Why Atlassian Acquired Cenqua

Yesterday we announced the acquisition on Cenqua. I have already received nice, congratulatory notes from friends at Johns Hopkins University, British Telecom, and Accenture who already use Cenqua products. Here’s why we made this move:

• Developer tools are 60% of our business. Confluence and the 2.0 market are hot and exciting, our Confluence license sales are growing at a faster clip than any of our other products, yet JIRA and our developer tools are a great business.
• We want to build on our strengths. JIRA, our issue tracker and project management tool, is our strongest brand, and already occupies a solid position in the developer tools market. The Cenqua products are a great way to build on this.
• The new products are highly complementary. On a scale of one to ten, the strategic fit is a ten. All three Cenqua products — Fisheye, Crucible, and Clover — allow us to create interesting new features and capabilities for developers through the combination of products.
• The Cenqua team. The hardest assets to get in the software business are great engineers and product. The Cenqua team is flat out one of the best engineering teams we’ve seen. And they are an excellent complement to our culture.

What are the benefits now to customers?

• For openers, Cenqua’s 2,000 customers receive improved global support and resources. The Cenqua engineering team gets freed up to concentrate on developing new features by leveraging Atlassian’s team.
• The overlap in customers means we can simplify things for customers and give them the stability of a 100-person software company located in three cities around the world.
• We can start to give our developer community new and interesting features. JIRA is about project management and workflow and adding Crucible code review to it would be a natural at some point. Already we have a plugin so you can click on Fisheye within JIRA and see the commits made against an issue. But there’s a lot more we can do to strengthen the combination of dev tools without forcing customers into a tightly integrated suite that is cumbersome. Our long standing philosophy remains: let people pick the individual lightweight tools they favor.
• Simpler pricing. Atlassian believes strongly in great products at attractive prices, so we have already lined up the Cenqua products to mirror our simplified, low pricing.

What does this mean to Confluence and our wiki business? It means we are passionate about both collaboration and developer tools. We think a diversified software business is a stronger business. We have big plans for the wiki business too, but that’s another blog…