4 ms·

I really hope this doesn't fuck up the company offering. We are deeply embedded with Atlassian products / services. JIRA is an ingrained part of our daily busin

by junto 13y ago

I really hope this doesn't fuck up the company offering. We are deeply embedded with Atlassian products / services. JIRA is an ingrained part of our daily business processes. All of our developers actually like it - a first when it comes to bug / issue / story management tools. It has its quirks, but we haven't found anything that matches it to date.

HarveyKandola 13y ago
Shameless plug: we @Countersoft actually compete with Jira all day long. But I hear you - there's not many enterprise grade issue trackers (that don't suck).
- Edmond 13y ago
  Nothing shameless! So how does one get a start selling software to enterprise? Granted your product is SAAS so I suppose that reduces the barrier. I spent 6 years doing Enterprise consulting but as a workerbee I don't believe that gives me much of a leg up, compared to say someone who was an exec. I don't want to start cold calling/emailing former clients and coworkers :)
  - HarveyKandola 13y ago
    Actually, we are not really 100% SaaS. Over half our sales are still On-Premise: download and install. Shock. Horror. From a tech standpoint that's tough because the same web app has to run under Windows IIS and then scale to handle SaaS customers in our own cloud setup. Barrier? You should see the crap you have to handle in order to just install .NET web app onto say a financial company's hardware. SaaS guys have it easy! In terms of Enterprise Sales we have lead generation activities with inside sales folks who provide product demos. Took a while to get it right. Trade shows, banners, magazines - none of this stuff works for us in enterprise sales, where customers hand over tens of thousands of dollars for a software license.
    - Edmond 13y ago
      Haha..No surprise On-Premise is big, though going by marketing buzz one would think the opposite. It is good to know it "Took a while to get it right", helps set expectations :)
davedx 13y ago
I love JIRA. The plugin ecosystem, on the other hand, reminds me of Wordpress in a mildly negative way. Vanilla JIRA and Bitbucket are both really solid offerings. JIRA is so ubiquitous I've used it on and off at various companies almost since it was first released. They've done so well there.
- monksy 13y ago
  As someone who has attempted to fix a broken plugin... I completely agree.
Karunamon 13y ago
So much this! My only gripe is the almost exclusively pay-for plugin ecosystem surrounding their apps. The number of decent free (or even low cost!) plugins is few and far between unlike, say, Mediawiki vs Confluence. Worse is that those same plugins follow the same user-based pricing that the main app does, regardless of what the plugin actually does.. so if I want, say, a table markup plugin to patch some of the holes in the Confluence's WYSIWYG editor, I can expect to pay the same amount as the Confluence license if not more! And the developers of said plugins get snippy with you if you dare ask "WTF?" Yeah, I'll just try to get approved to spend $1,200 to render HTML tables in Confluence. That'll go over really well with the accounting guys.
caoilte 13y ago
meh. It jumped the shark when they got rid of wikitext. The agile tools (Greenhopper or whatever) feel really bolted on. And it's sloooooow

by junto 13y ago

HarveyKandola 13y ago

Shameless plug: we @Countersoft actually compete with Jira all day long. But I hear you - there's not many enterprise grade issue trackers (that don't suck).

Edmond 13y ago
Nothing shameless! So how does one get a start selling software to enterprise? Granted your product is SAAS so I suppose that reduces the barrier. I spent 6 years doing Enterprise consulting but as a workerbee I don't believe that gives me much of a leg up, compared to say someone who was an exec. I don't want to start cold calling/emailing former clients and coworkers :)
- HarveyKandola 13y ago
  Actually, we are not really 100% SaaS. Over half our sales are still On-Premise: download and install. Shock. Horror. From a tech standpoint that's tough because the same web app has to run under Windows IIS and then scale to handle SaaS customers in our own cloud setup. Barrier? You should see the crap you have to handle in order to just install .NET web app onto say a financial company's hardware. SaaS guys have it easy! In terms of Enterprise Sales we have lead generation activities with inside sales folks who provide product demos. Took a while to get it right. Trade shows, banners, magazines - none of this stuff works for us in enterprise sales, where customers hand over tens of thousands of dollars for a software license.
  - Edmond 13y ago
    Haha..No surprise On-Premise is big, though going by marketing buzz one would think the opposite. It is good to know it "Took a while to get it right", helps set expectations :)

davedx 13y ago

I love JIRA. The plugin ecosystem, on the other hand, reminds me of Wordpress in a mildly negative way. Vanilla JIRA and Bitbucket are both really solid offerings. JIRA is so ubiquitous I've used it on and off at various companies almost since it was first released. They've done so well there.

monksy 13y ago
As someone who has attempted to fix a broken plugin... I completely agree.

Karunamon 13y ago

So much this! My only gripe is the almost exclusively pay-for plugin ecosystem surrounding their apps. The number of decent free (or even low cost!) plugins is few and far between unlike, say, Mediawiki vs Confluence. Worse is that those same plugins follow the same user-based pricing that the main app does, regardless of what the plugin actually does.. so if I want, say, a table markup plugin to patch some of the holes in the Confluence's WYSIWYG editor, I can expect to pay the same amount as the Confluence license if not more! And the developers of said plugins get snippy with you if you dare ask "WTF?" Yeah, I'll just try to get approved to spend $1,200 to render HTML tables in Confluence. That'll go over really well with the accounting guys.

caoilte 13y ago

meh. It jumped the shark when they got rid of wikitext. The agile tools (Greenhopper or whatever) feel really bolted on. And it's sloooooow