Australia’s biggest tech startup Atlassian rejigs SaaS JIRA offering prior to IPO
Pre-initial public offering (IPO), Australia’s largest tech startup Atlassian Pty. Ltd. is rejigging its enterprise offering by splitting up one of its more popular software as a service (SaaS) apps, project management tool JIRA.
One of Atlassian’s earliest enterprise tools, JIRA has its roots as a simple bug-tracking tool for programmers that morphed over time into a popular SaaS project-tracking tool that caters to over 35,000 companies globally across multiple industries.
Under the new split up JIRA will still seek to maintain a developer focus while dividing that out further into a broader multifaceted service.
The three new subdivisions of JIRA are:
- JIRA Service Desk, which will focused on IT teams who have to handle employee requests and help tickets.
- JIRA Core, offering users a simplified task management for those working in human resources, finance and marketing.
- JIRA Software, with best practices co-ordination, queue management and collaboration tools
“JIRA started as a way for tech teams to manage collaboration around products and the things that needed to get done,” Atlassian President Jay Simons said in a statement. “Over time it has been pulled in other directions by many parts of the business. The big thing it’s displacing is the chaos of using email and documents as ways to get people on the same page.”
Changes
It’s an interesting move so late in the day by Atlassian, given the company is seeking to become the biggest ever Australian tech company to float on the NASDAQ; as of its last funding round of $140 million in April, Atlassian is believed to be valued at AU$4.7 billion ($3.3 billion). But there is ongoing speculation around its float given the company filed under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which allows companies with under $1 billion in annual revenue to file their IPO paperwork confidentially.
That said, given how popular JIRA had become, IPO aside it seems to be a sane move; Atlassian has so many products now across a broad range of enterprise offerings, but it was JIRA that drove the success upon which both founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes can claim their fame.
Pre-IPO Atlassian had raised $210 million in secondary funding from firms including Dragoneer Investment Group, T. Rowe Price, and Accel Partners. It’s still not clear when the Atlassian IPO will occur.
Image credit: doctordray/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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