
Atlassian Acquires StatusPage - stevenklein
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/14/atlassian-acquires-statuspage/
======
mehdim
I really love the execution. Neat, slick and they even had the luxury to be
open about it in their blog. They attacked a simple-to-understand but real
problem, on a niche, making something people wanted to have and not wanted to
do. They built the right integrations...making money since the beginning,
increasing revenue per user and overall revenue... They probably made lots of
mistakes , but according to public information and taking the time to analyze
it with some prospective, they did (almost) everything right. Following their
traction and revenue, they must have sold for a good price as Atlassian really
needs such products to renew their platform and they have the portfolio of
customers Statuspage would have tried to acquire. Great story.

------
dantiberian
This acquisition doesn't fill me with confidence for the future. StatusPage
was a clean, simple, and intuitive service. Atlasssian's software is the
opposite of clean, simple, and intuitive.

~~~
r0m4n0
Having used many different bug tracking, help desk, and ticketing softwares…
Atlassian does a dam good job. Totally customizable screens, fields, and
workflows with a modern UI. A decent webservice API I’ve integrated a few
external tools into without much difficulty. I’ve also written a few gadgets
and plugins and received a decent amount of attention through their plugin
marketplace. Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did
a bad job?

I don’t think you say the same about other competitors right now… ServiceNow?
HP SMS or ALM? ClearQuest? I’ve used those and if you consider Atlassian
terrible, I’m not sure what words you would use to describe them…

~~~
lojack
> Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?

I think this is key. There's so much customization allowed that its easy to
get wrong. Your experiences can vary drastically between a well configured
instance and a poorly configured one.

~~~
gregmac
I'll also add it's not always obviously wrong when it's setup.

For example, of course only QA people can use "Testing passed" transition. Of
course there should be x, y, z fields filled out to be able to create the
ticket. Well we're at it, let's make sure only the product manager can close a
ticket with 'wontfix', and only the release manager can change a fixversion.

This is a really common problem with any workflow tool, where well-intentioned
control points get in the way of actually Getting Things Done, both from the
perspective of not thinking through all the complex scenarios (what? I have to
fill out 5 fields before I can close this as a duplicate??) and from not
trusting your employees (don't worry, a jr. dev is not going to re-assign a
fix version even though they can -- or at least, they won't do it twice).

~~~
ymerej
For you, there is Github issues. Have fun, cowboy.

~~~
voltagex_
Having used HP Quality Centre, JIRA and Team Foundation, I think your snark is
unwarranted and there is a middle ground to be found between very basic issue
tracking and something completely overbearing like QC.

~~~
glogla
It's been years and HPQC still gives me nightmares.

------
djsumdog
I remember when I was doing a talk in Melbourne, another developer told me
what he didn't like about Atlassian was that they essentially only had one
product (was it Jira? or Confluence? can't remember) and almost everything
else in their offering set; they bought from other people and re-engineered to
fit into their product line.

Having administered, Jira, Confluence and Bamboo servers (all with slightly
different installation steps, logging and means to connect to LDAP), what he
said made sense.

That being side, I really like Confluence. It's an amazing wiki, even though
it's a bit expensive (although they do have free open source project licenses)
and kinda resource hog.

~~~
tajen
Their biggest product is JIRA followed by Confluence. Let's look at
acquisitions vs internal developments:

\- 2003: JIRA - In-house

\- ~2004: Confluence - In-house

\- ~2007: Fisheye, Crucible (code analysis) - Acquisition

\- ~2008: Bamboo (builds) - Acquisition

\- 2010: Bitbucket - Acquisition

\- 2011: SourceTree - Acquisition

\- ~2012: Bonfire (JIRA Capture - screencast bugcatcher) - In-house

\- ~2013: HipChat - Acquisition

\- ~2013: Stash (BitBucket Server) - In-house

\- ~2013: JIRA Service Desk - In-house

\- ~2014: JIRA Portfolio (capacity management for Agile) - In-house

\- 2014: Wikidocs, Doctape - Acquisitions

\- 2015: BlueJimp, Hall, StatusPage - Acquisitions

But what's the right way to start a product today? It's easy to make big bets
when you're a start-up, but when you already own several products, you're
exposing the brand with every decision. If a product doesn't find its market
fit on day #1, if you don't support every combination of platforms, if it
really fits a niche but if you also expose the product to customers who were
not the initial target, if the pricing is wrong, if it doesn't fit a certain
usecase => Your brand is exposed.

I understand the trend to reach growth by external acquisitions, then achieve
earnings by scaling the product to the Atlassian size. It's easier to explain
it to the market, plus you've already proven the features match the customer
case.

Because something else in in-house at Atlassian: Going from Server products to
cloud products with the same codebase (a real technological performance),
developing the Plugins 2 system and the Atlassian Marketplace, developing an
internal PAAS platform, hosting microservices [1], developing a uniform
graphic design and graphic library, developing the sales, creating a big
conference for their products in CA (named Summit), creating the developer
conference (AtlasCamp in Europe), the marketing machine and relationships with
journals. Let's give credit to the workers of the shadow: Most of the work
that's needed to make great products aren't features.

Maybe, after all, it's a company whose core business became to bring features
from niche/luxury/early adopters to enterprise. They shorten the path of good
ideas from hackers to IBM-style customers. It's important to us, developers,
because they helps migrating big old companies like banks and government to
new methods. The features of the software you put in are important, but what's
more important is how to massively develop adoption. Man I'd love to be a PM
for Atlassian ;)

[1] [https://www.atlassian.com/atlascamp/2016/archives/build-
amaz...](https://www.atlassian.com/atlascamp/2016/archives/build-amazing-add-
ons/the-art-of-paas-lessons-learned-running-a-platform-for-hundreds-of-
microservices0) \- and you can look at their other developer conference videos
too.

~~~
wryun
Nice overview! Don't forget Bitbucket Pipelines (in-house), which is intended
to replace Bamboo Cloud:

[http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/05/introducing-bitbucket-
pip...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/05/introducing-bitbucket-pipelines-
beta-continuous-delivery-built-within-bitbucket/)

(Atlassian employee here)

------
Axsuul
Their original Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470)

~~~
rrecuero
Thanks for the link. It is great to see how things move from the early
beginnings to an acquisition

------
dangrossman
The ability to subscribe to other companies' status pages has saved me so much
time and headache. StatusPage has done something awesome here, for all the
people that rely on various services moreso than the service providers
themselves. Congrats to the team!

------
jroseattle
"Adding a service like StatusPage, which launched three years ago, seems like
a natural fit for Atlassian."

Why is this a natural fit for Atlassian? Not being snarky, I just don't see
how this is any more a natural fit for Atlassian than lots of other companies
that provide picks-and-shovels to the software builders of the world.

~~~
brianwawok
Jira goes down a lot. Maybe it helps you notice faster?

~~~
GFischer
Must be a problem with your installation. I've used Jira at 2 separate
companies and it never went down (it was purposefully restarted a few times a
year to apply updates).

Edit: I see that HipChat's reliability is a big issue for several posters,
maybe your installation has that. The ones I've used were fairly basic.

------
rmdoss
As a happy StatusPage user, I am worried about this acquisition. Been more and
more frustrated with Atlassian and recently we had to move away from HipChat
due to multiple issues (constant downtimes).

What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?

~~~
cyberferret
We use Cachet[1], an open source alternative. We checked out many status page
services out there, but found it hard to understand how some of them (web apps
with a handful of pages) were more expensive than our accounting system or
project management services we subscribe to?!?

[1] - [https://cachethq.io/](https://cachethq.io/)

~~~
jkarneges
Status pages are best hosted offsite, which means status page companies can
easily justify higher prices since the alternative is to run your own servers
exclusively for the status page (can't just throw the status page software on
your app server).

I'm skeptical that running Cachet on your own servers would be cheaper than
StatusPage's smallest plan, especially if you have any kind of redundancy in
place.

~~~
cyberferret
Our main stack is on Amazon AWS (West Coast) and we run Cachet on a $5/mo
Digital Ocean Droplet on the East Coast for redundancy. Took about 30 minutes
to set up Cachet on the DO VPS.

That is enough redundancy for our little bootstrapped web app until we are
large enough to be able to afford something better.

~~~
brianwawok
And for another $5 you could likely round robin dns a vpn in Europe. Being
cheap is fun.

------
onnnon
Official blog post here:

[http://blog.statuspage.io/joining-the-atlassian-
family](http://blog.statuspage.io/joining-the-atlassian-family)

------
rubiquity
Seems like the perfect acquisition for handling HipChat's downtime.

~~~
balls187
Ouch.

I know snark is generally frowned upon, but HipChat and hosted JIRA/Confluence
downtimes have been serious issues for us.

~~~
owenconti
Not limited to just those products, we have issues with BitBucket.

One example: it can sometimes take > 5 mins to merge a PR.

~~~
cdjk
How many open PRs do you have targeting the branch you're merging into it? We
heard through the grapevine that there are serious performance problems if you
have more than 60-80 or so.

The solution for us was to decline those old PRs.

~~~
HappyTypist
That's concerning. We use GitHub with a monorepo and have 462 open PRa without
issue.

------
micah_chatt
Congrats Scott & the StatusPage team! I interviewed for a position with
StatusPage at one point (ended up going with a different company), but I have
huge respect for the product and the team.

------
lquist
I'm surprised they sold. This seems like a fantastic business.

~~~
blahi
Seems like self-employment, not business, which gets cut from the bill the
minute the next down cycle shows.

~~~
manigandham
There is such a thing as so cheap it's not worth cancelling. These status
pages are a perfect example.

------
fiatjaf
Software for people who make software for people who make software for people
who make software.

------
josscrowcroft
Congratulations. I enjoyed the clear, transparent blog post, although my
fundamental question "Will they shut down the service in the mid-to-long term
or force us to become an Atlassian customer?" took some time to get an answer
to.

I also felt their blog post was all about their journey, which while
interesting doesn't really present any value for us as a customer. It would
have been nice to know why the acquisition is in the customers' best interest
rather than only the founders' (of course both are important).

------
7cupsoftea
Congrats guys! Very happy for you!!

------
callmevlad
Congrats Steve, Scott, and Danny!

------
spraak
Off topic - What are some alternatives to JIRA?

~~~
itomato
Which subset of functionality do you need?

Issue tracking? Kanban? A means to align corporate initiatives with dev
effort? Defect tracking with built-in links to commits and vice-versa?

~~~
spraak
Oh right, thanks for asking. Issue tracking and Kanban mostly

~~~
sirn
I'd suggest Phabricator[1]. Although it was quite hard to use at first, after
few months we really love it!

[1]: [http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/)

~~~
cyberferret
Phabricator looks great, but can the end user edit the menus to change the
spelling of Maniphest, Phriction, Conpherence, Phame, Pholio etc.?? That's
cute for 5 seconds but then would drive me crazy if I had to see that on a day
to day basis.

~~~
sirn
I don't think you can change, as they consider these component names to be an
app name (the same way as JIRA has Bamboo, Confluence, etc.)[1] In the actual
UI they do include description on what each one is[2] and you can activate
Serious Business Mode[3] to tone down all other jokes in the UI.

Everyone in our development team eventually get used to the names, and
everyone loved all the little jokes, so we leave the Serious Business Mode
off, though.

On the other hand, you can customize the sidebar, deactivate stuff the team is
not using, and such. Default install is definitely overwhelming.

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/Phabricator-Why-is-the-Browse-
feature-...](https://www.quora.com/Phabricator-Why-is-the-Browse-feature-
called-Diffusion-and-not-just-Browse)

[2]:
[https://files.grid.in.th/iXMhtQ.png](https://files.grid.in.th/iXMhtQ.png)

[3]:
[https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...](https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/)

------
_Codemonkeyism
I wonder when Atlassian will buy Jetbrains.

~~~
philliphaydon
Let's hope never. Jet Brains make amazing software. Would suck for them to be
aquired by the likes of Atlassian. Their products would turn to rubbish.

------
foolinaround
Could'nt some static pages ( based on templates ) hosted on S3 ( with its high
reliability ) do the job?

~~~
joshdick
No. You also need something that responds to events and reports on them.
Statuspage integrates with pingdom, new relic, and datadog.

------
donnfelker
If you're worried about this, you can always use the other status page site
that many other startups and large corps use:
[http://www.status.io](http://www.status.io)

------
tjholowaychuk
Congrats!

------
jgalt212
Question: If my web service is down, how do my customers know ex-ante to check
in with statuspage.io for more information?

------
martin-adams
I wonder if this means I'll be able to unsubscribe to the Atlasssian SMS
notifications. They make is so easy to subscribe, but no details how to
unsubscribe.

~~~
blakethorne
Reply to the SMS message with with "STOP"

~~~
martin-adams
I think it would be nice if there were clearer instructions. Plus, I'm
hesitant as I don't know if texting 'STOP' to a +1 (US) number from the UK.

I've just looked up the cost, it would be about £0.20 to send it.

I did tweet them about it a while ago, but I din't think it really made sense.

[https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/702074369296769024](https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/702074369296769024)

~~~
blakethorne
Ahh. Sorry about that. Shoot us an note to hi at statuspage.io and we'll get
you taken off. No text messaging necessary :)

~~~
martin-adams
That's okay, I sent the STOP text and looks like it's done the job. Thanks for
replying!

~~~
blakethorne
no problem!

------
foolfoolz
as a customer of many companies who use status page, i do not understand it at
all. this is just a nice looking page with some history to it?

most of my encounters with status pages have outdated information such as i am
checking your page because i think you are down, but you dont list that you
are down, yet. or when they are having a problem, there's a very tiny
indicator and somewhat useless message.

what could this possibly bring atlassian that they couldn't build themselves?

~~~
jkarneges
StatusPage is well known and has many customers, so I think this is more about
buying the business than merely the product.

------
thinkMOAR
'Outside Your Infrastructure, Always Up'

AWS has outages too, also statuspage.io own site reports, Hosted Pages Uptime
99.969%

99.969 != always.

Pricing also isn't too shabby, Enterprise starts at $1499/mo. Billed annually.

For small 18.000$ a year, one should be able to setup your own external
monitoring, with email, Facebook, twitter and what not for hooks to update
your users of the service status where the sky is the limit, not the limits
statuspage.io sets for your account.

~~~
pc86
Enterprise pricing is not about being cheaper than it would be for you to do
it yourself. It's about you simply not having to do it yourself. You might be
an organization that only employs 5 developers. It's much easier to pay a
small fraction of what you pay one of them than it is to pull 1-3 of them off
of what they're working on and have them build you a buggy implementation of
the same thing that won't be ready for many months.

~~~
thinkMOAR
It is always easier to pay somebody else to do it? Whats the point you try to
make? I never mentioned it is cheaper to do it yourself. And enterprise is
certainly not for teams of 5 people, 'Starts At 50 Admin Members'

Setting up the statuspage.io, monitoring it, keeping things as they should,
adding new stuff to monitor thats not a task one of those 5 will be doing
regularly? And what if he does a poor job at that? You end up with what you
say, the same buggy level of monitoring. So what _is_ the excuse not to make
your own and pay significant amounts of money to a third party?

I say 18.000 is a lot of money for a service that reports your outages (good 3
month salary here, and in three months one can code a lot). And if you do it
yourself you have all the freedom of choice how you monitor what you monitor
how you report to your users instead of relying on the options statuspage.io
offers, there is no limit

And why would your own monitoring be more buggy then some setup a third party
deems to be ideal? You can make a perfect fit, gives you another view on your
own products etc. Full control is key, in house solutions, not saving money.

~~~
pc86
> _And enterprise is certainly not for teams of 5 people, 'Starts At 50 Admin
> Members'_

I said 5 _developers_. My first job was on a team of ~12 developers for a
company with 30,000 employees. Developer time was gold and as such the company
often purchased products that we probably could have built in house _given
sufficient time_.

> _And if you do it yourself you have all the freedom of choice how you
> monitor what you monitor how you report to your users instead of relying on
> the options statuspage.io offers, there is no limit_

If you need something an off-the-shelf option doesn't offer than you wouldn't
be considering it in the first place. If you have truly odd requirements
you're going to be forced to build your own anyway.

> _And why would your own monitoring be more buggy then some setup a third
> party deems to be ideal?_

StatusPage's Show HN was a little over 3.5 years ago. There's no way you can
build something _less buggy_ in 3 months. This is a perfect example of not
only developer hubris and "Not Made Here" bias, but the problem of trying to
estimate the time to walk up the coast[0].

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-
esti...](https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-
regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3/answer/Michael-Wolfe?srid=oqU)

~~~
thinkMOAR
12 devs on 30.000 employees? This was an (IT related) company that would be a
possible customer of statuspage.io? I have to admit i'm very curious what
company, industry this was/is or services were provided. It's a strange
balance 12 over 30000

And im curious if* you wouldn't have liked it more if you did have more time,
resources, colleague to have had the chance to develop those things in house,
yourself. And having another product to sell instead of buying a service from
a (potential) competitor?

Also i doubt they have been coding for 3.5 years, and if their show HN was 3.5
years ago, very nice promotion for them. But that doesn't say anything about
the quality of the product. From what i have been reading over the years from
their development they are just integrators of already existing technology. So
if you want me to integrate APIs for 3 months, i think i can get quite a long
way.... by myself in the evening hours and weekend even.

They started with outsourcing most of their services used (mailgun for mail,
twilio for sms, etc etc), so i rather develop something myself, (and yes in 3
months i can integrate a lot of 3rd party services via APIs). So if you prefer
to OUTSOURCE, your service to a party that outsources their services again,
and find this of a higher quality of service then* writing your own (which
give you options to resell that product etc), then i think we just have
different view of what quality is.

Nonetheless, weekend is coming, hope you have a good weekend :) probably in
case of reply will read it only after

------
Animats
I usually use
"[http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/"](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/").

If your site's back end is down, the site itself should be saying something
intelligent. ("Ngnix timeout", or Cloudflare's error message blaming the site
server, is kind of lame, but it's something.)

~~~
jacques_chester
Cloudflare will serve any page you like during an outage.

If you pay them.

