Google needs developers. Atlassian has them. Reading Oliver Marks' report on Atlassian's progress and embrace of OpenSocial makes me think Atlassian's developer tools could be a good fit for a Google acquisition.
Atlassian offers an array of developer-focused productivity infrastructure. The company has been exceptionally successful by focusing on customer service and customer-centric development. Jira, Confluence, FishEye, and other Atlassian products may not register with your grandfather, but they're often the collaborative tools of choice for developers.
Enter Google. Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but to do that well it increasingly caters to software developers, its I/O conference being just the most visible example of this.
Google launched Google Code to host open-source projects and now claims tens of thousands of denizens. Making each of those projects more productive with Atlassian's tools could provide powerful incentives for more of the software world to revolve around Google, incentives that may be necessary as SourceForge strives to enrich its own developer experience.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows that Microsoft depends upon developers. Increasingly, Google will, too, as it fights Microsoft on multiple fronts with Android, Wave, and other open-source or open-access products.
Atlassian's developer products could help to feed Google's developer ambitions.
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There's a great article in Forbes about Jive taking a collaboration fight to Microsoft's SharePoint play. Its primary weapon? Ease of use and ease of integration.
[Jive's] strategy for competing with giants: work alongside them. Oracle and SAP bundle Jive's discussion forum software into their portal applications. The version of Clearspace released in April lets users search for and link to SharePoint content from within Clearspace and sync their Clearspace and Microsoft Outlook calendars. For customers who use both, Jive becomes the user-friendly portal for SharePoint's sophisticated but clunky file system.
Earlier this week I heard the same said of Atlassian by at least two companies with whom I was meeting. Atlassian makes excellent products that are easy to use. People want to use them rather than being forced to use them. In both cases business users are as likely to recommend the product as IT.
Jive and Atlassian, like Google and Apple, demonstrate an absolute essential for winning the software wars of the 21st Century: You've got to have easy distribution, and you've got to be mind-numbingly easy to use.
... Read more
Mozilla has launched its Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some cool prizes in the offing, including a MacBook Air.
The purpose? To encourage additional and improved add-ons for Firefox, of course.
It's similar in many ways to Atlassian's bounty program, which is giving away six $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.
Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.
... Read moreSometimes I read things like this and I'm relieved to find out that Steve Ballmer isn't completely deluded by proprietary ideology. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit today, Ballmer made it clear that his vendetta against open source isn't as all-encompassing as he sometimes makes it out to be:
... Read more"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said -- a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.
(Credit:
Atlassian)
If you work for an open-source company, no doubt you use some of Atlassian's software (Jira, Confluence, FishEye, etc.). If you're like me, you've always assumed that this was because Jira/etc. is open source. In this, I'm sorry to tell you, you would be as mistaken as I've been.
Atlassian is one of the most fascinating companies with which I'm familiar. Oddly enough, the company succeeds because it makes great software. It does, even more oddly, what most open-source companies aim to do. And yet it is not an open-source vendor.
There's a lesson in this for me...and maybe for you. I talked with Mike Cannon-Brookes today, Atlassian's co-founder and CEO, and learned the following:
... Read more
Look around at the rising tide of open source companies, and you'll find some things in common:
- Jira for bug and issue tracking;
- Confluence, SocialText, or some other wiki technology for online documentation;
- Jive Forums or other forum software of some stripe;
- Demand generation software (Loopfuse, Eloqua, or other)
- Hyperic for network functionality (a la Red Hat Network).
There is other software that open source companies have in common, but these are some of the major commonalities. Most people don't realize just how much money there is in arming the next century of software. Atlassian, for example, is doing upwards of $30M this year, according to a VC source of mine. And yet Atlassian has never taken a dime in venture funding. I suspect that number will continue to explode as more and more open source companies come online, and more and more proprietary vendors start to experiment with open source methodologies.
This last point is the key. There is no shortage of future for open source but most of it is, well, in the future, as Savio notes. So the real opportunity for these open source "arms dealers" is to get a foothold today which will dramatically expand in the future as the world shifts to the new norm of developing, distributing, and supporting software.
I've said it before specifically about Hyperic, but it's a much wider phenomenon than that. There is a rich future for those feeding the open source trend. This is the case for Telecom today (as BusinessWeek describes, Telecom is profiting from the move of high-bandwidth digital media to the web), and for any market, really. There are those who build the applications, and those who enable them. Both routes can be profitable.
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