Atlassian Acquires StatusPage

[mehdim]

I really love the execution. Neat, slick and they even had the luxury to be open about it in their blog. They attacked a simple-to-understand but real problem, on a niche, making something people wanted to have and not wanted to do. They built the right integrations...making money since the beginning, increasing revenue per user and overall revenue... They probably made lots of mistakes , but according to public information and taking the time to analyze it with some prospective, they did (almost) everything right. Following their traction and revenue, they must have sold for a good price as Atlassian really needs such products to renew their platform and they have the portfolio of customers Statuspage would have tried to acquire. Great story.

[dantiberian]

This acquisition doesn't fill me with confidence for the future. StatusPage was a clean, simple, and intuitive service. Atlasssian's software is the opposite of clean, simple, and intuitive.

[r0m4n0]

Having used many different bug tracking, help desk, and ticketing softwares… Atlassian does a dam good job. Totally customizable screens, fields, and workflows with a modern UI. A decent webservice API I’ve integrated a few external tools into without much difficulty. I’ve also written a few gadgets and plugins and received a decent amount of attention through their plugin marketplace. Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?

I don’t think you say the same about other competitors right now… ServiceNow? HP SMS or ALM? ClearQuest? I’ve used those and if you consider Atlassian terrible, I’m not sure what words you would use to describe them…

[darkstar999]

> In their official announcement today, the StatusPage co-founders also note that when the team explored the acquisition, “we were aligned on three important things: our complementary cultures, our desire to offer StatusPage as a standalone product, and our shared vision of the future of software.”

Standalone product. I think it will be safe.

[fletchowns]

I use JIRA, Confluence, and BitBucket daily and I'm a big fan of all three. Yeah, there's some aspects of their products I don't like, but overall I'm very happy with Atlassian offerings.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

When I saw the quote by the StatusPage founders saying they were aligned with Atlassian, I laughed. These companies are near polar opposites.

[atwebb]

Disagree on the Atlassian, well, JIRA at least. Just had to introduce it to a new group, we got cut short on the initial intro so I didn't get through much. Then to my surprise they were off and running the next day, they just got it.

[djsumdog]

I remember when I was doing a talk in Melbourne, another developer told me what he didn't like about Atlassian was that they essentially only had one product (was it Jira? or Confluence? can't remember) and almost everything else in their offering set; they bought from other people and re-engineered to fit into their product line.

Having administered, Jira, Confluence and Bamboo servers (all with slightly different installation steps, logging and means to connect to LDAP), what he said made sense.

That being side, I really like Confluence. It's an amazing wiki, even though it's a bit expensive (although they do have free open source project licenses) and kinda resource hog.

[stephen_g]

Luckily they do seem to have put some effort into making the administration of each project more consistent (at least between Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket Server). I've definitely noticed that things are slowly becoming more similar each release (and they got a lot more consistant in the frontend last year too).

[tajen]

Their biggest product is JIRA followed by Confluence. Let's look at acquisitions vs internal developments:

- 2003: JIRA - In-house

- ~2004: Confluence - In-house

- ~2007: Fisheye, Crucible (code analysis) - Acquisition

- ~2008: Bamboo (builds) - Acquisition

- 2010: Bitbucket - Acquisition

- 2011: SourceTree - Acquisition

- ~2012: Bonfire (JIRA Capture - screencast bugcatcher) - In-house

- ~2013: HipChat - Acquisition

- ~2013: Stash (BitBucket Server) - In-house

- ~2013: JIRA Service Desk - In-house

- ~2014: JIRA Portfolio (capacity management for Agile) - In-house

- 2014: Wikidocs, Doctape - Acquisitions

- 2015: BlueJimp, Hall, StatusPage - Acquisitions

But what's the right way to start a product today? It's easy to make big bets when you're a start-up, but when you already own several products, you're exposing the brand with every decision. If a product doesn't find its market fit on day #1, if you don't support every combination of platforms, if it really fits a niche but if you also expose the product to customers who were not the initial target, if the pricing is wrong, if it doesn't fit a certain usecase => Your brand is exposed.

I understand the trend to reach growth by external acquisitions, then achieve earnings by scaling the product to the Atlassian size. It's easier to explain it to the market, plus you've already proven the features match the customer case.

Because something else in in-house at Atlassian: Going from Server products to cloud products with the same codebase (a real technological performance), developing the Plugins 2 system and the Atlassian Marketplace, developing an internal PAAS platform, hosting microservices [1], developing a uniform graphic design and graphic library, developing the sales, creating a big conference for their products in CA (named Summit), creating the developer conference (AtlasCamp in Europe), the marketing machine and relationships with journals. Let's give credit to the workers of the shadow: Most of the work that's needed to make great products aren't features.

Maybe, after all, it's a company whose core business became to bring features from niche/luxury/early adopters to enterprise. They shorten the path of good ideas from hackers to IBM-style customers. It's important to us, developers, because they helps migrating big old companies like banks and government to new methods. The features of the software you put in are important, but what's more important is how to massively develop adoption. Man I'd love to be a PM for Atlassian ;)

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/atlascamp/2016/archives/build-amaz... - and you can look at their other developer conference videos too.

[a_imho]

Have you tried xwiki? Last time we were on a really tight budget, we ended up with it and was very nice. Confluence could only handle our use case with 2 separate paid plugins installed!

[Axsuul]

Their original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470

[rrecuero]

Thanks for the link. It is great to see how things move from the early beginnings to an acquisition

[dangrossman]

The ability to subscribe to other companies' status pages has saved me so much time and headache. StatusPage has done something awesome here, for all the people that rely on various services moreso than the service providers themselves. Congrats to the team!

[jroseattle]

"Adding a service like StatusPage, which launched three years ago, seems like a natural fit for Atlassian."

Why is this a natural fit for Atlassian? Not being snarky, I just don't see how this is any more a natural fit for Atlassian than lots of other companies that provide picks-and-shovels to the software builders of the world.

[pech0rin]

Atlassian has tooling around handling support (Service Desk), bug tracking (Jira), and I think it seems like a natural extension to integrate those products into an external facing service like StatusPage.

[vthallam]

May be because there is plenty of opportunity for upselling StatusPage to the existing and new customers of Atlassian?

[ElliotH]

One problem with the stack right now is if you are using Jira to track issues internally then users who aren't party to the ticket aren't able to see what's going on very easily. Perhaps/hopefully this will provide that sort of ongoing progress report, so if the database goes down there aren't 50 support tickets.

[timv]

Because Atlassian's core skills these days seem to be oriented towards getting enterprises to buy their software.

Their products are decent enough, but certainly not exceptional. Their pace of development has slowed to a crawl. The word on the street is that they're pouring massive investment into HipChat, yet it's been easily outdone by Slack.

Yet, they're doing well, because they manage to package it all up at just the right price point, with just the right set of services to get people to buy it.

Something like StatusPage fits them well because it's an existing, working, solution that they can monetize.

[brianwawok]

Jira goes down a lot. Maybe it helps you notice faster?

[rmdoss]

As a happy StatusPage user, I am worried about this acquisition. Been more and more frustrated with Atlassian and recently we had to move away from HipChat due to multiple issues (constant downtimes).

What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?

[cyberferret]

We use Cachet[1], an open source alternative. We checked out many status page services out there, but found it hard to understand how some of them (web apps with a handful of pages) were more expensive than our accounting system or project management services we subscribe to?!?

[1] - https://cachethq.io/

[1_800_UNICORN]

Are you really going to ditch StatusPage that quickly? I'm not a huge Atlassian fan myself, but StatusPage is a great tool.

[logicallee]

>What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?

http://i.imgur.com/adl7Yc3.png

[Miner49er]

hund.io is the best alternative in my opinion. It integrates with pingdom too, and has some other cool features.

[onnnon]

Official blog post here:

http://blog.statuspage.io/joining-the-atlassian-family

[rubiquity]

Seems like the perfect acquisition for handling HipChat's downtime.

[balls187]

Ouch.

I know snark is generally frowned upon, but HipChat and hosted JIRA/Confluence downtimes have been serious issues for us.

[elwell]

I thought HN was a place where snarky comments don't get upvoted. I can go to proggit for that.

[rvalue]

ahh burn!

[jkrelax]

They bought StatusPage so could manually alter HipChat's downtime history. I jest.

[kevinburke]

It's fun to be snarky, but maybe leave it alone for a day, or a comment thread? Can't we just be happy for Atlassian and StatusPage today and gripe later? There are certainly lots of employees at both places reading this comment section.

I'm also sure HipChat knows about, and is embarrassed about, outages. Shaming them accomplishes nothing.

[micah_chatt]

Congrats Scott & the StatusPage team! I interviewed for a position with StatusPage at one point (ended up going with a different company), but I have huge respect for the product and the team.

[lquist]

I'm surprised they sold. This seems like a fantastic business.

[blahi]

Seems like self-employment, not business, which gets cut from the bill the minute the next down cycle shows.

[fiatjaf]

Software for people who make software for people who make software for people who make software.

[josscrowcroft]

Congratulations. I enjoyed the clear, transparent blog post, although my fundamental question "Will they shut down the service in the mid-to-long term or force us to become an Atlassian customer?" took some time to get an answer to.

I also felt their blog post was all about their journey, which while interesting doesn't really present any value for us as a customer. It would have been nice to know why the acquisition is in the customers' best interest rather than only the founders' (of course both are important).

[7cupsoftea]

Congrats guys! Very happy for you!!

[callmevlad]

Congrats Steve, Scott, and Danny!

[spraak]

Off topic - What are some alternatives to JIRA?

[mmanfrin]

There are, no exaggeration, probably thousands of alternatives. People are very subjective in what they want out of a task tracker, so I'd start by making a list of what you think you need and in what format, then go from there.

[itomato]

Which subset of functionality do you need?

Issue tracking? Kanban? A means to align corporate initiatives with dev effort? Defect tracking with built-in links to commits and vice-versa?

[_Codemonkeyism]

I wonder when Atlassian will buy Jetbrains.

[philliphaydon]

Let's hope never. Jet Brains make amazing software. Would suck for them to be aquired by the likes of Atlassian. Their products would turn to rubbish.

[foolinaround]

Could'nt some static pages ( based on templates ) hosted on S3 ( with its high reliability ) do the job?

[joshdick]

No. You also need something that responds to events and reports on them. Statuspage integrates with pingdom, new relic, and datadog.

[donnfelker]

If you're worried about this, you can always use the other status page site that many other startups and large corps use: http://www.status.io

[tjholowaychuk]

Congrats!

[jgalt212]

Question: If my web service is down, how do my customers know ex-ante to check in with statuspage.io for more information?

[martin-adams]

I wonder if this means I'll be able to unsubscribe to the Atlasssian SMS notifications. They make is so easy to subscribe, but no details how to unsubscribe.

[blakethorne]

Reply to the SMS message with with "STOP"

[foolfoolz]

as a customer of many companies who use status page, i do not understand it at all. this is just a nice looking page with some history to it?

most of my encounters with status pages have outdated information such as i am checking your page because i think you are down, but you dont list that you are down, yet. or when they are having a problem, there's a very tiny indicator and somewhat useless message.

what could this possibly bring atlassian that they couldn't build themselves?

[jkarneges]

StatusPage is well known and has many customers, so I think this is more about buying the business than merely the product.

[thinkMOAR]

'Outside Your Infrastructure, Always Up'

AWS has outages too, also statuspage.io own site reports, Hosted Pages Uptime 99.969%

99.969 != always.

Pricing also isn't too shabby, Enterprise starts at $1499/mo. Billed annually.

For small 18.000$ a year, one should be able to setup your own external monitoring, with email, Facebook, twitter and what not for hooks to update your users of the service status where the sky is the limit, not the limits statuspage.io sets for your account.

[pc86]

Enterprise pricing is not about being cheaper than it would be for you to do it yourself. It's about you simply not having to do it yourself. You might be an organization that only employs 5 developers. It's much easier to pay a small fraction of what you pay one of them than it is to pull 1-3 of them off of what they're working on and have them build you a buggy implementation of the same thing that won't be ready for many months.

[Animats]

I usually use "http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/".

If your site's back end is down, the site itself should be saying something intelligent. ("Ngnix timeout", or Cloudflare's error message blaming the site server, is kind of lame, but it's something.)

[jacques_chester]

Cloudflare will serve any page you like during an outage.

If you pay them.

[gkoberger]

Sites aren't all or nothing. It's possible something like just image uploads might be broken, or maybe you want to keep people updated as the issues progress.