Atlassian is acquiring collaboration and project management software vendor Trello in a bid to improve its family of tools for application development teams. The deal's price tag is $425 million, a sum that reflects Trello's popularity—some 19 million users already work with its digital whiteboarding software, which lets teams working remotely manage projects and share content.
While Atlassian already has a range of collaborative tools, Trello fits into an important niche, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a blog post:
Trello will become an important part of the Atlassian portfolio, offering a fun new way for teams to organize the often messy range of information that feeds into great teamwork. Its card system is intuitive, easy to use, and instantly familiar, which has made it extremely popular with teams across marketing, legal, HR, sales and beyond.
One of Trello’s strengths is its flexibility. You control how the board looks and operates so you can mold it to how your team works, and track progress in stages that reflect your processes. You can take this flexibility a step further by integrating the tools you already use with Trello as Power-Ups that extend the functionality of the boards to meet your team’s unique needs.
The JIRA family of products will continue providing purpose-built experiences such as JIRA Software, the #1 tool for agile software teams; JIRA Service Desk, a beautifully simple service desk solution for IT and business teams; and JIRA Core for project and process management.
As Cannon-Brookes suggested, Trello will also help Atlassian expand its user base beyond app-dev teams, and into other enterprise departments such as marketing and HR.
While integration plans are afoot, Atlassian will continue to offer both the free and paid versions of Trello as a standalone service, according to Cannon-Brookes.
The acquisition speaks to broader trends afoot in the marketplace that should inform how enterprises make investments in collaboration and communication software going forward, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
"As organizations try and shift some of their communication away from email to more social tools, they can quickly find that information overload increases rather than improves," he says. "The abundance of information shared in social networks and chat clients can be overwhelming. Social task management tools can help reduce some of the strain, by providing structure to the content, enabling people to organize, prioritize and act on tasks in a more manageable and repeatable way. Constellation recommends organizations invest in collaboration platforms that either have native task management capabilities, or support very seamless integration with dedicated task management tools."
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