I asked the team at Atlassian yesterday about their macrovision of the market and how they view the developer world. I found their answer revealing.
What they said made me think about the way companies have to build for developers and end users. It’s increasingly almost a task that has to be one and the same.
The question came as they explained why Atlassian, which received $60 million in finding last year, bought two plugins from Sysbliss: Bamboo Release Management and JIRA Workflow Designer.
Both tools have a core value. They are easy to use and they help get the job done quickly.
Jira Workflow Designer plugin is a visual editor similar to Visio for making workflows. With it you can save custom layouts, drag and drop items and remove the steps that have often required repeated tasks in the initial workflow creation.
Bamboo Release Management integrates with Jira. It offers:
- Centralized version management.
- Filters and masks to grab the right version.
- Version qualifiers to doc custom builds on different release levels.
- Configuration tester to see what versions are available based on your configuration.
The End User and the Developer
Atlassian has made its mark by offering developer environments for building software and services.
I asked about that in context with their macrovision. Atlassian offers tools for developers but they see themselves focusing in many ways on the end user. Their goal is to offer custom workflow environments for people like myself who want the sophistication of a rich workflow but do not have the skill sets of a developer.
To that end, they have launched Atlassian University.
That’s a trend you see in the market with Web apps such as Dropbox, which is a service for anyone to use but has serious credibility with the developer geek crowd.
The idea being that developers want smooth experiences. And the end user absolutely requires it.
That’s better than the alternative. And that’s being classified according to tired metaphors such as application lifecycle management providers.
It’s almost as if developers are saying treat us like everyone else. Just allow us to show our individuality and ways to extend tools and service the ways we want.
That’s the message we hear from Atlassian as well as across the market with each passing day.
