Published on the 08/03/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Atlassian turns 14 this month, and now boasts 54,000 customers, 1,400 employees, revenues north of $US320 million and a market capitalisation of around $US5 billion…
The company, which floated on the New York Stock Exchange late last year, last week threw open the doors of its Sydney offices, home to 860 staff, and provided a rare media walkthrough of the key software products that form the foundation of the business and which are being used by enterprises internationally to craft their own software solutions.
Dom Price, head of programme management, explained that Atlassian had always focused on developing systems able to “unleash the potential in the team”.
While the software has been well received internationally, the genius of its success has been that Atlassian makes its systems available online for just $10 a month for 10 people, and has no sales people, confident that once the technology is trialled by a small group it will percolate through the enterprise.
According to Price over a period of five years this has meant that the ARPU (average revenue per user) has risen eightfold. It’s also now being used in large enterprise scale customers; the HipChat communications and collaboration platform has for example just been rolled out to one enterprise for 25,000 end users.
Originally used almost exclusively by software developers, the systems are now being harnessed by other functional teams such as HR or marketing to provide collaboration and task management.
Key products are JIRA, which as the company’s flagship system manages tasks and projects, particularly among agile teams to ensure everyone is on the same page; Confluence, its collaboration platform; HipChat, a communications and collaboration enabler across multiple platforms including the Apple Watch; JIRA service desk, which is exactly what it says on the tin and targeted at IT teams (and Atlassian’s fastest growing product in terms of user numbers); and BitBucket that allows programmers to create a code repository where software can be reviewed and enhanced by a team, and which is used by organisations such as Cochlear in Australia and Elon Musk’s Tesla team.
Besides developing its own software, Atlassian has encouraged a developer ecosystem around its systems. Tanguy Crusson, product manager for HipChat, said that there were now 2,000 apps in the Atlassian Marketplace which had generated revenues of $US120 million in the last three years.
He believes that the next major app trend will be around messaging – using tools such as HipChat to allow, for example, Uber ride-sharing by employees attending the same conference or off-site meeting.
