Atlassian Gradually Deploying a Sales Team

According to a recent Gartner report on enterprise application software market in the Asia Pacific region, the market is estimated to have grown 6.5% over the year to $12.6 billion in 2013. The fastest growing market was Australia, which recorded 7.7% growth over the year to $3.4 billion. China reported a comparatively modest growth of 5.9% to $3.1 billion.

Atlassian’s Financials
In another report, IDC estimated that the growth in worldwide applications market was driven by more than 10% growth rates witnessed by collaborative applications and content application tools. Cloud-based collaborative software company Atlassian Software is also seeing remarkable growth.

The Australian company recently disclosed some of their financial results. Revenues for the fiscal year ended in June 2014 improved 44% over the year to $215 million. The growth is significantly higher than the 35% improvement the company had reported a year ago. They did not divulge their profitability, but analysts estimate that they have been profitable for a while now thanks to their less sales intensive business model. At the end of their fiscal year, they had 40,000 organizations using their tools compared with 35,000 reported a quarter ago.

Atlassian has been venture funded with $210 million in funding from Accel Partners and T Rowe Price. The last round of funding was held in April this year when they raised $150 million at a valuation of $3.3 billion.  

Atlassian’s Growing Product Line Up
Atlassian investments in R&D have led to several product enhancements. Earlier last month, they released a beta version of Atlassian Stash Data Center, the first enterprise Git solution that caters to increased scale. Stash Data Center is aimed at larger organizations wanting to leverage collaborative workflow tools for their software teams and manage distributed development on their own infrastructure.

The Stash Data Center introduces active–active clustering to the collaborative platform and comes with features such as a simple set-up for teams to be operating on Git, ability to handle several continuous integration server requests, ability to increase capacity by adding additional nodes in real-time, and reduced downtime.

They also released a major upgrade to JIRA Service Desk. The 2.0 upgrade features an improved user experience, self-service tools, improved knowledge base utilization, and advanced service level agreement monitoring and management. They also deployed a new agent-based pricing for JIRA Service Desk that will make it more affordable for their customers to deploy service desks.

Atlassian’s Sales Remodelling
Atlassian attributes its higher profitability to the minimal investments it puts in a dedicated sales team. They rely on word-of-mouth marketing, minimal billboard, and online ad spend and invest all the money saved on research and development efforts. For more than a decade, Atlassian has operated on a model that required no sales team. Recently though, they have begun to build a sales team to promote their latest date center offering. The team is still very small compared to other organizations. They have a mere seven people selling their products for more than 1,000 total employees that they have.