HipChat

History

HipChat was founded by Chris Rivers, Garret Heaton, and Pete Curley, who studied together at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and also created HipCal and Plaxo Pulse. They launched the first HipChat beta on December 13, 2009. 
HipChat was made available to the public starting January 25, 2010.
On March 22, 2010, HipChat launched a web chat beta which allowed users to chat via the browser in addition to the existing Windows, Mac and Linux client. HipChat's web client came out of beta and SMS chat support was added on April 16, 2010. On May 12, 2010, HipChat unveiled its official API. HipChat is mainly written in PHP and Python using the Twisted software framework, but uses other  third-party services.
On July 19, 2010, the team moved into an office in Sunnyvale, California. Co-founder Pete Curley announced that HipChat had secured $100,000 in funding on August 10, 2010. This round of seed funding allowed the company to start advertising and cover operational costs.
HipChat launched their iOS app on March 4, 2011 and their Android app on June 2, 2011.
On March 7, 2012, Atlassian, which had been using the service internally, announced it had acquired HipChat.
On April 24, 2017, HipChat experienced a hacking incident in which user info, messages, and content were accessed.
On May 11, 2017, Atlassian announced HipChat Data Center, a self-hosted enterprise chat tool.
On September 7, 2017, Atlassian discontinued the cloud-based HipChat, replacing it with HipChat's successor, called Stride, which offers additional features to enhance efficiency of collaboration. The client-hosted HipChat Data Center continues to be supported.

Integration with Slack

On July 26, 2018, Atlassian announced that HipChat and Stride would be discontinued February 15, 2019, and that it had reached a deal to sell their intellectual property to Slack. Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over three years to assume the user bases of the services, and Atlassian will take a minority investment in Slack. The companies also announced a commitment to work on integration of Slack with Atlassian services.

Features

The primary features of HipChat are chat rooms, one-on-one messaging, searchable chat history, image sharing, 5 GB of file storage, and SMS messaging for one-on-one conversations. A premium version adds video calling, screen sharing, unlimited file storage, history retention controls, and a virtual machine version allows HipChat to run within corporate firewalls. A guest access mode allows users outside of the organization to join a group chat via a shareable URL. Inline GIF playback and custom emoticons are also available. The product is available as a mobile client, a web client and a downloadable native application.
HipChat Data Center is Atlassian's self-hosted team communication offering. Hipchat Data Center was built for large, enterprise customer that need to store their data on premise. Hipchat Data center offers active-active clustering, 24/7 support, technical account management, SAML 2.0 SSO, multiple deployment offerings, and integrations for internal systems, 3rd party products, and Atlassian products.
In addition to integration with Atlassian's other products, HipChat integrates with services such as GitHub, MailChimp and Heroku. To allow for more third-party integrations to be added, HipChat features a REST interface with several language-specific implementations.
Administrators can access 1-to-1 chat histories if the customer's company policies permit viewing of employee communications.  There is no way for an individual or organization to opt out of this data collection/exposure.