Interview with Robyn Monroe, Marketing Specialist

May 2009¹⁹⁵

Atlassian¹⁹⁶ is an Australian software company founded in Sydney in 2002 by two 'fresh out of University' entrepreneurs, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes. Since 2002, Atlassian has grown rapidly. Last year, the company earned over $35 million from more than 15 000 customers in more than 100 countries. Its customer base includes 30 of the world's top 50 corporations and companies such as Accenture, American Express, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Sony Computer Entertainment, Pixar, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Atlassian is not a household name in the same way that a computer manufacturer is because the company develops productivity tools for back-end use. However, Atlassian enjoys a strong reputation among the developer community. This reputation has caused two of its products—JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki—to be widely used amongst technology professionals.

Mike Cannon-Brookes

Atlassian's flagship products

Atlassian's two flagship products are JIRA and Confluence. 'JIRA' is an issue tracking program that can be used for software bugs, project management or even help-desk tickets—Atlassian's office manager uses JIRA to track and manage the status of internal office requests. JIRA was released in 2002 with the intention of being customisable, easy to use and low-cost.

JIRA's initial popularity and customer base grew by word-of-mouth, primarily amongst the tech community. Frequently, developers would come across JIRA and start using it for their personal coding, before then recommending it and having it adopted by their employer for enterprise use.

The result is that JIRA is now deployed by many large companies around the world. Its customers include Pixar (the animation company), Linden Lab (developer of the virtual world 'Second Life') and the Australian company Cochlear (maker of hearing implant products).

Atlassian's second tool was 'Confluence', which was released in 2004. Confluence was developed from an internal need. Atlassian's distributed team found that shared drives and emails did not allow effective collaboration between employees and existing wiki products were not sufficiently rigorous for their needs. So they developed their own product to respond to this need in the form of Confluence.

Confluence is an enterprise wiki that allows internal teams to communicate and share information such as news, projects updates and meeting minutes through an in-built blogging function. It also connects with Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Blog syndication feeds, videos and photos hosted on third-party sites such as YouTube or Flickr and links to external websites can also be included in an internal Confluence wiki.

The latest version of Confluence includes social networking elements such as status updates and the ability to add people to your network and follow them. These new features can assist distributed teams or groups in large organisations to stay in touch with each other's work. Confluence 3.0 also supports 'OpenSocial'—a set of standards released by Google that developers can adopt when writing applications for social networking sites. This allows the application to work across different sites, such as MySpace, Yahoo!, Hi5 LinkedIn and now Confluence 3.0 wikis also.

Products that enable the digital economy

Atlassian exemplifies the digital economy in several respects. It has built a global presence from its Australian headquarters. Atlassian's products have also been developed and enhanced as a result of its own internal need to collaborate between more than 200 employees across offices in Sydney, San Francisco and Amsterdam. These tools then allow other companies to similarly utilise networked digital technologies to manage teams and projects across time zones. In presenting at the Atlassian Summit (discussed below), Alex Davidson, a Senior Manager of Information Portals at Sony Computer Entertainment, explained how the need for Atlassian tools arises for game developers:

'Games consist of code developers, artists, Motion Picture Studios, sound designers, producers, directors, animators, and many other key disciplines, and the employers can be located in many studios in many cities in North America, Europe and Japan. JIRA and Confluence are used in our portal to create collaboration sites for sharing game assets such as audio tracks, artwork, marketing 'sizzle reels'. More and more we see game development teams using Jira to create workflows that manage the delivery of assets to outside studios, and Confluence for asset repositories and shared document libraries.'

Global collaboration and development products built using the digital economy

In some respects, you could say that Atlassian was born global. Its first sales were made to customers in London. The company has never shipped physical product—all sales have been completed online and the software downloaded from the Atlassian website. In addition, Atlassian has never had an outbound sales force. They designed the product so that it would sell itself by word-of-mouth.

Part of Atlassian's success stems from appealing to the developer community. Since its inception, the company has had a policy of releasing its source code. It has adopted a flexible licensing approach that permits open source projects and not-for-profits to use Atlassian software for free.

The company also recently started releasing its documentation under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license (a license that permits any member of the public to make commercial and non-commercial verbatim and derivative use provided attribution is given) to complement its approach to its software. Now, developers who create add-ons for Atlassian products are free to develop and maintain their own documentation for their add-ons.

Growing industry recognition

Industry recognition is now replacing Atlassian's initial word-of-mouth appeal.

At the April 2009 Australian Information Industry Association iAwards, Atlassian's JIRA product won the iAward for Tools and Infrastructure. In 2008, a leading technology blog-ReadWriteWeb—named Confluence as one of the 'Top Enterprise Products of 2008' alongside products from Amazon and Salesforce.com.

For the fourth year in a row, Atlassian was named as one of the winners of the 2008 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, which ranks the fifty fastest growing technology public and private companies for Australia based on percentage revenue growth over the three years from 2006 to 2008.

Atlassian demonstrated its Open Social integration into Confluence 3.0 as part of the 2009 Google I/O ('Innovating in the Open') Developer Conference held in San Francisco, United States, a developer gathering focused on programming using Google and open web technologies.

Atlassian recently hosted its first worldwide user conference—the 'Atlassian Summit 2009'. Over 340 users came together in San Francisco, USA, to discuss the Atlassian products, customer and partner products and participate in product demonstrations.

This growing recognition indicates that there is ongoing need for collaboration tools and if you make a product that responds to that need, then, as Atlassian explains,

'It does not matter where it comes from in a global economy. Many people do not know we are an Australian company.'

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[195] Reuse or distribution of this case study must include the following attribution: Australia's Digital Economy: Future Directions © Atalassian and Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/final_report

[196] See www.atlassian.com/