Atlassian and its products have fascinated me since 2008. I first got in touch with their JIRA issue tracking software. Later I have helped customers introducing JIRA Agile and setting up requirements management with JIRA. It is impressive how Atlassian has evolved and how their products spread.
What are the ingredients of Atlassian’s success? Three factors stand out:
- Products that appeal to software developers. — Should never be taken for granted. But very important, if you can’t count on a sales team …
- Direct sales model without classical sales force. — A lean sales approach, with very low entry level for accessing and using the products
- Very huge and active ecosystem. — They literally don’t let you alone: rich knowledge bases; super-(re)active support forums; collaborative documentation with strong quality management; (world-)wide partner network
Why is this important? Understanding the Atlassian way helps you to use their products successfully (given you are a customer or consider to become one). And it can inspire everyone interested in software business models.
The following information sources give you an overview of Atlassian and the three success factors.
Atlassian
Atlassian is privately held with headquarters in Sydney (Atlassian Pty Ltd, Australian Business Register: ABN 53 102 443 916) and eight offices in six countries.
Company description on Atlassian homepage: https://www.atlassian.com/company
Atlassian on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian
Atlassian on CrunchBase (crowd-sourced information): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/atlassian
Atlassian Experts homepage (partner directory): https://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts
Atlassian press release with data on FY 2013/2014 results (FY from July to June): https://www.atlassian.com/wac/company/press/press-releases/atlassian-posts-another-banner-year-with-44-revenue-growth
TechCrunch article including FY 2012/2013 data: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/atlassian-earned-150m-in-revenues-last-year-but-competition-intensifies-with-collaboration-providers/
Wallstreet Journal article with data on Atlassian and its 2014 funding round: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/08/atlassian-valued-at-3-3-billion-selling-business-software-sans-salespeople/
Business Insider company profile article from February 2014 (very comprehensive and fun-to-read overview; a pie chart shows the share distribution after the first funding round): http://www.businessinsider.com.au/atlassian-the-untold-story-how-two-australian-young-guns-built-a-company-headed-for-a-billion-dollar-ipo-2014-2
Products
Product overview: https://www.atlassian.com/software
Their flagship products JIRA and Confluence have ever been very appealing to software developers. I have observed several cases where individual developers have introduced the tools to their teams. From there, the products have spread fast, often to enterprise-level.
Atlassian’s license model has very low entry levels for evaluation use and for smaller teams. For most products they offer instant set-up of cloud instances as well as direct download for on-premise installations.
Sales Model
An article in Sydney Morning Herald (August 2015) explores on Atlassian’s approach, which omits a classical sales team. A comprehensive article from February 2014 at Business Insider lays out the entire Atlassian story and adds context to their sales approach.
Of course, Atlassian does not omit sales per se. Although they publish comprehensive price models on the web, customers can contact them (i.e., their sales organization …) for quotes. And they have retail sales partners in their worldwide “Experts” ecosystem.
Ecosystem
Their ecosystem has many facets, ranging from documentation and support resources via user groups and events to a thriving marketplace of product add-ons.
Documentation homepage: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation
Knowledge base: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/KB/Atlassian+Knowledge+Base
Support forums: https://answers.atlassian.com/
User groups & events pages: https://www.atlassian.com/company/events
Marketplace homepage: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/
Experts partner ecosystem homepage: https://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts
Looking for Experience Sharing
What are your impressions and experiences? I am interested to discuss with you what’s so special with Atlassian, and what their approach means to organizations that use their products. Contact me via info@makingofsoftware.com.
On our list of requirements management tools and on our blog, we track Atlassian’s activities in the requirements areas, monitoring their JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence products. While none of their products is a full-fledged RM tool, they provide interesting entry paths to RM tool support. Add-on products like RMsis and Requirements for JIRA extend JIRA with more advanced RM functionality.