Düsseldorf Scott Farquhar drives a German car. The Australian does not want to reveal the brand because it is definitely a customer of his company. The vehicle has excellent workmanship and the engine is impeccable, says the boss and co-founder of Atlassian. Only the software leaves something to be desired.
Jira is a so-called workflow software that changes more in companies than just clicking on new boxes. In principle, the agile work of software developers is transferred to car manufacturing. “In the past, you built the car first and then used the software, like an engine part,” says Farquhar. “Now the cars are built around the software, which is constantly updated over the Internet. Everything is much faster and more dynamic.”
Was kann Atlassian?
It’s the exact opposite of how the auto industry used to work. The “waterfall” process is used there, every component and every screw has to be installed one after the other so that a vehicle finally rolls off the assembly line. Car manufacturers are structured in a correspondingly hierarchical manner; every work step has to be carried out precisely, the production requires large teams.
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Not so with software. When they are created, there is comparatively chaos: each development team works independently and in their own time. With Jira, teams come together, everyone shares everything with everyone else. Because autonomy requires transparency: a team must be able to see what the others are doing in order to be able to make informed decisions on this basis.
“In the past, a project manager would draw a chart on a piece of paper and a week later would review the progress and decide what to do,” says Farquhar. “It’s much too slow and cumbersome. Today, companies work agile, like in software development.”
Jira has now become the standard, also because all industries are going digital. “It’s an incredible success story,” said Peter Fintl, vice president of technology and innovation at the Capgemini consultancy. “If Jira were gone tomorrow, a large proportion of commercial software projects would also be affected.”
Atlassian received first order by fax
The beginnings of Atlassian are those of a classic start-up. Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes met at Sydney University in 1998, aged 18. They gave up their IT studies because they didn’t want to work for what they call “soul-destroying” companies like IBM or PwC.
Instead, they withdrew $10,000 from their credit card and founded Atlassian. The first product was Jira. The name comes from the Japanese name for the monster Godzilla and was initially intended to be “bug tracking software” for programmers.
The Australian co-founded the software company with Mike Cannon-Brooks because he didn’t want to work at “soul-destroying” companies.
(Photo: Atlassian)
This resulted in the software for efficient project development. The first customer was American Airlines in 2003 – founder Farquhar still remembers ordering by fax. For eight years, Atlassian financed itself from the income from the Jira licenses until 2010 when the first venture capitalist got involved with 60 million dollars.
“Focus away from technology, towards profit”
Today, Atlassian has more than 240,000 customers worldwide, including car manufacturers, Software AG and Deutsche Bank in Germany. In 2015, the company went public, which not all customers liked. “With the IPO, a lot has apparently changed at Atlassian, with some users complaining that the focus is shifting away from technology and towards profit,” says Joachim Mayer, an expert in auto software development at the consulting firm Capgemini.
Atlassian is a pioneer in a highly competitive workflow management market. The fall in tech stocks this year has also hit the company, losing two-thirds of its market cap. A few weeks ago, the US analysis firm New Constructs classified it as a “zombie stock”. “We disagree fundamentally,” the company replied at the time, referring to the positive cash flow and strong growth.
Analysts expect the company to average sales of $3.5 billion in the current fiscal year, rising to $4.3 billion in the following year. According to Farquhar, the long-term sales goal is ten billion dollars.
More: Software development overwhelms Germany’s car manufacturers