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Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion
- thrillgore 13y agoI can sorta see the value in Atlassian, with Jira being used what seems everywhere.
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoI agree, this actually seems pretty reasonable.
- polskibus 13y agoThey do seem to be the best in a very competitive market. There are loads of either commercial or open source issue trackers, wikis, combinations of both, etc. etc. How will they grow past that ? Acqusitions? Writing custom JIRA plugins that will make it more like an ERP ? Ideas?
- raverbashing 13y ago> There are loads of either commercial or open source issue trackers, wikis, combinations of both, etc. etc Yes, and they all suck. They go from a pain to use (Bugzilla) to a huge mountain of useless and worthless crap with a obscene price tag (Rational tools) It seems to me they are in the right path
- kyrra 13y agoFor just straight-up bug tracking, Bugzilla isn't all that bad. Though we do some fun interactions where we put SCM commit messages on a bug as a comment, then have a Greasemonkey script to pretty format those commit comments on bugs. For feature tracking of timeline type of views, Bugzilla is fairly useless, but for just doing bugs, it does a good job.
- eropple 13y ago> Yes, and they all suck. Redmine ain't bad.
- polskibus 13y agoI love redmine, it's been really good and 0 upkeep for my company for a couple of years now.
- latortuga 13y agoI hope you don't mean literally zero because there have been numerous Rails vulnerabilities in the intervening time. If you're been running the same instance for a few years unpatched and publicly accessible, chances are good your installation is owned.
- polskibus 13y agoNot my case. I didnt mean literally zero but we never hit a bug.
- raverbashing 13y agoIt's not bad, still, it tries to be too similar to Trac
- madeofpalk 13y agoTrello.
- raverbashing 13y agoIt's newer than Jira
- madeofpalk 13y agoand?
- lmm 13y agoBugzilla is much easier to use than Jira; it does what it needs to (tracks bugs) and gets out of your way, rather than having eleventy different modes and dialog boxes and view rules to confuse you when you just want to resolve bug x.
- thathonkey 13y agoOne of the biggest value-adds with Atlassian is the synergy between products. Bamboo, JIRA, BitBucket, and HipChat all integrate nicely together. Eg. I put a JIRA ticket number in a commit message to a BitBucket repo. Bamboo is watching that repo and runs a build with the ticket # in message. The ticket number has also already been interpreted and links straight back to JIRA where you can mark the issue as deployed.
- bragh 13y agoIsn't JIRA already using some Apache Ofbiz (pretty fullish ERP + e-commerce platform) components? That would be going pretty much full circle.
- rpowers 13y agoGood! I enjoy their tools and think they really deserve that.
- nodata 13y agoSold for more than Nest. At last something that makes sense!
- outside1234 13y agoMaking more sense than Nest is a low bar.
- malanj 13y agoReally cool that you can reach that kind of valuation with a basket of products, rather than a single run-away network effect fueled win. I find it very inspirational that they do that well by building great software that people love. also: They really make awesome products (we use BitBucket, HipChat and Confluence)
- dopamean 13y agoDid they acquire HipChat or was that home grown?
- daigoba66 13y agoBitBucket and HipChat are fairly recently acquisitions, but fit perfectly in their portfolio. Some of their lesser-used products are also acquisitions.
- daveoflynn 13y agoMany of the products were acquisitions, though often at a very early stage in the product's lifecycle. Off the top of my head, acquisitions: HipChat, Bitbucket, GreenHopper (now JIRA Agile), SourceTree, FishEye, Crucible, Clover, Crowd, Bamboo.
- tomjadams 13y agoCenqua is the company that had fishey, crucible & clover. About 5 people when they bought it, and probably their first acquisition.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alecsmart1 13y agoThey acquired hipchat.
- jonbishop 13y ago
- ToastyMallows 13y agoI'm not surprised. We use Crucible at work and everyone loves it. Atlassian makes some great prodcuts.
- kodablah 13y agoIt does have some warts but is the best out there. I believe the code review market is very ripe for disruption (especially for software hosted publicly on sites like github).
- hoopism 13y agoI have similar sentiment. Use a lot of Atlassian tools over the years and I am constantly bitching about various issues... eventually someone says "ok, find something else that's better"... and I can't. Not for lack of trying... there are lots of competitors... but they all are lacking.
- shortstuffsushi 13y agoI feel exactly the same way. I always end up cursing Atlassian's software (specifically Jira and Confluence), but when I look for an alternative (primarily for Jira), I can't ever find anything that does it quite as well or attractively as Jira. Even with its problems, it still does what I want, and does it well. I would, however, love to see something try to compete with it. There are a lot of decent alternatives, but it would be cool to see a bit more competition.
- rgrieselhuber 13y agoThis is a company that was founded in 2001. I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing. They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no. You can build huge companies on your own terms and you don't have to swallow the story that everybody tries to feed you. You do need to do one thing though (and only one thing): get traction and keep it growing.
- tluyben2 13y agoCan you give examples of SaaS companies which did that in 4-5 years; I know you said 'by VCs', but i'm curious.
- rgrieselhuber 13y agoSalesforce was founded in 1999 and IPO'd in 2004. Marketo was founded in 2007 and IPO'd in 2013. Both are closer to 5-6 years. Salesforce had just over a $1B valuation post-IPO, Marketo was ~$500M.
- tluyben2 13y agoThat's both a lot less than $3.3B though. You meant 'this point' being an IPO only?
- rgrieselhuber 13y agoYes, but that is also worth noting. Some of the more recent SaaS IPOs were built on lots of funding and, as a result, don't have great fundamentals.
- tluyben2 13y agoIndeed. Those fundamentals and lack thereof are worrying. It seems everyone just goes for their own wallet content, not for building value over time. In the end bad fundamentals result in some kind of damage; not for the founders, but for the employees and others directly and indirectly involved when the axe falls. I don't really respect that if it is intentional. Billions or not. Hoped to see some different cases.
- dangoor 13y agoFirst sentence in the article: "Atlassian, an Australian maker of online collaboration tools for businesses, is gunning for the same market as fast-growing startup Box Inc." Saying that they're gunning for the same market seems a stretch to me. No one's going to say "I was thinking of buying Jira, but I just went with Box instead." Leading off with drawing parallels between Atlassian and Box just strikes me as not helpful. edit: grammars
- sailfast 13y agoPerhaps they meant the stock market? I also thought "man, I guess I missed where Atlassian went into the cloud storage market" when I read the first paragraph.
- dorkrawk 13y agoI saw that as perhaps a way to compare Atlassian (mainly BitBucket) to Github Atlassian is to Github as Box is to Dropbox ?
- dangoor 13y agoI think you're giving the reporter too much credit :) Also, Atlassian is a good deal bigger than GitHub (if measured by revenue, profit, people or valuation), which would seem to put them on the Dropbox side of the analogy
- lbotos 13y agoWhich is an interesting thought because the common perception (from my chair) is exactly the opposite. A matter of skewed perception, etc, etc.
- lmm 13y agoI think the Bitbucket piece is smaller than Github. But Atlassian also have a whole bunch of enterprise-oriented products, more in the same kind of market as Thoughtworks or one of the big enterprisey lots.
- Elof 13y agoThat's only 3.3 Instagram's, one Snapchat, or .21 WhatsApp's. Solid proof consumer tech is always more profitable then enterprise tech.
- sz4kerto 13y agoNo, you're wrong in two points: - they have higher profits than Snapchat or Whatsapp - you have chosen 1 enterprise tech and 3 consumer tech company randomly, and based on that, you claim that consumer tech is more profitable than enterprise tech. Well, I say Microsoft makes more profit out of enterprise then Facebook makes out of consumer. Does this prove anything? Not at all.
- govindkabra31 13y agoagree with your reasoning. (though you probably should edit "randomly" part; those choices were handpicked, not randomly)
- Guvante 13y agoIt is hard to compare companies that are bought out, since they are valued higher due to the network affects with their new parent company. i.e. if Instagram had a valuation of $800 million the $1 billion purchase price could make sense if Facebook believes their combination could produce the difference in price.
- dredmorbius 13y agoIt's not just network effects. Purchase of Snapchat at $21 billion, or Bebo at $870 million, had a lot to do with attempted strategic positioning and/or edging out competitors who were eyeing acquisition. Doesn't always mean the acq will perform to price.
- Guvante 13y agoBut those are network effects. If I buy a product and kill it and make more money than if I had not purchased, then it was good acquisition.
- stephengillie 13y agoWe've had a rough, shaky time using Jira, but it's almost entirely due to internal politics and constantly-shifting business priorities. (aka CEOs and owners who are just megaphones for their corporate customers) We intended to replace our invented-here ticketing system (which has Zendesk integration) with Jira, but instead we integrated Jira into that invented-here ticket system. On the other side, my team has been bit by a bug from 2008 which prevents us from changing any ticket's state to Resolved. We can Resolve tickets, but their Resolution remains Unresolved. Since the Resolved state is central to most of Jira's built-in features, this means Jira has been broken for me since we installed it 6 months ago. The Your Issues default display shows all my tickets, including my closed tickets. The interface is not customizable enough to build workarounds for this problem. Also, the name (bastardizing the Japanese pronunciation of Godzilla) always feels somewhat racist to me.
- lhnguyen09 13y agoThe Japanese pronunciation of Godzilla is "gojira". How is that a bastardization?
- toufka 13y agoIt's not even just the 'Japanese pronunciation', but the original name of that monster was ゴジラ - 'gojira' (gorilla/kujira (whale)) - which was anglicized into 'godzilla'. There's nothing racist at all about 'jira'.
- eponeponepon 13y agoedit: yeah, you know what? I totally misread your post, never mind. Sorry for impugning your knowledge! :)
- sledmonkey 13y agoWe had a similar bug that we worked around by adding a transition view of "Resolved Issue Screen" to all steps leading to done in the Add Workflow Transition page.
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- hyp0 13y agooblig. BitBucket has free private repo's https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/overview https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/overview you don't get to 3 billion dollars without giving away a lot of stuff for free to infiltrate the enterprise
- thathonkey 13y agoI use Github for personal stuff and Bitbucket at work. They're pretty comparable. I don't really have a problem with either. Some parts of the Bitbucket UI are nicer, some parts of the Github UI are nicer. It's hard to beat free private repos but note that they are limited to 5 users. If you have a larger team, you've got to pay.
- aeflash 13y agoAnother key distinction of Bitbucket is that you pay per private collaborator, rather than per private repo. You could have a 5 person team but 100 private repos, and it would still be free. After that its $1 per user per month. With Github, the 50-125 private repo tier costs $100 per month for an organization.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoPerhaps not applicable to many here, but for students you can get unlimited users. It's a great offering and could well pay off in the future at Github's expense.
- nraynaud 13y agoWhat would be the exit for the VCs? they could have kept it private without the VCs, but I don't think VCs line up for dividends at the end of the years. That forces them to create an exit event for a company that seems in a nice path.
- jsonne 13y agoIf you wanted to keep the company private and give the Vc's an exit you can always do a leveraged buyout. Basically borrow loads of money from a bank and use it buy back their equity.
- nraynaud 13y agodoesn't that pit the management against the VC on pricing when doing a management initiated LBO?
- jsonne 13y agoSure. It's not a perfect alternative, but it's an option. I imagine it would be a happy negotiation. Basically just trying to figure out what multiple the VC would want and negotiating a fair outcome.
- dudurocha 13y agoIPO
- nraynaud 13y agoI don't get the point of going public when you don't really need money. With the press trying to find sensational stories, the sheepish behavior of the markets etc.
- DavidAdams 13y agoAn IPO provides liquidity for the stockholders. That's almost always the reason for an IPO when the company doesn't need the cash.
- veidelis 13y agoThe company I work for uses both Confluence and Jira. We find those very helpful, but the price of plugins for additional functionality is too high, imho.
- Lambdanaut 13y agoI personally don't see the value in their product, but they've got huge market saturation so that valuation sounds about right.
- bane 13y agoI don't know why, but this makes me feel good. Like a world that makes sense. A regular old business, that makes money and continues to grow and make more money, gets valued on a nice speculative curve, doesn't make useless dodads or chat apps or whatever and went from $0 to $xx billion valuation in a couple years because it has some possible tangential business tie in with somebody else, but instead makes something useful. It feels like the universe makes sense again.
- emsy 13y agoHaha, that was my thought too. A evaluation for a company that actually adds value instead of smoke and mirrors.
- zevyoura 13y ago>doesn't make useless dodads or chat apps or whatever To be fair, Atlassian makes HipChat, and though it's not exactly the foundation of their valuation it is a pretty significant product.
- startupranks 13y agoNow #11 on www.thestartup100.com > 1/3 of the top 100 are SaaS, but not all are purely enterprise.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoAssuming from your username that this is your site, sorry if that's wrong. Anyway, how do you define a "startup"? Some of these companies are over a decade old (eg Atlassian), some have over a $B of funding (eg Dropbox), and a couple (Box, GoPro) seem to be pretty much at IPO. Also they're all in America, is that intentional or could you genuinely not find any non-US startup valued at over $225M?
- startupranks 13y agoThe list is pre-IPO / private tech companies. There are several non US companies on the list - e.g., Spotify, Atlassian. Also, note that you can sign up to add or edit companies. It's a collaborative list and dynamic. Thanks for the feedback.
- allochthon 13y agoThese multi-billion dollar valuations are uncomfortably close to the 3b needed by VCs to get the carried interest commission, mentioned here [0]. [0] http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/five-reasons-not-to-raise-venture-capital http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/five-reasons-not-to-raise...
- EGreg 13y agoAnyone here think JetBrains is in the same space and can also fetch a huge valuation? Also don't forget, Atlassian runs BitBucket! And look at GitHub's valuation.
- kmt 13y agoJetBrains, yes absolutely. YouTrack is not as popular as Jira but JetBrains' IDEs are very popular. TeamCity is also waaay better than Atlassian Bamboo and sells well in the enterprise.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoTheir git service is really first rate. I have always felt a little guilty that I don't pay them for services rendered, so I would like to at least give the Atlassian crew my best wishes.
- dkarapetyan 13y agoI don't understand any of this. Every atlassian product I have ever used has been terrible. All their software is full of performance issues, uncountable UI bugs, and every time we upgrade it's impossible to tell whether we lost any data in the process and several times we have lost data. Their continuous integration server, Bamboo, is pretty to look at but unusable except for the lightest of use cases. The message broker between master and slave constantly goes down, publishing artifacts is hit or miss based on various network conditions that are mostly out of my hands because we're in AWS and I think they use chunked encoding to transfer the artifacts. Honestly, if they're worth $3.3 billion then the software industry is doomed. Maybe that's a bit over the top but the quality of the products based on what I read doesn't add up. How can you do so much R&D and still have a product that's so unstable and can't handle simple network hiccups?
- lnanek2 13y agoGenerally they seem good at convincing management they offer some business like value add none of the users actually want. I've been at companies where we had to switch to their really poor wiki product, Confluence, instead of free and better alternatives because Confluence allowed management to lock down editing permissions on individual pages in a more detailed manner. Note that I then spent weeks trying to get access to write to a page whenever I needed to add something to the company wiki, and weeks trying to get an admin to install a plugin to allow some HTML syntax we needed. So the experience from the user side was absolutely terrible, but it made management happy they got to micromanage all the page write permissions. That's all you need to do to make money in enterprise.
- optimusclimb 13y agoGoing through this right now. Loved writing internal developer docs in github markdown. Quick and painless. Confluence...not so much.
- bowbles 13y agoI posted the same thing above but you can use https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plugins.confluence.markdown.confluence-markdown-macro https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plug... to work around this.
- lnanek2 13y agoDon't really understand why they are comparing Box and Atlassian the whole article. Box is cloud storage. Atlassian is programming tools like issue trackers, wikis, etc.. It's like comparing DropBox and StackOverflow. It doesn't make much sense.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jmacd 13y agoI met Mike and Scott in 2004 and they were incredibly humble, focused and benevolent then. From what I can tell they seem to have maintained that through the years and all their success. They also had a President of their company names Jeffery Walker, who was one of the kindest and most interesting guys I've ever met. This is a company that is learning too. Since the acquisition of HipChat they have made the product dramatically better. If they can get a good model in place for further acquisitions, and they can continue to successfully launch their own products as well as they have in the last few years, then this company is on track to being worth a hell of a lot more than $3.3bn.
- neovive 13y agoCongratulations to Atlassian. We've been using a locally-hosted Confluence instance for over 3 years in a higher education setting and it's been a great experience. The more I use Confluence, the more I see it's true value as a collaboration platform. The uptake among users has been great and the sharing of information has grown exponentially. The product consistently improves and gets easier to use over time as opposed to typical enterprise applications.
- sergiotapia 13y agoI love Atlassian products. I use it on every project I make, and recommend it to clients when we need a place to keep workflow centralized. We use: JIRA - For issues Bitbucket - For code repository Confluence - For documentation Bamboo - For a build server and CI I'd love to settle on HipChat as well but it's stupidly difficult to get it to pull git commits and other things directly into chat. Flowdock is much much simpler in usage, UI and integration - so Atlassian team, if you're reading this: Let me 1-click integrate git commit notification into a HipChat room of my choosing, you own both products - make them connect in the easiest most straightforward way!
- eean 13y agohttp://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/65271-bitbucket-integration http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/65271-bitbuck... :)