• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 9, 2017

As the battle to help professionals communicate continues to heat up, Australian software giant Atlassian is buying Trello for $425 million.

The company intends to keep the Trello service and brand intact.

A popular team collaboration software maker, Trello competes with Slack, Microsoft and Google in their efforts to help business types communicate and organize their ideas.

“Our small idea was to take the paradigm of a sticky note on a wall and turn it into a tool that allowed people to collaborate in real time,” Trello CEO Michael Pryor notes in a new blog post.

After about five years of operation, Trello presently boasts about 19 million users and numerous enterprise clients from the United Nations to the Red Cross.

Under Atlassian's umbrella, Pryor says he envisions a scenario in which hundreds of millions of Trello users collaborate in teams however they like, “with their imaginations being the only constraint for what they can accomplish.”

That, of course, is if those professionals don't choose any one of several competing communication platforms.

Slack, in particular, has quickly established itself as a company to watch in the white-hot mobile messaging space. Standing apart from rival messaging services -- namely Facebook -- Slack has convinced subscribers to fork over monthly fees for premium features.

Facebook, for its part, recently rolled out “Work Chat” -- a messaging app designed specifically for business teams. (Between its WhatsApp unit and Facebook Messenger, Facebook already dominates the mobile-messaging space.)

Microsoft, meanwhile, recently debuted Teams -- a chat-based “workspace” in Office 365.

“It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud,” Kirk Koenigsbauer,corporate vice president for the Office team, said upon the launch of Teams.

To encourage engagement, Microsoft Teams supports “persistent” and threaded chats. By default, conversations are visible to the entire time, but private discussions available as an option.

Of course, Skype is integrated into Teams -- so users can participate in voice and video conferences -- along with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve.