Mahesh Sharma | October 30, 2007
AUSTRALIAN Web 2.0 software producer Atlassian has cut a deal with Microsoft to integrate its enterprise wiki software into Sharepoint.
In several weeks Atlassian will release the Sharepoint Connector, which will integrate its Confluence product with Microsoft's Sharepoint, enabling search across the two products, content sharing and embedding of applications.
Atlassian is based in Sydney, and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes hopes the partnership with Microsoft will boost Confluence's sales.
"From the point of view of the customers using the wiki tool contained in Sharepoint, it's very basic, Microsoft is very open about that, and from that point of view Confluence provides a natural upgrade," he said.
Mr Cannon-Brookes co-founded the software company in 2002 with Scott Farquar. It has 125 employees and last financial year generated $20 million in revenue.
Confluence and collaboration software makes up half of Atlassian's business, with the other half concerned with software development tools and its main product, JIRA. It has 8500 customers, with 400 local customers, including Telstra, the big four banks and Cochlear.
The engineering side is based in the Sydney office, which has 70 staff, with 30 in San Francisco and the rest spread across Asia and Europe.
Mr Cannon-Brookes said the expansion to the US was due to a skills shortage. "It really allows us to be close to the customer and to have access to certain types of specific talent. In Australia there aren't a lot of other software companies that people have grown up with, which means that there's less availability of common software skills."
Atlassian had doubled in revenues and size since it started, Mr Cannon-Brookes said, and while it was approached regularly by interested investors, it was not looking at bringing anyone on board, or to an IPO. "We get approached by a lot of investors, and we talk to some of them. At the moment we're not looking to raise any money but that may change over time."
He hosed down the possibility that this money could come from Microsoft, which recently said it planned to acquire 20 web 2.0 startups over the next year.