Atlassian, a work collaboration software provider headquartered in Sydney and listed on Nasdaq, plans to use mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a growth strategy, according to global CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.
Last year, the company acquired Loom, a video messaging startup founded by Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan.
“Atlassian has a long history of acquiring companies and growing them into products and businesses,” he said. “40% of the product portfolio came from acquisitions, and the rest came from internal product creation,” he added.
“We have historically said that we don’t want all the innovation to exist only inside the company. Loom is largely acquired but Trello and Bitbucket that we have acquired over time, we have massively grown those teams and organizations,” he said.
Atlassian developed Trello, a list-making application, initially created by Fog Creek Software in 2011 and acquired by Atlassian in January 2017. Bitbucket Cloud, another Atlassian product, is a Git-based tool optimized for teams using Jira.
In India, the company serves customers such as Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs, and Flipkart. India is Atlassian’s fastest-growing market, with an R&D centre in Bengaluru. The company has hired over 1,900 employees across 17 states and has driven many product innovations from this region.
Atlassian, known for its team collaboration and productivity software like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello, serves over 300,000 customers worldwide.
The company’s Rovo enterprise search platform is being developed in India, and the Atlassian marketplace team is also based there. Atlassian began its operations in India in 2018 with 60 employees in Bengaluru. The company has expanded with growing hubs in cities such as Delhi-NCR (11%), Pune (3.8%), and Hyderabad (4%).
Over 50% of Atlassian’s staff are outside Bengaluru, with 32% of these employees based in smaller cities across India. Competitors in the field include Microsoft, ServiceNow, Monday.com, Notion, Asana, and GitLab.
“We have a large customer footprint in IT and IT service management. It includes those who run internal service functions, helpdesks, and automation in IT, HR, finance and marketing. We have a broad presence in software teams, project management and broader software operational space,” Cannon-Brookes said.
“We have tens of millions of people who use Atlassian’s applications everyday for project management, document management, providing service, and helping with operational software service,” he said. “Two thirds of new hires are outside Bengaluru and less than half of the staff are in Karnataka. Large parts of our IT service management teams work from India, and increasingly large parts of our artificial intelligence and data offerings run out of India as it has huge strengths and talent in those areas. We’d like to have the leadership of those teams to be in India and not somewhere else,” Cannon-Brookes added.
