Atlassian Sets Its I.P.O. at $21
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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)
I just had a flash of old nightmares that I used to get when working with sharepoint sites. Thx for that :)
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.
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.
Overall I've been pleased though with the rate of releases for JIRA. It hasn't stagnated like many enterprise offerings.
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...
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?
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.
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?
2013: $148.4M
2014: $215.1M (44% growth)
2015: $319.5M (48% growth)
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look, I didn't say management was smart. That's just the dumb way they look at it.
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.
Gosh, I'm 63, and I talk about JIRA like that!
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..
Wow.
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).
https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-jobs?location=...
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...
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?
There is way too much focus on "unicorns" that aren't real businesses but just an investment vehicle.