Sometimes it seems that I do nothing but try to sell their products, so I wanted to justify quite why I like them so much.
First of all, they produce good products. Each of those products is particularly good in some way, and the fact that they focus on plugin development as well as a single product means that they have an ecosystem which does more than a single product ever could.
Second of all, they integrate well, and so you get network effects by using them together. Also a plus side.
But the main reason why I'm confident in recommending them is that they have an extremely good attitude towards support, and that really matters when you're trying to work with this stuff in a real environment.
Other Companies: Read This. It Matters.
They have an approach to support that I call Extreme Openness. Essentially, as a user (or even prospective user) of their software, you have the level of insight into their internal development processes that you wish you had from even open source projects (where unless you're trolling through the mailing list archives you often can't establish).
For example, the JIRA system that they use to track their own work is publicly accessible. Not only that, you can freely post things in it. For example, I've been quite active in providing bugs and feature enhancement requests. They make all that information available, and I can easily help myself in seeing whether things I've encountered or only dreamed of are on their roadmap, and vote for what I think is important. This gives me an insight into roughly what their priorities are. I may not always agree with them, but at least I'm aware.
It also means that I can see what's forthcoming, up to several releases in advance. This actually meant the difference between our buying a product and not buying it, because we saw that the roadmap involved some features that we wanted. For example, we were evaluating our Continuous Integration technology, and came up with the standard set of contenders (Bamboo, Hudson (which we already used), CruiseControl (which we already used), CruiseControl.NET (which we already used), and TeamCity). We ended up not buying anything, in part because we saw that Bamboo was working on the key feature we needed (remote build agents) and we wanted to wait for its implementation. As soon as they implemented it, we bought the product because it was better than the alternatives. Now we're almost done putting every single project firm-wide into our Bamboo installation.
Contrast this with your general Classic Big Software Company. Maybe you'll drip out bits and pieces of what's forthcoming to key customers, but you definitely won't let all your bugs out into the open like that, and you definitely wouldn't let customers and competitors see what you're working on (and sometimes more importantly, what you're not working on). I like the Atlassian approach quite a bit, because it gives me insight. And if I'm making a commitment to a platform like this, I need to have long-term confidence in it as a platform, and that means insight into development.
To give a contrasting example, SonicMQ comes out with a new release. Did I even know they were working on it? No (and at this point I have a direct line to the head of SonicMQ support for EMEA). Could I easily find out what was in it? No. There're reference notes, but they don't really tell you what's going on. As a customer, did they even email me? No. I found out meeting with the EMEA support manager on a standard meeting that it had come out as he asked me what we thought of it.
Next, you can download all their products and use them in some limited way. No contacting a sales person, no having to hunt for them, you just download them and use them. With SonicMQ, although I'm a customer, in order to get an "official" download of a new release, I have to have my account manager approve our account getting access to a new release, and then it goes through to the worst download manager in the world (including the new Sun JavaSE download web system) and hunt for the downloads that I need. That's rubbish. Atlassian ones are same download no matter what you're going to use, whether eval or paid. I like that a lot.
And they make it really easy to work with their support system, and they're really responsive. They aren't using some archaic system, they aren't making me work with something that makes me rip my hair out. Their system works really well (it's built on JIRA, so they're eating their own dog food), they're fast to respond (although the time zone differences between Sydney and London make for high latency sometimes), and they have proven themselves very intelligent over support channels, and I have no doubt that very often I'm communicating directly with a developer on the product.
Could you scale this up? I think so. Even when I was at BEA working on WebLogic Server, and we had over 50 core developers on the product, we all still did some type of support, we had public downloads of the major products, and while we didn't have public JIRA access, we did announce what features were forthcoming quite a bit and communicated on particular features on public newgroups. Perhaps that's one reason why at the time people liked us.
But you have to support this if you're trying to sell to developers. You have to think of the fact that many of your customers are extremely intelligent (some of them are lesser-skilled, and you have to support them too), and they won't put up with dealing with standard support drones. If your support engineers ever see a script they have to follow, and I sense that, I'm going to do everything in my power to never work with you again.
So if you're planning on starting a software company, let me give you some lessons that you can learn from Atlassian:
- Make it easy (super duper extra easy) for me to download and use your products. Whether I've paid you or not.
- Don't ever stop me from downloading your manuals. Before I even think of installing your software, I'm doing to read your manuals. Cover to cover.
- Open up your processes and let me see what you're working on. I really want to know, and I really want to know in quite depth and detail. Your competitors may find out, but quite frankly, if you're that worried about individual features, you can hide those features themselves. And if your business model requires that nobody knows what you're working on, you're going to fail anyway.
- Have good support. Have excellent support. Make me think that my annual support contract is a bargain. I'm going to pay you, so make me happy I'm paying you.
- Make Good Software.
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