You know you’re succeeding big-time in the American business software market when industry giant Microsoft decides to change direction and take you on directly.

That’s just happened to the Australian controlled Atlassian company, whose workplace collaboration products have been hugely successful among major US companies.

Microsoft has made a major entry to the marketplace with a new product dubbed Teams.

It’s a free chat-based service now being offered to all subscribers to Microsoft’s online hosted version of its productivity suite, Office 365.

Teams has been available under “preview” since November last year and Microsoft claims more than 50,000 organisations – some big, some quite small – are now using it. Among them are Accenture, Deloitte, Trek Bicycle and Expedia.

While not a straight-out pinch, Teams is said to be edging closer to Atlassian’s widely used Confluence and Hipchat collaboration offerings. Other competitors include Slack, Amazon’s Chime and Facebook’s FB Workplace.