atlassian

Developer tool maker Atlassian readies for IPO

With 460 full-time employees worldwide, 18,000 customers, and plans for an initial public offering on the horizon, Atlassian's revenue has grown from $17 million in 2007 to more than $100 million five years later.

Possibly more interesting is that the company doesn't have salespeople, was founded in Australia instead of Silicon Valley, and largely saw this enormous growth selling behind-the-firewall tools to development teams.

Let me put this out there upfront: developer tools are boring. And yet, you talk to Atlassian execs and its customers, and it seems to be a big lovefest for the company and … Read more

An integrated Atlassian thanks to OpenSocial (Q&A)

Atlassian is one of those curiosities within the open-source world: like Apple, Atlassian doesn't tend to release its software as open source. But as with Apple, the open-source world loves to use its software.

From JIRA to Confluence and just about everything in between, Atlassian's software is broadly deployed within open source. Intriguingly, Atlassian turned back to that open-source community to integrate its own applications using OpenSocial, as I learned in an interview with Jay Simons, Atlassian's vice president of marketing.

Many people tend to think of OpenSocial as a way for Web sites like LinkedIn to … Read more

Should Google make a move for Atlassian?

Google needs developers. Atlassian has them. Reading Oliver Marks' report on Atlassian's progress and embrace of OpenSocial makes me think Atlassian's developer tools could be a good fit for a Google acquisition.

Atlassian offers an array of developer-focused productivity infrastructure. The company has been exceptionally successful by focusing on customer service and customer-centric development. Jira, Confluence, FishEye, and other Atlassian products may not register with your grandfather, but they're often the collaborative tools of choice for developers.

Enter Google. Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but to do that well it increasingly caters to software developers, … Read more

Widgetbox introduces integration with Confluence

Widgetbox is making its widgets compatible with Confluence, a business wiki product from Atlassian.

Widgetbox widgets "componentize" applications and Web sites, making them portable and transferable across any Web site. To date, the focus has been on consumers, but the integration with a clear enterprise business product like Confluence is a good step behind the firewall. The company also recently introduced Blidgets, which take any feed and turn it into a widget.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Confluence wiki and Atlassian's bug-tracking tool, Jira, they provide free versions to open-source projects and … Read more

Software that sells itself, Part II (Jive and Atlassian)

There's a great article in Forbes about Jive taking a collaboration fight to Microsoft's SharePoint play. Its primary weapon? Ease of use and ease of integration.

[Jive's] strategy for competing with giants: work alongside them. Oracle and SAP bundle Jive's discussion forum software into their portal applications. The version of Clearspace released in April lets users search for and link to SharePoint content from within Clearspace and sync their Clearspace and Microsoft Outlook calendars. For customers who use both, Jive becomes the user-friendly portal for SharePoint's sophisticated but clunky file system.

Earlier this week I heard the same said of Atlassian by at least two companies with whom I was meeting. Atlassian makes excellent products that are easy to use. People want to use them rather than being forced to use them. In both cases business users are as likely to recommend the product as IT.

Jive and Atlassian, like Google and Apple, demonstrate an absolute essential for winning the software wars of the 21st Century: You've got to have easy distribution, and you've got to be mind-numbingly easy to use.… Read more

Extend Firefox, for a prize: The joy of the bounty

Mozilla has launched its Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some cool prizes in the offing, including a MacBook Air.

The purpose? To encourage additional and improved add-ons for Firefox, of course.

It's similar in many ways to Atlassian's bounty program, which is giving away six $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.

Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.… Read more

Ballmer shopping for open-source companies. Who's for sale?

Sometimes I read things like this and I'm relieved to find out that Steve Ballmer isn't completely deluded by proprietary ideology. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit today, Ballmer made it clear that his vendetta against open source isn't as all-encompassing as he sometimes makes it out to be:

"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said -- a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market. … Read more

The riddle that is Atlassian

If you work for an open-source company, no doubt you use some of Atlassian's software (Jira, Confluence, FishEye, etc.). If you're like me, you've always assumed that this was because Jira/etc. is open source. In this, I'm sorry to tell you, you would be as mistaken as I've been.

Atlassian is one of the most fascinating companies with which I'm familiar. Oddly enough, the company succeeds because it makes great software. It does, even more oddly, what most open-source companies aim to do. And yet it is not an open-source vendor.

There's a lesson in this for me...and maybe for you. I talked with Mike Cannon-Brookes today, Atlassian's co-founder and CEO, and learned the following:… Read more

Open source arms dealers

Look around at the rising tide of open source companies, and you'll find some things in common:

Jira for bug and issue tracking; Confluence, SocialText, or some other wiki technology for online documentation; Jive Forums or other forum software of some stripe; Demand generation software ( Loopfuse, Eloqua, or other) Hyperic for network functionality (a la Red Hat Network).

There is other software that open source companies have in common, but these are some of the major commonalities. Most people don't realize just how much money there is in arming the next century of software. Atlassian, for example, is … Read more