Atlassian swallows AgileCraft, springs onto business leaders’ desks

Atlassian swallows AgileCraft, springs onto business leaders’ desks

Atlassian is eating its way into the enterprise software stack from at last two sides, after snapping up enterprise planning software provider AgileCraft for $166m.

Texas-based AgileCraft, as its name suggests, supports a range of Agile frameworks, and apart from Jira, has integrations with a fleet of products including Jenkins, GitHub, and ServiceNow – all of which have rivals in Atlassian’s product lineup in one way or another.

Atlassian said in a statement: “Business leaders use AgileCraft to map strategic projects to the distributed work required to deliver them, providing better visibility into bottlenecks, risks and dependencies, and more accuracy around capacity planning and measuring return on investment.”

The statement went on to position Jira “as the collaborative backbone for how modern engineering and IT teams plan and execute work” adding that “ AgileCraft helps connect the work of these teams to the business objectives and strategic outcomes of the entire enterprise.”

So it seems the AgileCraft buy gets Atlassian squarely on the screens of higher tier execs in the enterprise. Last month Atlassian said it wanted to invisibly work its way further into developers’ IDEs, with Jira as the bus connecting the various tools developers rely on. Last year it dug deeper into ops with the acquisition of OpsGenie.

Which all seems to suggest that Atlassian is looking to eat its way into the enterprise software stack from at least two sides, arguably three, simultaneously pushing its own suite of products, while ensuring full integration with a plethora of rivals.

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO. “As Atlassian tools spread through organizations, technology leaders need better visibility into work performed by their teams. With AgileCraft joining Atlassian, we believe we’re the best company to help executives align the work across their organization – providing an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes.”

Farquhar added in a blog post, “We will continue to offer AgileCraft as a standalone service as we work together to build solutions that can unlock the potential of teams at scale.”

Atlassian is not shy of making acquisitions to pad out its product line. As well as last year’s OpsGenie buy, it hoovered up Trello in 2017, and in 2016 bought StatusPage.

But not all Atlassian’s buys have panned out. It looked to beef up its chat product with the acquisition of Hall back in 2016. Last year it pulled out of Chat altogether handing its chat IP to Slack, while making an investment in the platform. Slack has since announced plans to list its shares.