$6.8 million profit last year and an initial valuation for the company of $4.38 billion. It truly is a crazy world we are living in.
I was tempted to take a long position in Atlassian, but frankly I think the chosen price grossly overvalues them.
Not to mention they are no longer "cool". I hear younger developers talk about Jira like I might talk about Internet Explorer. Without Jira, the Confluence Wiki loses some luster. HipChat of course has been overrun by Slack...etc.
For the record, I'm still a big fan of the Atlassian suite, and also had thought about taking a long position once they were public, but I can't do it given the above conditions and this seemingly inflated price.
They don't have to be cool: they're enterprise. Jira is established as the de facto standard in Agile development/project management. Managers and above make the decision to purchase, and those with opinions on "cool" tools begrudgingly use the tools handed down all the while complaining about how uncool they are.
The tie-in between their products is also their undoing in the Enterprise market.
I'm just an onlooker but I've seen Jira (the proper tool for a problem) was universally shunned by management because they specifically didn't want to be tied into the rest of the Atlasssian ecosystem.
I realise that it makes no sense, but it's partly because they want diversity rather than being strung over a barrel by one vendor, and partly because they are ordered to use some different components by the higher-up conglomerate managers; which is what Enterprise is all about.
I don't know what the integration options were with other systems but management struck it off the list from the get-go regardless. We were already using it internally successfully; but hey no let's try to shoehorn ServiceNow to do the same thing.
I'll leave the rest for your imagination.
Yes though, it sucks for us on the ground floor. We really don't give a crap WHAT gets used as long as it works, and all the different crappy products with zero integration absolutely doesn't work. Tell that to management though; they don't have to use it.
Tied? How so? I consult for a large department of a certain Fortune 100 company (think 30k users) and their JIRA is tied to an Enterprise Github instance for example, not Bitbucket. Developers are on a self hosted IRC network (yes, really) as IRC is still unbeatable when you work in a heterogeneous, massively distributed environment.
Because Atlasssian offers other products and so the impetus is to get them as well. It's not worth it to pay for Jira because why do that when you can just turn ServiceNow into... a development CMDB time tracking thing with a mere few tens of millions of effort.
Look, I didn't say management was smart. That's just the dumb way they look at it.
Sure, I was thinking of the JIRA+GHE setup as well though. As for IRC – they also use some weird clients (actually, might be the same one everwhere, just rebranded) to hide away the fact that it's IRC. Some people I know would just use Irssi or whatever.
I'm guessing the fact that IRC is used is that it's reliable, simple to set up, and works for a rather large audience even without any redundancy. Most extra functionality that the Slack etc. provide – integrations, notifications embedding things – are not really necessary (but possibly wanted) in that context. E-mail still reigns supreme for anything that can't fit in simple text, and certainly for more formal comms and sign-offs.
Nothing, honestly. JIRA has been painful to use as a developer in the trenches for the 7 years and 3 companies I've used it at, but there still isn't a proper competitor to it that seems to have traction. For what it's worth, we moved to breeze.pm, but the CTO decided to build his own "complete" business management service; project management, CRM, HR, etc. all in one system and integrated with Xero. We'll see how it goes. I'm keeping an eye on Tagia.io, but I'm waiting for the "Slack" to appear.
Who set up those instances? The only Jira instances I have ever used were set up by developers and were really great, but I hear that it's a fatal mistake to ever let a project manager know there's such thing as the workflow editor.
JIRA without spending the time to correctly set it up to match your workflow/approach/business is a complete waste -- for companies who do invest that effort upfront (and evolve it over time) then it usually works great.
there's an evergreen issue of "do you run your business around the software (jira defaults in this case) or do you make your software operate like your business?"
There's arguments to be made on both sides, and there's never just one answer. Default JIRA flow for some people is probably a godsend compared to what they're coming from, and yes, for other operations, having it mimic what's already in place probably needs to be done.
Redmine is pretty good for what it is, but I don't think it's in the same league as Jira... It does a lot of things, but having used it for a while at work I didn't feel that it did anything amazingly well. We just kept hitting annoyances in the UI, various limitations in all sorts of things in the ticketing and wiki, the lack of good reports, etc.
I actually joined the company just as they were about to move to Redmine, and recommended Jira instead after playing around with the Redmine test instance for a while. They were worried about the cost though, and I didn't have much say yet, but in the end switching to Redmine was the best argument for getting Jira. I didn't even have to push for it - after a few months my manager came to me and said he'd already got the funds approved!
Hi. Old time Jira user here. Used to use it heavily ... 5-3 years ago.
Last few years we use Redmine mostly. In the beginning I had mixed feelings about it. Now I'm OK with it.
We sometimes need to switch to Jira in our projects. It's always a pain nowadays. I used to love Jira time reports, now I just don't get them.
My perspective: Redmine covers the basics we need, don't have the feature creep problem and does reporting (time reporting) really really well.
Rant mode continued: In several projects we use YouTrack [0]. Initially I was very excited: e.g. great UX etc .. But! It's time reporting capabilities are just rudimentary.
In the end we do the following: created internal tool too fetch time reports from different systems and to push to our Redmine system (via REST API). Redmine serves our reporting needs well. Still, in some extreme cases also use excel via ODBC..
Which is credence to the fact that this isn't an argument for tool choice, but against processes that developers don't have an appetite for understanding.
Profit isn't necessarily the most meaningful way to evaluate a company (n.b. Amazon). Usually for growth stage companies, YoY revenue growth is more important. I don't know what Atlassian's revenue numbers actually are, but I'd have to imagine they've been growing significantly in order for them to try to command such a valuation.
I hope to see them succeed with their IPO, they seem like just a good company. They got solid revenues that they have been reinvesting while staying profitable, so this IPO could let them grow much faster. With $319.5 million revenue, the IPO valuation is only 13x revenue, which is a solid company in this tech market.
We're part of that growth. As much as I tried to avoid JIRA, it's just that good (and, that integrated) and once you're on JIRA, you realize just how well their other products are aligned. It's pretty amazing, and I think one of the few times a tech IPO feels quite worth its valuation.
We went with JIRA because every other system I've used was super-clunky, Windows-only, or both. We do embedded systems but the last time I needed Windows for anything was about 5 months ago when I needed to email myself a pdf from the QA team's tracker. Everything of consequence we do in Linux.
You said $319.5 million revenue, and the other poster said $6.8 million profit. Which is right?
Edit: Ok I get it. Revenue vs Profit. Of course.
Speaking as a non-stockmarkety person: comparing the valuation with profit it looks like a much worse deal and who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?
It's deceptive to try and calculate the valuation of a company, particularly a growing company, based on it's profit. People who manage those companies have two options - stop investing in growth, and customer acquisition, and collect profits off a smaller base of revenue, or, ramp up the growth, increase revenue, and then later collects profits off a much bigger base of revenue.
As long as the company is well managed, and the growth opportunities will (eventually) become profitable - the better long term strategy is to invest in growth, and future revenues/profit, and not cut costs and try and collect profit on todays revenue.
>who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?
People who think putting that revenue back into the business today will result in even more revenue tomorrow. Money they take in and spend on making the company better isn't counted as profit, just like how paying the costs of accruing that revenue lowers the profit.
I've never been a huge fan of their products, apart from HipChat (a bit too "enterprisey" for me). My initial experience with Jira had been pretty bad and I just had labeled Atlassian as boring/enterprise/old school.
That was until I read a piece about the two founders (I believe in Forbes [1]) and started digging. I'm still not interested in their services but I find their story pretty interesting; they definitely look like a pretty good company, built by two hardworking Aussies who have fairly conservative and rational ideas about business. It's pretty refreshing in a world of VC hungry ventures.
Perhaps, but I know some Atlasssian employees who were there reasonably early, and - let me put it this way - they're not exactly unhappy at the moment.
Why do you think the Australian government should be entitled to ownership of all startups founded there? By most counts, they just make it difficult and annoying for tech companies.
Atlassian has paid millions in taxes, why should they owe more?
Do they have a moral or ethical obligation to support the society that gave them life?
Should the Australian government have supported them more than say the coal or car industry? Hell yes. This is a massive blunder on the part of the Australian government. One that has been repeated for decades.
Could Australia be in the position to provide as much capital as Atlassian is raising now? Yes! There is a LOT of money flowing around Australia. Just a small percentage of Super (compulsory pension funds) could have been invested. Even R&D tax breaks could have given more. However, VC invested by Australian funds is tiny (less than 1 billion/year).
The fact is Atlassian left Australia to avoid paying tax. They have even admitted it many times. The Australian government should have done more to keep them there. Maybe Atlassian leaving will actually do more good in the long term, because more people will see the missed opportunities. (not holding my breath on that one).
To be clear, Atlassian didn't leave Australia to avoid paying income tax, or even to avoid paying any tax. The principal reasons they left were that the Australian market doesn't have the ability to price a tech IPO of their size and to increase attractiveness to foreign investors.[1][2]
Atlassian's approach to taxation is an exemplar of one of their core company values: "Be the change you seek". They voluntarily paid millions of dollars to their employees to reimburse them for the tax that their employees were obliged to pay on their employee share options under Australian law.
Until very recently, Australian law required that employees who receive share options pay tax on the value of the shares at the time the share options are issued (before the options are even exercised by the employee). The application of the law to startups was widely criticised (including by Scott Farquhar) for obvious reasons.
Here's Scott Farquhar's description of how they chose to deal with that:
"Atlassian believes that share options are so important to attracting and retaining talent that it has covered the cost of the tax for its employees, said Farquhar. He estimated that this has so far cost the company a total of $5.4 million."[3]
Fortunately, the current Australian government introduced tax breaks for startups using employee share schemes earlier this year.[4]
I have no affiliation with Atlassian other than as an Aussie who is proud of their accomplishments.
The harsh circumstances probably meant they had to have a better product to survive. Higher employee costs, and a time zone 12 hours different means you HAVE to work/manage more efficiently.
During the previous round (see CrunchBase), Scott Farquhar said some employees will be able to buy a little home with the shares they have. I'm not sure employees who joined in the last years (when it became bigger than 500 people) should get equity at all, but I don't know how this opinion compares with the rest of the industry.
Former employee here. The previous "round" was a private sale of stock from current and former employees to T. Rowe Price. No money went to the company but we got to sell a third of our shares. Scott was probably talking about proceeds from that third.
Trust me when I say it's gonna be a huge life-changing windfall for most employees I know from my time there (I left in 2013).
I think the employees will probably be happy. The current market cap is above 5.5B. The 15% that is employee owned comes out to 825M. With 1100 employees, this comes out to an average of 750K per employee. Obviously this won't be distributed evenly, but definitely life-changer for many employees.
Ah they're IPOing now? I hadn't really kept up with this news but I guess it explains them converting bitbucket account to Atlassian ones. Great service though :)
The options, RSU, and NSO packages remain as-is. The only thing that changes is the tax situation. Excercising options after a stock is publicly traded is viewed and taxed exactly as income.
Pity they're not on the ASX - last time I looked it was a lot of paperwork. Although, last time I was lazy about paperwork I missed investing in ARMH...
Do current shareholders sell part of their shares, or is it newly emitted shares? If newly emitted, will they dilute the founder's shares? Thus, at the end, will this money be used for investment and sudden, huge growth, or will Atlassian stay on their "bootstrapper" growth rate?
Aren't all IPOs principally the same in that a company raises money by selling new shares to the public, and those companies shares can then be traded publicly? (With the exception of lockups, etc.)
I can't believe Jira is so popular, I've had to use it for 3 years and it's - to put it mildly - bad. Ok, actually it's a pile of shit. It's hard to count how many times we had problems with it on meetings, the UX is absolutely horrendous - I felt like Jira was always in the state of war with you, trying to make your day worse. Common tasks that should be easy to do were overly complicated and required too many actions, trying to find an issue was a chore, on every page a lot of shit you don't need - generally one big mess. I don't know about their other software, maybe it's better, but Jira being the most popular, their success baffles me.
I'm not sure if Jira is inherently bad or if Jira is destroyed by project managers that force developers to use it as a reporting/management tool and not as a bug-tracking tool.
I'm diving in to a new project right now - third one with Jira/Confluence, and working with a freelance PM on it.
The one issue she's got with it is trying to generate "good reports" with it for the 'biz folks' on the project. :)
That said, we're still going with it, partially because the other tools we've tried all... don't work together very well. Documenting things in Confluence and tying tickets to those documents directly does wonders for bridging the gap between tech/dev and the other parts of a project that think in English.
There are no doubt better 'bug trackers' out there, and there are no doubt better 'document collaboration' tools, and better 'planning' tools, but I've not found any that play nice together. Open to suggestions...
My experience also suggests that this is the real issue. Someone has to make a decision on which solution to use for their "agile" development workflow, but this someone doesn't understand that they are actually purchasing a product with a constrained, predefined version of agile. Even though it is somewhat flexible it doesn't perfectly map onto this person's version of agile and so, since they've already paid the licensing fees and gone through the office politics of getting buy in or stuffing it down the users throats, they don't want to admit that either their version of agile could be tweaked or that they should have licensed different software. So then, the mess begins. At every turn square pegs are forced into round holes and workflows are misused with consequences that are not immediately evident. A year down the road and everyone is frustrated. You'd be better off using an excel workbook. Now you have to explain to everyone you onboard why your version of agile is so much better than other versions and warranted creating this monstrosity which they must figure out how to use without documentation (which is useless at this point) and without frustrating their new coworkers with too many questions about the arbitrary nature of their system, which they hate and had shoved down their throats.
what you described is a typical enterprise software which naturally leads to its maker being a solid tech performer. Enterprises like enterprise software. In my experience, in addition to all what you mentioned, the Jira was also slow as hell on our pretty large deployment. Like an icing on the cake, it made it very enterprise-y and natural in our BigCo environment. Mid management and their suckers loved it during those couple years of Black Death... err... Agile Lean Scrum pandemic.
You obviously wouldn't think that poor performance and usability was an indicator of a reasonable tool for a job - no one would. Perhaps the people with which you worked were simply making bad decisions?
> those couple years of Black Death... err... Agile Lean Scrum pandemic.
Agreed. If you don't make it your business to create the perfect workflow software for your coworkers, and instead learn to use it as designed, it may not be perfect, but it works well and has some really nice features. It certainly works well enough, when used as designed and only using the pieces you need instead of trying to find uses for stuff that you can do without and which will only complicate your work, and is a good tool that can let you get back to your work.
You can customize what's on any given view in a project. You can also use any number of plugins for Agile, such as Grasshopper.
It integrates nicely with various source control technologies to keep track of work items and tickets/stories, being able to plug sprints into cards on Confluence (say describing long-term goals or release requirements) is convenient.
There are certainly reasons for its success, despite the recent surfacing of anti-enterprise sentiment on HN.
First of all, like any system, the data for search is as good as the data entered: if the users put in garbage, you'll have trouble finding things. If your users are very good about making proper titles, using appropriate labels, etc, and most importantly, fixing up (other people's) badly-entered issues when they come across them, you won't have this trouble.
In fact, JQL is freaking awesome. It's really like using SQL for finding tickets. For a mildly complex example, here's the JQL I use for viewing active customer-reported bugs:
type = Bug AND ("Related Support Tickets" is not EMPTY OR "Bug Reported by" = Customer) AND (status != closed OR status changed to closed after -30d) ORDER BY updated DESC
JIRA has a very highly-customizable workflow, which controls how tickets of various types flow from one state to another, and includes optional things like permission restrictions, required fields at certain states, etc. This can be pretty powerful and useful, and it can also be horribly crippling.
I wasn't the one that introduced JIRA, but took it over fairly quickly. At this point, I don't think we have any permission restrictions on workflow (that is: if you have access to transition issues on a project, you can do anything). The only actual restriction that springs to mind is the "fixVersion" field (which we use for targeting and then later confirming what release it's in) must not be blank when closing an issue as "fixed". We also early on identified any situations where people had to quickly transition between 2 or 3 workflow states (usually brought up during sprint retrospectives) to do something, and made a way to transition directly.
I suspect most of the pain and hate comes from badly configured or even draconian rules. If you try to make it so only QA or a manager can close a ticket, you're going to cause friction. If you try to enforce fields get filled out even if you're closing as "wontfix", it will cause friction. If you also require 8 workflow transitions to get it from "new" to "closed" -- even for wontfix -- then yeah, people will rightfully hate it.
One of the best and worst things about JIRA is it's very customizable. If your admin wants to make it a pain in the ass to get work done, JIRA will happily allow them to configure it that way.
JIRA is far from perfect, but in an "enterprise" environment it's far better than most of the piece of $&@? "enterprise" software tools floating around. i.e. "Hey guys check out the new Sharepoint site for this project!" (banging head against wall)
Agree, it could be worst. We have Jira bug tracking, Confluence and Jira Agile. Confluence is great, no more sharepoint, we just put all our documentation there. Jira Agile is simply awful, the UI/UX is non-intuive and super hard to understand. That product is definitely there for the enterprise world who is drinking the Agile kool-aid.
We started using gitlab at work, sadly we dont track issues in there, but still rely on Jira Agile. GitLab would be a great acquisition for Atlasian.
I'm not sure why Atlassian would acquire Gitlab when they already have Stash (which might be called Bitbucket Server now - but either way is a fully fledged Git{la,hu}b competitor)
We use Stash (and Jira and Confluence and a bunch of Agile stuff). Its... ok. Its a lot better than some of the other self-hosted repositories we tried, but there are some rough spots. Pull requests are a lot worse than Github, for example. The integration with Jira can be pretty cool though.
> Jira Agile is simply awful, the UI/UX is non-intuive and super hard to understand.
What product would you consider better for Agile? And are you talking Scrum or Kanban style Agile? Over the years I've used and tried a bunch, and Jira Agile (used to be Greenhopper) seemed better than most.
My favorite for a (very) small team was actually Trello, but it doesn't scale to larger teams (UI-wise I mean, with more tasks and a bigger backlog).
I was gonna say Trello, since I work with a small team, or a simple white board with tool tip and manage bugs in gitlab.
I can see why Jira Agile is used with bigger team. My team is pretty big, but the projects I am on are usually 2-3 developers, but some other projects they are on average 10 guys. I havent used jira agile much, but everytime i used it, i found it painful (compared to Trello)
Here's my feedback. As a part of a small startup team, I used Jira for years before Github issues and Slack were there.
The company I work at right now still uses Atlassian's trio Jira + Hipchat + Bitbucket. They are great tools with lots of features but Jira's productivity is much slower compared to Github issues and Hipchat offers a poor user experience compared to Slack.
As a former user of Atlassian products in a number of "enterprisey places", and having always myself said something along the lines of "this [Jira/Confluence/HipChat] is a big ball of enterprisey s!&t" I just now realised after reading these comments that we're all really just upset at Atlassian making great products for their. target. markets.
Besides a select few (e.g. Apple with Swift OSS Jira), how many companies which you really admire do you think would buy and use Jira? The reason Atlassian have made, and will continue to make a lot of money (think of all the businesses in this world who haven't even heard of the term "agile" who will buy Jira down the track) is that they make products which serve their target market - big, bumbling, _less than nimble_ enterprises.
And you have to respect them for that.
Every time you look at an Atlassian product and complain about it being crappy and having a bad UI (I've certainly done this in the past), just realise that what you're really upset about is the company in which you work where someone is willing (and able) to purchase such a product.
Apologies - I acknowledged Apple (via Swift OSS) in my original post, will update to reflect the ones you have posted. (Actually I don't think I can as PG's algorithm seems to time lock edits - would happily add those names if I could).
I think you have to consider just how much better Atlassian's products are than the typical large enterprise software. (HP Quality Center anyone?)
These large enterprises are waking up to the reality of SaaS and better software. Mature SaaS software with a well-oiled enterprise support machine (Atlassian) is much more comfortable step for a large organization to take than switching to a newer/better, but a lesser known player.
I hear you (I once had someone describe a $125m "PeopleSoft" payroll system upgrade which didn't actually work - far cry from Jira) and I wasn't trying to say that their stuff is bad; I had been hoping to place some commentary around the endless moaning I hear from software developers when they're told they have to work with an Atlassian stack. I'm really just trying to work out how it can be that we have a clearly successful company and many people (in my experience) moaning. Either way appreciate your insight.
that we're all really just upset at Atlassian making great products for their. target. markets.
No. "We're" not. You. You are. People tend to extrapolate from themselves and assume the same is true for others, but that's an impulse we have to control and use stronger reasoning.
Atlassin has good products and none of the silliness that comes from accepting VC cash. That they're not hip in the startup echo chamber doesn't bother me. I don't need to (inaccurately) characterize and throw shade at their customer base to not have a hangup about that company.
I think there is more going on here than you disliking their UI and therefore dismissing them as too "enterprise." Have you considered pulling your head outside the startup bubble, and having a bit of a think for a while about what you're actually frustrated with ('cause it sure as shit ain't Atlassin)?
No need to make it personal! I was only referring to the people who always complain about their products. I have a huge amount of respect for Atlassian (IMO they're the standout Au tech story as a company), have a number of friends who work for them, and have enjoyed countless free beers and pizzas as a result of their selfless sponsorship of the software development community.
Starting a company which actually has sales and sustainably operates - all with capital from your credit card? I think that is f$&)ing awesome. I was just trying to place some commentary around the not-infrequent complaints given to some of their products which I hear - I wasn't trying to justify them. :) peace
I really admire a company like Atlassian that has real products, a real business and didn't take 100s of million dollars of investment without having any kind of plan to make money.
There is way too much focus on "unicorns" that aren't real businesses but just an investment vehicle.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadFor the record, I'm still a big fan of the Atlassian suite, and also had thought about taking a long position once they were public, but I can't do it given the above conditions and this seemingly inflated price.
I'm just an onlooker but I've seen Jira (the proper tool for a problem) was universally shunned by management because they specifically didn't want to be tied into the rest of the Atlasssian ecosystem.
I realise that it makes no sense, but it's partly because they want diversity rather than being strung over a barrel by one vendor, and partly because they are ordered to use some different components by the higher-up conglomerate managers; which is what Enterprise is all about.
I don't know what the integration options were with other systems but management struck it off the list from the get-go regardless. We were already using it internally successfully; but hey no let's try to shoehorn ServiceNow to do the same thing.
I'll leave the rest for your imagination.
Yes though, it sucks for us on the ground floor. We really don't give a crap WHAT gets used as long as it works, and all the different crappy products with zero integration absolutely doesn't work. Tell that to management though; they don't have to use it.
Look, I didn't say management was smart. That's just the dumb way they look at it.
I'm guessing the fact that IRC is used is that it's reliable, simple to set up, and works for a rather large audience even without any redundancy. Most extra functionality that the Slack etc. provide – integrations, notifications embedding things – are not really necessary (but possibly wanted) in that context. E-mail still reigns supreme for anything that can't fit in simple text, and certainly for more formal comms and sign-offs.
It become a problem when a PM gets his hands on it, included about 50 steps with manual approvals etc.
There's arguments to be made on both sides, and there's never just one answer. Default JIRA flow for some people is probably a godsend compared to what they're coming from, and yes, for other operations, having it mimic what's already in place probably needs to be done.
I actually joined the company just as they were about to move to Redmine, and recommended Jira instead after playing around with the Redmine test instance for a while. They were worried about the cost though, and I didn't have much say yet, but in the end switching to Redmine was the best argument for getting Jira. I didn't even have to push for it - after a few months my manager came to me and said he'd already got the funds approved!
Last few years we use Redmine mostly. In the beginning I had mixed feelings about it. Now I'm OK with it.
We sometimes need to switch to Jira in our projects. It's always a pain nowadays. I used to love Jira time reports, now I just don't get them.
My perspective: Redmine covers the basics we need, don't have the feature creep problem and does reporting (time reporting) really really well.
Rant mode continued: In several projects we use YouTrack [0]. Initially I was very excited: e.g. great UX etc .. But! It's time reporting capabilities are just rudimentary.
In the end we do the following: created internal tool too fetch time reports from different systems and to push to our Redmine system (via REST API). Redmine serves our reporting needs well. Still, in some extreme cases also use excel via ODBC..
[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
Gosh, I'm 63, and I talk about JIRA like that!
Before that we had a poor mediawiki install, and for task management basically nothing (or rather, awkward internal tool compatible with IE6...).
It is a blessing.
I guess if you have been using (and abusing) Atlassian tools for years, you will experience some tool fatigue, which is natural.
2013: $148.4M
2014: $215.1M (44% growth)
2015: $319.5M (48% growth)
Edit: Ok I get it. Revenue vs Profit. Of course.
Speaking as a non-stockmarkety person: comparing the valuation with profit it looks like a much worse deal and who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?
As long as the company is well managed, and the growth opportunities will (eventually) become profitable - the better long term strategy is to invest in growth, and future revenues/profit, and not cut costs and try and collect profit on todays revenue.
People who think putting that revenue back into the business today will result in even more revenue tomorrow. Money they take in and spend on making the company better isn't counted as profit, just like how paying the costs of accruing that revenue lowers the profit.
I've never been a huge fan of their products, apart from HipChat (a bit too "enterprisey" for me). My initial experience with Jira had been pretty bad and I just had labeled Atlassian as boring/enterprise/old school.
That was until I read a piece about the two founders (I believe in Forbes [1]) and started digging. I'm still not interested in their services but I find their story pretty interesting; they definitely look like a pretty good company, built by two hardworking Aussies who have fairly conservative and rational ideas about business. It's pretty refreshing in a world of VC hungry ventures.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmorrell/2014/04/09/new-finan...
Wow.
Atlassian has paid millions in taxes, why should they owe more?
Do they have a moral or ethical obligation to support the society that gave them life?
Should the Australian government have supported them more than say the coal or car industry? Hell yes. This is a massive blunder on the part of the Australian government. One that has been repeated for decades.
Could Australia be in the position to provide as much capital as Atlassian is raising now? Yes! There is a LOT of money flowing around Australia. Just a small percentage of Super (compulsory pension funds) could have been invested. Even R&D tax breaks could have given more. However, VC invested by Australian funds is tiny (less than 1 billion/year).
The fact is Atlassian left Australia to avoid paying tax. They have even admitted it many times. The Australian government should have done more to keep them there. Maybe Atlassian leaving will actually do more good in the long term, because more people will see the missed opportunities. (not holding my breath on that one).
Atlassian's approach to taxation is an exemplar of one of their core company values: "Be the change you seek". They voluntarily paid millions of dollars to their employees to reimburse them for the tax that their employees were obliged to pay on their employee share options under Australian law.
Until very recently, Australian law required that employees who receive share options pay tax on the value of the shares at the time the share options are issued (before the options are even exercised by the employee). The application of the law to startups was widely criticised (including by Scott Farquhar) for obvious reasons.
Here's Scott Farquhar's description of how they chose to deal with that:
"Atlassian believes that share options are so important to attracting and retaining talent that it has covered the cost of the tax for its employees, said Farquhar. He estimated that this has so far cost the company a total of $5.4 million."[3]
Fortunately, the current Australian government introduced tax breaks for startups using employee share schemes earlier this year.[4]
I have no affiliation with Atlassian other than as an Aussie who is proud of their accomplishments.
[1] http://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca... (see paragraph [25])
[2] http://www.techworld.com.au/article/535906/what_atlassian_mo...
[2] http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/557248/atlassian-ceo...
[4] https://www.ato.gov.au/General/Employee-share-schemes/In-det...
https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-jobs?location=...
Trust me when I say it's gonna be a huge life-changing windfall for most employees I know from my time there (I left in 2013).
What will the proceeds of the IPO be used for?
Do current shareholders sell part of their shares, or is it newly emitted shares? If newly emitted, will they dilute the founder's shares? Thus, at the end, will this money be used for investment and sudden, huge growth, or will Atlassian stay on their "bootstrapper" growth rate?
The one issue she's got with it is trying to generate "good reports" with it for the 'biz folks' on the project. :)
That said, we're still going with it, partially because the other tools we've tried all... don't work together very well. Documenting things in Confluence and tying tickets to those documents directly does wonders for bridging the gap between tech/dev and the other parts of a project that think in English.
There are no doubt better 'bug trackers' out there, and there are no doubt better 'document collaboration' tools, and better 'planning' tools, but I've not found any that play nice together. Open to suggestions...
what you described is a typical enterprise software which naturally leads to its maker being a solid tech performer. Enterprises like enterprise software. In my experience, in addition to all what you mentioned, the Jira was also slow as hell on our pretty large deployment. Like an icing on the cake, it made it very enterprise-y and natural in our BigCo environment. Mid management and their suckers loved it during those couple years of Black Death... err... Agile Lean Scrum pandemic.
> those couple years of Black Death... err... Agile Lean Scrum pandemic.
What's wrong with SCRUM?
Did you ever dive into all the cool stuff you can do?
It integrates nicely with various source control technologies to keep track of work items and tickets/stories, being able to plug sprints into cards on Confluence (say describing long-term goals or release requirements) is convenient.
There are certainly reasons for its success, despite the recent surfacing of anti-enterprise sentiment on HN.
First of all, like any system, the data for search is as good as the data entered: if the users put in garbage, you'll have trouble finding things. If your users are very good about making proper titles, using appropriate labels, etc, and most importantly, fixing up (other people's) badly-entered issues when they come across them, you won't have this trouble.
In fact, JQL is freaking awesome. It's really like using SQL for finding tickets. For a mildly complex example, here's the JQL I use for viewing active customer-reported bugs:
JIRA has a very highly-customizable workflow, which controls how tickets of various types flow from one state to another, and includes optional things like permission restrictions, required fields at certain states, etc. This can be pretty powerful and useful, and it can also be horribly crippling.I wasn't the one that introduced JIRA, but took it over fairly quickly. At this point, I don't think we have any permission restrictions on workflow (that is: if you have access to transition issues on a project, you can do anything). The only actual restriction that springs to mind is the "fixVersion" field (which we use for targeting and then later confirming what release it's in) must not be blank when closing an issue as "fixed". We also early on identified any situations where people had to quickly transition between 2 or 3 workflow states (usually brought up during sprint retrospectives) to do something, and made a way to transition directly.
I suspect most of the pain and hate comes from badly configured or even draconian rules. If you try to make it so only QA or a manager can close a ticket, you're going to cause friction. If you try to enforce fields get filled out even if you're closing as "wontfix", it will cause friction. If you also require 8 workflow transitions to get it from "new" to "closed" -- even for wontfix -- then yeah, people will rightfully hate it.
One of the best and worst things about JIRA is it's very customizable. If your admin wants to make it a pain in the ass to get work done, JIRA will happily allow them to configure it that way.
I just had a flash of old nightmares that I used to get when working with sharepoint sites. Thx for that :)
We started using gitlab at work, sadly we dont track issues in there, but still rely on Jira Agile. GitLab would be a great acquisition for Atlasian.
What product would you consider better for Agile? And are you talking Scrum or Kanban style Agile? Over the years I've used and tried a bunch, and Jira Agile (used to be Greenhopper) seemed better than most.
My favorite for a (very) small team was actually Trello, but it doesn't scale to larger teams (UI-wise I mean, with more tasks and a bigger backlog).
I can see why Jira Agile is used with bigger team. My team is pretty big, but the projects I am on are usually 2-3 developers, but some other projects they are on average 10 guys. I havent used jira agile much, but everytime i used it, i found it painful (compared to Trello)
For my startup, Jira+Confluence work good enough to keep us organized. And we know that we can change those tools to match our needs.
BTW. Atlassian, if you read this: We need a better UI to organize (big) backlogs.
Overall I've been pleased though with the rate of releases for JIRA. It hasn't stagnated like many enterprise offerings.
The company I work at right now still uses Atlassian's trio Jira + Hipchat + Bitbucket. They are great tools with lots of features but Jira's productivity is much slower compared to Github issues and Hipchat offers a poor user experience compared to Slack.
Besides a select few (e.g. Apple with Swift OSS Jira), how many companies which you really admire do you think would buy and use Jira? The reason Atlassian have made, and will continue to make a lot of money (think of all the businesses in this world who haven't even heard of the term "agile" who will buy Jira down the track) is that they make products which serve their target market - big, bumbling, _less than nimble_ enterprises.
And you have to respect them for that.
Every time you look at an Atlassian product and complain about it being crappy and having a bad UI (I've certainly done this in the past), just realise that what you're really upset about is the company in which you work where someone is willing (and able) to purchase such a product.
Source: Atlassian front page http://www.atlassian.com
These large enterprises are waking up to the reality of SaaS and better software. Mature SaaS software with a well-oiled enterprise support machine (Atlassian) is much more comfortable step for a large organization to take than switching to a newer/better, but a lesser known player.
No. "We're" not. You. You are. People tend to extrapolate from themselves and assume the same is true for others, but that's an impulse we have to control and use stronger reasoning.
Atlassin has good products and none of the silliness that comes from accepting VC cash. That they're not hip in the startup echo chamber doesn't bother me. I don't need to (inaccurately) characterize and throw shade at their customer base to not have a hangup about that company.
I think there is more going on here than you disliking their UI and therefore dismissing them as too "enterprise." Have you considered pulling your head outside the startup bubble, and having a bit of a think for a while about what you're actually frustrated with ('cause it sure as shit ain't Atlassin)?
Starting a company which actually has sales and sustainably operates - all with capital from your credit card? I think that is f$&)ing awesome. I was just trying to place some commentary around the not-infrequent complaints given to some of their products which I hear - I wasn't trying to justify them. :) peace
There is way too much focus on "unicorns" that aren't real businesses but just an investment vehicle.