
Atlassian Planning U.S. IPO - sqs
http://www.wsj.com/articles/australian-software-tools-maker-atlassian-planning-u-s-ipo-1443213301
======
mrmondo
Every time I come across one of their products I am underwhelmed. Jira and
Bamboo both feel half a decade behind the game and are each clearly large,
fumbling beasts that seem to get in your way more than they do assist you.
Their ecosystem is very closed and you can feel the pain of this when you
visit an organisation that's drunk their cool aid and is now locked in. I'm
making it all sound a bit fire here - which it's not but I really just don't
think that they're good, modern products.

~~~
threeseed
Show me an alternative that is (a) able to be hosted and (b) isn't designed
for startups.

There are lots of agile tools but most of them deliberately ignore the
enterprise space.

~~~
douche
I've been looking hard at JetBrains' YouTrack.

The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little
painful. However, we've just barely gotten people trained to use the current
system. I can either accept the current, somewhat clunky system, or go through
another year of retraining and hope the slicker tool and the additional
features are a net win.

At least JetBrains actively works on their products. Our current tool hasn't
changed in three years, and that was just a reskin of the UI to a more
bootstrappy css.

~~~
structural
My day job / team uses YouTrack. We'd love to replace it (because the admin
side of running an instance is pretty terrible), but it's been by far easier
for people to use than anything else we compared to.

Huge downsides:

\- Doing centralized authentication in a large-organization environment is
basically impossible. Its LDAP implementation is broken for anything else than
a couple very standard schemas that they've tested against & you can't make it
authenticate using a Windows domain. They've recently split out the user
management, etc., components into a separate product called Hub, but it's the
same code and suffers from the same problems. [NB: Hilariously enough, other
JetBrains products work just fine in this regard.]

\- The thing uses some custom proprietary database. Integrating backups into
your normal workflow is painful. Upgrades are VERY painful (oops, the old
version had a database that didn't enforce some constraints that the new one
does, please go fix all your issues by hand), although there's some auxiliary
API and tools for exporting individual issues as -- if I recall correctly --
JSON objects that was an 80% solution.

Upsides:

\- The UI does the expected thing by default in all cases we could find. It is
also fast & responsive, relatively uncluttered, and doesn't have a bunch of
extra things to click in order to create/comment on/edit issues.

\- Searching for issues is very fast and powerful.

\- Batch updating issues (which we tend to do a lot) is extremely easy. Make a
custom search describing the issues to update, then update all of them with a
couple clicks.

The admin downsides were (for us at least) bad enough that I'm not sure I'd
recommend deploying it if you already have a working, integrated system. If
you're starting from scratch, though, or committed to replacing another system
for whatever reason, it's a pretty good choice.

~~~
douche
Thanks, good to get some real impressions from someone who has used it. We
already use TeamCity, which is why I was looking at it in the first place. I
guess they haven't quite rolled the two together yet, so I might wait on that.

Upsource also looks very interesting, is that also something you have used? We
don't really have a good tool for doing code review at the moment. Also, the
VCS browsing capabilities look to be miles ahead of what our current setup
offers (almost completely unusable, hijacks the browser back button, no
searching, definitely no chance of static analysis, links sent out in email
notifications constantly pointed at the wrong thing, etc.).

~~~
structural
Upsource is good for browsing. We're still in the process of finding a "good"
tool for code review (using a bunch of in-house stuff at the moment which is
great for review, but bad for branch management). It uses the same
authentication stuff, Hub, as YouTrack does.

Currently we're looking very hard at Critic ([https://critic-
review.org/](https://critic-review.org/) is a demo site, code's on github)
because it looks to offer the closest workflow to what we use.

We're specifically looking for something sorta similar to Gerrit as far as how
reviews work, but while actually supporting a feature-branch-heavy workflow
where we tend to review branches rather than individual commits, and
frequently rebuild/rebase feature branches.

Obviously, if your workflow is different then your needs for a review tool may
differ wildly.

~~~
piotrkaminski
If your code is on GitHub, you might be interested in Reviewable
([https://reviewable.io](https://reviewable.io), disclosure: I built it). It's
made for incremental full-branch review (though will also do per-commit if you
wish) and deals gracefully with rebasing. As a bit of social proof, Mozilla's
Servo project ([https://github.com/servo](https://github.com/servo)) moved
their code review process from Critic to Reviewable a couple months ago...

~~~
structural
Anything where we can't host the tool and point it at git repositories on a
server we control is a complete non-starter for us, unfortunately. This is
mostly because our development and test environments are not connected to the
Internet.

Other than that, I took a quick look at your product and it's feature-wise
close to something I would want to use. Only comments I would make would be
that non GitHub projects generally want the review tool to handle the branch
management (a.k.a storing pull requests, flagging their status, etc.): of
course only focusing on GitHub lets you not worry about that and get a product
running much sooner... You should spend some serious time looking at your page
load times as well - I'm 10msec away from your server and the demo code review
at
[https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1](https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1)
took nearly three full seconds to load, even with most static assets already
cached since I didn't timeline it on the first attempt.

~~~
piotrkaminski
Thanks for taking a look! Unfortunately, developing self-contained tools that
customers run behind a firewall is a complete non-starter for me. ;-)

Developing against the GitHub API does carry some non-trivial advantages:
among other things, I never actually clone any repos. This wouldn't be
possible with a raw git repo. I'm considering adapting the tool to AWS
CodeCommit, though, which might be a decent middle ground. Making my own
equivalent of pull requests is actually the least of the changes I'd need to
make, though.

And yeah, performance is a never-ending battle... But considering that all the
work is done in the browser (fetching sources, diffing, formatting, etc.) I
think it's actually not too bad. Again, like running in the cloud, it's a
trade-off of in favor of flexibility and development speed.

------
wluu
One of the co-founders (Mike Cannon-Brookes) did an AMA on reddit a few days
ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cann...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cannonbrookes_cofounder_of_atlassian_ama/)

Some quotes:

Q: "What was the scariest, most panic-inducing thing to happen to/at
Atlassian?"

A: "The most topical fear we have at the moment (and one of the reasons you
see us spending so much time on it right now) is that Atlassian is growing
faster than the Sydney (and Australian) technology industry. That cannot be
good for our long term domicile here - we must continue to diversify product +
engineering overseas, or risk running aground."

Q: "...before Atlassian for saving bookmarks which you sold pretty early. What
did you learn from that business that helped the most with Atlassian?"

A: "Overall? It was a fantastic lesson. Failure (or forced sale type success
in a smart decision before we hit the wall) taught us many things. How to get
customers. How to build software. How to prioritise our day. How to get a
business name. A domain name. How to run books. Get investors on board. How
hard it is to make $1. Harder to make $10 still etc."

And the other co-founder (Scott Farquhar) did an interview on ABC's lateline
show earlier in the week:
[http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm)

------
cpayne
I'd love to see a postmortem on Atlassian's rise to fame where other tools
haven't succeeded.

I remember reading a brief comment by Joel Spolsky saying he wasn't too
worried about "those blokes from Australia". At lot more people I work with
know more about Jira than Fogbugz.

IMO Atlassian do OK tools. But nothing to justify the hype they are always
receiving. What am I missing - Price? Features? Implementation pain (or lack
thereof)?

~~~
walterbell
JIRA offered a good compromise between closed and open source: full source
code was available, which enabled local custom modifications to prove out the
viability of enhancement requests. Atlassian also provides free JIRA to open-
source projects, e.g. keep code on Github, move issue tracking to cloud-hosted
JIRA for workflow not supported by Github issues.

It is encouraging to see a bootstrapped company reach IPO, even if it took
them a decade to reach their $3B valuation compared to Github's attainment of
a $2B valuation in a much shorter time. Atlassian's forward-thinking private
investors provided liquidity to employees, which supported their long road to
the public market. From a 2014 interview,
[http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-
soft...](http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-software-
company-youve-never-heard-of/)

 _" The $150 million it recently raised isn’t going into its bank account —
instead, its new investors are buying shares from past and present employees
in an effort to offer workers some liquidity and retain talent ... 'the Accel
Partners round was mostly about founders, and this [T. Rowe Price] one is
about employees. Now neither of the founders are selling anything. So this is
a little different. We’ve been profitable for 10 years, so we don’t need the
cash, we have a lot of cash in the bank. It’s more a case of wanting to get a
partner [that knows about public markets] on board..'"_

From a 2011 review of Atlassian culture and self-service sales,
[http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-
stupid-h...](http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-how-
permeating-information-culture-leads-corporate-success), with a talk about
internal systems:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs)

 _" Atlassian CEOs have instilled an information culture throughout the
company with the core value of "Open Company, No Bullshit". The result is a
bottom-up democracy of information where information sharing is the norm and
information hoarding is a foreign concept ... Product pricing is public,
including discount policies. Prospective customers can download software and
try it free for 30 days. All documentation is public and available for anyone
to access. Bug reports and feature requests are public, allowing people to
'vote' on their preferred features."_

------
aaronbrethorst
Saying that 'Jira is better than lots of other tools out there' is sort of
like saying that breaking your finger is better than breaking your femur.
Although technically true, that's not to say that breaking your finger or
using Jira is enjoyable.[1]

[1] n.b. I have never broken either my finger or my femur, but I have used
Jira[2] quite a bit over a period of 8 years.

[2] I am also amused by the origin of the name: "Although normally styled
JIRA, the product name is not an acronym, but a truncation of Gojira, the
Japanese name for Godzilla,[6] itself a reference to JIRA's main competitor,
Bugzilla."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA)

------
ghiculescu
Atlassian' founders are constantly in the press talking about the australian
startup ecosystem and its flounderings, asking that government do more to
help, and so on. I've always wondered why, given their patriotism, they aren't
going public on the ASX first. Obviously they'll make a lot more money this
way, but going by what they've said in the past, it doesn't seem like that's
the biggest priority anymore. (I haven't met the guys and would love to have
this problem so take this armchair analysis as it is, but I'm curious if
anyone knows more about the why here.)

~~~
jpau
You're right - they will probably make more by listing in the USA. Tech
valuations on US exchanges are higher than on the ASX - even with recent
falls, the NASDAQ is sitting at an average price-to-earnings of 22 vs the
ASX200 IT index sitting at about half that.

The Atlassian founders are known to be good at putting their money where their
mouth is. Perhaps they feel they can make a greater impact with the extra
funds than with a single statement.

------
nevi-me
If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks
because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system. It was my biggest complaint
because I was being cheap and not wanting to spend the amount of money I spend
on a day's lunch to get a better tool.

JIRA does feel clunky, but after spending the time configuring it, I find it
helps me more than getting in the way. I've tried a number of other tools,
especially for Agile development, and I ended up feeling like our team would
need multiple told to get things done. By trying JIRA out on work projects and
personal ones, I'm now a bit more productive, and my team is getting there
too.

The price felt a bit 'steep' after the 10 users, but I've convinced my company
that the price per user is nothing as it's how much we bill our clients for a
few minutes if our time.

The listing makes sense, they've been profitable for a long time, and should
have a possibly sustainable share considering EPS and other requirements of
shareholders.

~~~
mapunk
> If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks
> because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system.

You'd say an entire company sucks because one feature of one of their products
is underwhelming to you?

------
Randgalt
Maybe they'll finally fix Jira's email spamming:
[https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-
an-F](https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-an-F)

~~~
yeukhon
You can disable some of the email spams in JIRA. For example you can disable
notify anybody when a ticket is created in your Kibana board. But I find those
spams really useful regardless. I read all of JIRA mentions, tickets just
created in my queue, and everything coming from JIRA so I know what's going
on. Well, I am in a DevOps role so maybe that's a whole different experience.

------
mbubb
I recently migrated jira/ Confluence / Stash / Hipchat from the cloud versions
to self hosted for a company going through the IPO process.

So we went from the Crowd based setup to LDAP / postgresql backed versions of
the products. The big surprise for me is how divergent the products are. User
setup and the cross application links are so different. The underlying
postgres schemas are different. So the migrations were fundimentally
different. (In hipchat's case it is understandable as the self hosted version
of the softwre was new and somewhat beta)

It reminded me of how back in the 90s I heard that Microsoft kept the
developers of different products in the Office suite apart.

Thus when you go to link the applications together you get weird redundancies
and it all doesnt work as it should. Partly that is because the licensing is
so separate. Atlassian support was pretty good in that they worked with us on
it and also they provided unofficial scripts to help withthe process. They
also recommended using Crowd to manage users which to my mind only added a
layer of complexity - you should be able to add users directly from LDAP.

I ended up enjoying the migration project because I got to work with postgres
which is great software.

Atlassian is bloated and in my opinion they havent worked on cross application
connectivity enough. It should be seamless.

My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the
complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow
stuff down.

It is good when you have jira and confluence running well - but it takes a lot
of time and money to get to that point.

~~~
johnhkg
> My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the
> complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the
> workflow stuff down

Offtopic - I have recently been trying to break into full-time consulting /
contracting. May I know how you went about hiring the consultants for the
migration ?

------
semerda
Awesome news! When I 1st arrived in USA (from Australia back in 2009) I never
knew of Atlassian when their tools were brought on-premise at Coupons.com. Boy
was I proud to hear it's an Aussie product. Yap, it was expensive.

As time went on and I moved on to do my own gig. I wanted to go cheap so I
explored many alternative products to replace Jira/Agile, Bitbucket,
Confluence, Bamboo etc.. what I ended up with is different tools with
different interfaces sticky taped together working just OK.

This got frustrating and I decided to dump them all and move to Atlassian
OnDemand. The overhead of managing & educating staff on all these tools was
just not worth the pennies saved. This is the power in Atlassian products,
their tight integration and consistency. Yeah there are quirks here and there
but those always get resolved and features added over time.

Anyways I love Atlassian products and I hope their IPO is a success! Long
journey to get this far but well worth it. Solid company!

------
siliconc0w
Honestly I like trello the best for day to day issue tracking. It gets clunky
if you try to do too much at once but that is intentional. JIRA _can_ be okay
but there are a lot of caveats:

* well customized to fit the business (i.e don't let those 'non-practicing-entities' with nothing else to do go crazy creating and reworking convoluted workflows)

* small number of users (or performance sucks)

* well organized (you tend to get 'dumping grounds' of bugs and tech debt that just accumulates). I like trello's concept of card 'decay'.

* deep pockets (you gotta 'buy in' to the ecosystem and not get stingy about who gets access)

* ignore features - don't try to shoehorn, use what you need and forget the rest

------
dmourati
Jira is okay. Confluence is okay. I find the installation and management of
each okay. We don't use Hip Chat but I imagine with all the focus on Slack
lately, chat is not a big portion of Atlassian's growth story.

What is strange to me is how on-premise focused their business is. This is a
market at or beyond its peak. Perhaps that is the reason for the IPO at this
point?

~~~
walterbell
Atlassian started on-premise and later moved to cloud. Github started with
cloud and later moved to on-premise. It would be interesting to compare the
current revenue split/growth at the two companies.

------
condescendence
For those looking to get past the paywall very quickly and easily, quick gif
tutorial.

[http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull](http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull)

Sorry about url, gfycat so weird with their url generation

------
AnthonBerg
They should fix their incredibly slow OnDemand hosting - unusable! - painfully
un-automatable upgrades and operations, and add realtime multiuser editing.

------
snurk
How does this company trudge on despite their products sucking so badly?

