "most innovative" of communication platforms, but it remains apparent it was not designed for enterprise purposes. This could allow companies like Microsoft and Atlassian to gain traction in the market.