Atlassian: Sydney-based Atlassian to pursue M&A as growth model: CEO

Sydney-based, Nasdaq-listed collaboration software provider Atlassian is looking to expand through mergers and acquisitions, global CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told ET.Late last year, the company acquired video messaging startup Loom from Indian-born duo Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan.

“Atlassian has a long history of acquiring companies and growing them into products and businesses,” he said. “40% of our product portfolio came from acquisitions, and the rest came from internal product development,” he added.

“Historically, we’ve said we don’t want all innovation to happen in-house. Loom is largely an acquisition, but Trello and Bitbucket, which we’ve acquired over time, we’ve grown those teams and organizations significantly,” he said.

Trello is a list-making application developed by Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software, it was sold to Atlassian in January 2017. Bitbucket Cloud is a Git-based codebase optimized for teams using Jira.

In India, Atlassian customers include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs, and Walmart-owned Flipkart. India is Atlassian’s fastest-growing market, with its R&D center in Bengaluru employing more than 1,900 people across 17 states and driving much of the company’s product innovation.

The company, which provides team collaboration and productivity software like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello, has over 300,000 customers worldwide. Its enterprise search platform Rovo is built in India, and its Atlassian Marketplace team is also based in India. The company launched its India operations in 2018 with 60 employees in Bengaluru. It has several growing hubs in India outside Bengaluru, such as Delhi-NCR (11%), Pune (3.8%), and Hyderabad (4%).

More than 50% of their staff is located outside Bengaluru, and 32% of them are in smaller cities in India. Some of Atlassian’s peers and competitors include Microsoft, Service Now, Monday, Notion, Asana, and Gitlab.

“We have a broad customer reach across IT and IT service management. This includes people managing internal service functions, help desks and automation across IT, HR, finance and marketing. We have a broad presence in software teams, project management and the broader software operations space,” Cannon-Brookes said.

“We have tens of millions of people using Atlassian applications every day to manage projects, manage documents, deliver services and support operational software,” he said. “Two-thirds of our new hires are from outside Bengaluru, and less than half of our staff is in Karnataka. A large portion of our IT service management teams are based in India, and an increasing portion of our AI and data offerings are being delivered outside India because the country has tremendous strength and talent in these areas. We would like to see the leadership of these teams based in India, not elsewhere,” Cannon-Brookes told ET.