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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

How much could they grow? It's not clear to me, unless they suddenly have much more ambitious plans and new categories of product, how big the market is that can sustain infinite growth over time for them. The market is very specialized for them, and if they try going after non tech their products directly then go up against many other players already entrenched (and it's not like JIRA is some shiny beacon of ease and apple-like perceived simplicity -- if they rebuilt from scratch maybe they'd have a better chance)

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My impression is that they're after dominance and becoming utterly entrenched, and that they've got a pretty good shot at it. They've had stellar growth over the past couple years. They currently strike a good balance between "creating value" and "extracting value", from a business perspective. Compare to older companies, like Oracle, which are much more focused on extracting value.

They're also used both in startups and in established firms, which makes me feel confident about their growth.

Confluence is used quite a bit internally at Oracle and given the extent of the company's usage, I wouldn't be surprised if they're making a killing off it and other enterprises.

My employer (large financial institution, 15000+ employees) uses confluence and jira enterprise-wide, as well as others that are more developer-centric. I'd say we're paying some of their bills on our own.

You bring up a really good point around adding vs. extracting value. There are definitely a few well-known large enterprise software companies that seem almost entirely focused on the extraction side once they reach a certain scale and level of entrenchment.

To me that seems like a sign they are ready for new competition, but I really wonder what the mindset is like internally once an org makes that kind of shift.

The JIRA integrations with things like HipChat, Bitbucket, Bamboo, etc. are incredibly valuable for their customers from day 1. Competitors can't offer that level of integration right away and chipping away at one product category will be harder when companies like Atlassian offer well integrated products in suites or ala carte.

Visual Studio Team Services is just as good at this.

The SSO integration they're currently implementing will be a nice addition.

Their biggest customers are large companies that DON'T want apple-like perceived simplicity - they want a powerful product that they can customize to their needs.

The company I work for has both JIRA and Confluence. It took a lot of work from several team members to get it to the current state where most people are happy about how it works, but the output is very highly valued by higher-ups.

It also has a growing ecosystem and good integration.

They've also made some underrated acquisitions, like the JITSI team (Blue Jimp), which recently made ENSO and is working on Hipchat

https://enso.me/

Their products are general enough to be easily customized by a couple of devs (or even only one) for very specific use cases. They're also easily integrated with market leading erp software. Companies that already use it for development departments might very well use it to manage most of their operations under a single umbrella application by linking multiple instances.

Do you, or anyone else, have personal experience with customizing Atlassian's products?

The customizations I've seen at rather big companies have required multiple devs, many months, and the end result has had some rough edges.

From what I've seen it is also non-trivial to scale their products to say orgs with 500+ active users, granted my experience here is a few years back.

Yep, we have a junior dev working on customization and integration with SAP. She needs help every once so I sometimes help her out with the more complicated stuff, but in general she comes out with pretty robust code and the integrations and customizations work as they should.

We have just under 2,000 users in our JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo ecosystem. Customizing things like ticket types and workflows is obviously just point and click. We've also created custom reports, and Jelly based custom event triggers and actions with one untrained person. I guess it depends on the nature of what you're trying to do, but we've found it very easy to customize and integrate.

Hipchat can grow a lot, I really think every organization, tech or not, will eventually start using a tool like hipchat or slack.

Slack is starting to become popular with student groups at my university. Definitely has a wide range of potential users.

When Slack self-hosted is a possibility, Hipchat is dead in the water.

That's the only reason to use Hipchat today, and the Slack experience is an order of magnitude better.

> When Slack self-hosted is a possibility, Hipchat is dead in the water.

I think Slack put some pressure on the Hipchat team but there is plenty of stuff that is highly problematic for how Slack is set up at the moment. In particular even for small teams it can become incredibly hard to see what's happening and the integrations either spam too much or are too useless once it becomes a bit more crowded in a room.

Is it me or is the hosted version of HipChat really unstable the past two or three months?

Hipchat Connect takes a HUGE step forward in completing with Slack and I prefer integration over a few flashy features. Yes you can integrate with Slack but my company has bought into Atlassian and it's quite wonderful...

You're forgetting the price: Paid Slack accounts start at $6.67/user, HipChat $2/user. That's a very big difference for even a medium-sized business.

Isnt self hosted slack IRC?

Your post seems ridiculous to me. They are a profitable company with a solid portfolio of products and you suggest that they are failures unless they do a complete re-write of one of their biggest products?

I didn't say they're failures. I said how far can they grow?

When you go public, you have a legal obligation to your shareholders to make more money next quarter until the end of time. I'm questioning how big they can get with their current products... when they start trying to get into different industries that are already using Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc, how will they compete?

> How much could they grow?

I don't see that there is a limit to how far they can grow. They are expanding their user base, they are constantly making or buying new products into their portfolio and they know how to sell and support it.

Their market is very similar to that of Salesforce, which is showing very few signs of slowing (and had a 52B market cap).

> apple-like perceived simplicity

Jira's a workhorse, not a consumer device. If Atlassian went with "apple-like perceived simplicity" their product would probably be terrible for most of their users (enterprise customers) who want customizability and integrations over prescribed use cases.

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