Atlassian

Atlassian Corporation is an Australian-American software company that develops products for software developers, and project managers among other groups. The company is domiciled in Delaware, with global headquarters in Sydney, Australia, and US headquarters in San Francisco.

The name, Atlassian, is an ad hoc derivative of Atlas, the Titan in Greek mythology who the gods had condemned to hold up the Heavens after the gods overthrew them. (The usual form of the word is Atlantean.) The company's logo reflected this from 2011 through 2017 with its stylized blue human holding up what is shown to be the bottom of the sphere of the sky.

In the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022, Atlassian reported serving 242,623 customers in over 190 countries, with 10 million monthly active users. As of March 2024, the company had over 10,000 employees across 13 countries.

History
In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes sent an email to his University of New South Wales classmates asking if any of them were interested in helping him launch a tech startup after graduation. However, Scott Farquhar was the only one who replied, and together they founded Atlassian in 2002. They bootstrapped the company for several years, financing the startup with a $10,000 credit card debt.

Originally, Mike and Scott were working to support other customer support teams, but this required them to take calls at all hours. Additionally, they were dissatisfied with the bug-tracking software they were using. As a solution, they launched Atlassian's flagship product Jira, a project and issue tracker that is still widely used today, and refocused their operations to selling the software.

In 2004, Confluence, a team collaboration platform that lets users work together on projects, co-create content, and share documents and other media assets, was launched.

In July 2010, Atlassian raised $60 million in secondaries venture capital from Accel Partners. By June of the next year it announced that revenue had increased 35% in the previous year to $102 million. The 2014 restructuring saw the parent company became Atlassian Corporation PLC of the UK whose address was registered in London though the de facto headquarters remained in Sydney.

In November 2015, Atlassian announced sales of $320 million, and Shona Brown was added to its board. On 10 December 2015, Atlassian made its initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange, under the symbol TEAM, putting the market capitalization of Atlassian at $4.37 billion. The IPO made its founders Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes Australia's first tech startup billionaires and household names in their native country, despite Atlassian being called a "very boring software company" in The New York Times for its focus on development and management software.

In March 2019, Atlassian's value was US$26.6 billion. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar own approximately 30% each. In October 2020, Atlassian announced the end of support for their "Server" products with sales ending in February 2021 and support ending in February 2024 to focus on "Cloud" and "Data Center" editions.

In October 2021, Atlassian received approval to construct their new Headquarters in Sydney, which will anchor the Tech Central precinct. Their building is planned to be the world's tallest hybrid timber structure and will embody leading sustainability technologies and principles.

In March 2023, the firm announced layoffs of 500 employees, or 5% of its workforce.

In October 2023, Microsoft identified a severe zero-day vulnerability that can be exploited remotely and anonymously in Atlassian's Confluence product. It also accused Chinese state-backed group known as Storm-0062, DarkShadow, or Oro0lxy, of breaking into Atlassian customers' systems several weeks earlier. Atlassian asked its customers to look for signs of a breach, as it could not itself confirm whether their systems were affected. The flaw has since been fixed via an update that the customers would need to apply.

Sales Model
Atlassian operates under the principle that "software should be bought, not sold." Instead of running a traditional sales team, they opted to build a self-service purchase experience. This was considered risky in the early 2000s, but the strategy worked better than expected when they awoke one morning to an order form from American Airlines in the fax machine. While a majority of sales are made through their website, Atlassian also runs a partner program where solution partners not only provide knowledge about Atlassian products but can also assist with product implementation and configuration depending on their partner classification.

Acquisitions and product announcements
Additional products include Crucible, FishEye, Bamboo, and Clover, which target programmers working with a code base. FishEye, Crucible, and Clover came into Atlassian's portfolio by acquiring another Australian software company, Cenqua, in 2007. In 2010, Atlassian acquired Bitbucket, a hosted service for code collaboration.

In 2012, Atlassian acquired HipChat, an instant messenger for workplace environments. Then in May 2012, Atlassian Marketplace was introduced as a website where customers can download plug-ins for various Atlassian products. That same year Atlassian also released Stash, a Git repository for enterprises, later renamed Bitbucket Server. Also, Doug Burgum became chairman of its board of directors in July 2012.

In 2013, Atlassian announced a Jira service desk product with full service-level agreement support.

In May 2015, the company announced its acquisition of work chat company Hall, intending to migrate all of Hall's customers across to its chat product HipChat. In April 2015, Atlassian announced that it had acquired Blue Jimp—the company behind Jitsi—to expand its video capabilities.

A small startup called Dogwood Labs in Denver, Colorado, which had a product called StatusPage (that hosts pages updating customers during outages and maintenance), was acquired in July 2016.

In January 2017, Atlassian announced the purchase of Trello for $425 million. On 7 September 2017, the company launched Stride, a web chat alternative to Slack. Less than a year later, on 26 July 2018, Atlassian announced it was going to exit the chat business, that it had sold the intellectual property for HipChat and Stride to competitor Slack, and that it was going to shut down HipChat and Stride in 2019. As part of the deal, Atlassian took a small stake in Slack.

On 4 September 2018, the company acquired OpsGenie (a tool that generates alerts for helpdesk tickets) for $295 million. In October 2018, the company announced that it was selling Jitsi to 8x8.

On 18 March 2019, the company announced that it had acquired Agilecraft for $166 million. On 17 October 2019, Atlassian completed the acquisition of Code Barrel, makers of "Automation for Jira", available on Jira Marketplace.

On 12 May 2020, Atlassian acquired, a tool that generates helpdesk tickets from Slack conversations, for an undisclosed amount. On 30 July 2020, Atlassian announced the acquisition of Mindville, a provider of IT service management software, for an undisclosed amount.

On 26 February 2021, Atlassian acquired the cloud-based visualization and analytics company Chartio.

On 19 April 2023, Atlassian announced the availability of "Atlassian Intelligence".

On 12 October 2023, Atlassian made its biggest acquisition to date, by agreeing to buy video messaging company Loom for US$975 million, with the intention to integrate Loom's technology into its cloud-based products, such as Jira and Confluence.

In April 2024, Atlassian released Rovo, a set of search and automation tools which use AI.

DataSpii
In July 2019, cybersecurity researcher Sam Jadali exposed a catastrophic data leak known as DataSpii involving clickstream data provider DDMR and marketing intelligence company Nacho Analytics (NA). Branding itself as the "God mode for the internet," NA granted its free and paid members the ability to access real-time Jira and Confluence data from Atlassian's cloud and on-premise products, impacting thousands of Atlassian customers including Reddit, FireEye, NBC Digital, BuzzFeed, AlienVault, Cardinal Health, T-Mobile, and Under Armour.

Ars Technica's coverage of Jadali's findings highlighted DataSpii's ability to disseminate sensitive Atlassian Jira data, including Blue Origin staff's competitor discussions and technical issues with sensors, equipment and manifolds.

DataSpii circumvented the most effective security measures, enabling the unauthorized dissemination of Jira data from the internal corporate networks of leading cybersecurity firms. This resulted in the real-time leakage of Jira tickets containing the cybersecurity issues of entities such as the Pentagon, Bank of America, AT&T, and others. Jadali's investigation revealed that DDMR facilitated rapid dissemination of the data to additional third parties, often within minutes of acquisition, endangering the privacy of the sensitive data collected.

The DataSpii leak harvested data from millions of Chrome and Firefox users through compromised browser extensions, exploiting Atlassian's method of embedding project tasks and other corporate data directly within page titles. The leak demonstrated a vulnerability in data security, where a single compromised staff member could inadvertently expose the Jira tickets of others.