Atlassian Refocus on Core Market with AgileCraft Acquisition
Australian enterprise software giant Atlassian has consistently pursued growth through acquisition – boosting revenue by bringing new companies into the fold with related products and complementary skill sets.
The latest of these deals is the $166 million purchase of Austin-based AgileCraft, whose all-in-one Agile management suite will now be absorbed into Atlassian’s extensive range of enterprise software.
The two companies already share a similar customer base, and have existing integrations for some of their most popular tools. In a press release announcing the deal, AgileCraft founder and CEO Steve Elliot spoke of their shared ambition to help enterprises more easily gather and distill information across siloed teams, and effectively scale through Agile transformation:
“Organisations lack the ability to easily gather and distill information across siloed teams – making it extremely difficult to assess progress and measure success,” said Elliott. “We’re excited to be joining the Atlassian family to enable the new digital enterprise, which is able to connect teams and align strategy to outcomes.”
Since bootstrapping the startup off a credit card in 2002, founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes have rapidly expanded Atlassian, making a total of 11 acquisitions in tangential and complementary markets, and continually expanding its product range and customer base.
But the purchase of AgileCraft represents a return to its core market. In July last year, the company surrendered its strategic partnership with Slack, and exited the business communications space by discontinuing its two workplace chat products – Stride and HipChat.
Now Atlassian looks to be refocusing its energy on a segment of the enterprise software market that it knows very well: project and portfolio management. As a leading provider of Agile project management software solutions, AgileCraft are a significant player in this segment, which, according to a market report by IDC, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.8% to reach a valuation of $5.7 billion by 2022.
