After selling its HipChat and Stride team collaboration services to Slack Technologies Inc. in June, Atlassian Corp. PLC is taking another big step back from the video communications market.

The company today announced that it has sold its Jitsi video conferencing platform to 8×8 Inc., a major provider of online meeting services for the enterprise.

The acquisition is somewhat unusual because Jitsi isn’t a commercial product. Rather, it’s an open-source project that provides building blocks for developing communications platforms.

Jitsi powers services from companies such as Comcast Corp., Andreessen Horowitz-backed video conferencing startup Highfive Inc. and Symphony Communication Services LLC, a team collaboration provider with a strong presence on Wall Street. The project also supported features in Atlassian’s Stride service, which was discontinued following the deal with Slack earlier this year.

The timing of the sale makes sense given that the company acquired Jitsi back in 2015 with the express goal of boosting its communications portfolio. As part of the deal, 8×8 is set to take over the project and hire the team of Atlassian developers that has been maintaining the code base.

The acquisition buys the communications provider an expansive collection of technologies. Jitsi is comprised of a half-dozen individual projects headlined by the Jitsi Meet web-based video conferencing application and Videostream, a system for handling the back-end heavy lifting involved in streaming meetings over the web. The project’s maintainers said that it will remain in its current form under 8×8’s wing.

“The Jitsi team will remain 100% intact and will continue to be an independent group,” the engineers wrote. “Operationally things will work much the same way as they did under Atlassian. Jitsi users and developers won’t see any impact, though we do expect with continued funding and support you will see even more new features and capabilities from the project.”

On top on supporting the continued development of Jitsi, 8×8 intends to integrate components from the project into its 8×8 Meetings video conferencing platform. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. 

Atlassian’s exit from the video conferencing segment is the latest sign of just how competitive this segment has become. One of the main reasons is the rapid expansion of Slack, which is drawing business workers away from traditional team communications platforms. The company is even going after Gmail and Outlook: it recently acquired an email management service called Astro Technology Inc. that lets users check messages without leaving the Slack interface.

Photo: Atlassian