Atlassian is acquiring New York-based widely popular project management service Trello. The deal is valued at $425 million, with majority of it in cash ($360 million) while rest ($65 million) in Atlassian restricted shares, restricted share units and options to acquire Atlassian stock.
Trello is a task-management app that lets people set up boards containing lists of customizable cards and move cards from one list to another to reflect the progress of work. It allows various team members to contribute and track progress.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO announcing the news in a blog post wrote Trello will become an important part of the Atlassian portfolio, offering a fun new way for teams to organize the often messy range of information that feeds into great teamwork. Its card system is intuitive, easy to use, and instantly familiar, which has made it extremely popular with teams across marketing, legal, HR, sales and beyond.
Mike states Trello’s pioneering use of an intuitive visual system has been embraced by all kinds of teams to do everything from managing marketing campaigns to tracking action items from team meetings. He further wrote, over the past five years, it has grown to over 19 million registered users by solving an important problem: capturing and adding structure to fluid, fast-forming work. He also cites flexibility as one of Trello’s strengths and adds,
You control how the board looks and operates so you can mold it to how your team works, and track progress in stages that reflect your processes. You can take this flexibility a step further by integrating the tools you already use with Trello as Power-Ups that extend the functionality of the boards to meet your team’s unique needs.
This is Atlassian’s 18th acquisition, and akin to others, Trello will operate as a standalone service. They will be working with their product team to help them accelerate development efforts. Atlassian has always focused on deep investments in R&D, they will continue the same with Trello.
Founded in 2011, Trello began as an internal-project management tool which later spun out of software company Fog Creek Software in 2014. It is basically and has clientele including Google, Pixar, Adobe, United Nations.
Atlassian is the maker of work collaboration software JIRA. It has been building out from its core JIRA enterprise project tracking tools via acquisitions of Confluence and HipChat. While, Jira, the flagship product is about project management, Trello is about project organization which makes the two complementary.
JIRA tools excel at work that benefits from a well-defined, traceable, and repeatable process, whilst Confluence is great for teams creating and collaborating on documents and rich content.
Atlassian believes Trello perfectly fills a gap between the structured workflows of JIRA and the free-form collaboration of Confluence and will give teams the option to find the right Atlassian tool for the type of work they need to complete. The company says they, and Trello share the same goal of getting 100 million active users. This will certainly witness them focusing more on other verticals, which is comprehensible from mention of Trello’s popularity with business teams in PR, finance, business, marketing, in the blog.
