> Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path?
Ahem:
Bond: You expect me to [use RocketChat or Matrix]?
Atlassian: No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die.
If Atlassian are killing this "wing" of their HipChat business, it must have not been a very large money-maker for them. The market for this kind of product is dying, in other words. Along with the companies who refuse to re-evaluate the threat-surface of moving their communications to the cloud.
Look at it this way: IBM uses Slack. That means that 1. they researched the security threat model and were okay with using it for their own internal data; and 2. they managed to convince all their clients that those clients' internal data, and those clients' customers' PII, would be fine being passed over Slack. That's a pretty large argument, in my mind, for the idea that there's nothing about Slack that disqualifies it from even the crustiest dinosaur of a corporation's requirements. To mangle a phrase: "Nobody ever offended a conservative regulator by copying IBM's choices."
Or do you have security requirements that IBM—in its professional-services interactions with a whole ecosystem of clients, including banks and government agencies—doesn't? If so, maybe you need something on-prem.
Even then, though, you realize that you can just not put the critical stuff directly into Slack, without much impact on your workflow, right? If you're e.g. an investment firm, doing BI and quantitative analysis over tons of data, you can still talk over Slack while keeping the actual data to your Intranet. When you want to refer to the data in the chat, you paste the link to the (Intranet-hosted) data into the channel. Slack can't visit the link, but you can. Isn't that enough for... pretty much any use-case?
Ahem:
If Atlassian are killing this "wing" of their HipChat business, it must have not been a very large money-maker for them. The market for this kind of product is dying, in other words. Along with the companies who refuse to re-evaluate the threat-surface of moving their communications to the cloud.Look at it this way: IBM uses Slack. That means that 1. they researched the security threat model and were okay with using it for their own internal data; and 2. they managed to convince all their clients that those clients' internal data, and those clients' customers' PII, would be fine being passed over Slack. That's a pretty large argument, in my mind, for the idea that there's nothing about Slack that disqualifies it from even the crustiest dinosaur of a corporation's requirements. To mangle a phrase: "Nobody ever offended a conservative regulator by copying IBM's choices."
Or do you have security requirements that IBM—in its professional-services interactions with a whole ecosystem of clients, including banks and government agencies—doesn't? If so, maybe you need something on-prem.
Even then, though, you realize that you can just not put the critical stuff directly into Slack, without much impact on your workflow, right? If you're e.g. an investment firm, doing BI and quantitative analysis over tons of data, you can still talk over Slack while keeping the actual data to your Intranet. When you want to refer to the data in the chat, you paste the link to the (Intranet-hosted) data into the channel. Slack can't visit the link, but you can. Isn't that enough for... pretty much any use-case?