Atlassian Acquires Cenqua

Atlassian announced today that they have acquired Cenqua, adding Cenqua's Clover, Crucible, and FishEye products to Atlassian's product line.

Plug-ins already existed to allow JIRA to work with the code viewing of FishEye, and to allow Bamboo to work with the code analysis capabilities of Clover, but merging the two companies will provide more seamless integration of Cenqua's products with the issue tracking, wiki, and integration tools of Atlassian.

As the press release points out, Atlassian and Cenqua already shared many of the same clients. The products will remain separate, with sales already moved to the Atlassian site, and documentation and forums to be migrated at a later date. Cenqua staff will be merged with the Atlassian organization, with development teams remaining on their products (and with an injection of fresh Atlassian talent as well). Cenqua CEO Peter Moore will head up the development teams for the former Cenqua products.

I had the opportunity to ask Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes a few questions about the merger today:

How do you feel this new Atlassian product line-up can benefit companies?

 

Mike: The biggest benefit for companies is in the integration and greater support resources. Cenqua's products are each well established as industry leaders and they have over 2,000 customers around the world - those same customers now get access to our global sales and support network (across our offices in Sydney, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur).

 

Can you give us an idea of what your vision is for this new and improved stable of products? Where do you see the product suite a year from now?

Mike: I know the Cenqua guys have a long list of features they want to add to their applications. By taking the sales and support load off their hands, we'll let them get back to what they do best - building kick ass apps. Beyond that, we're going to be spending a lot of time to get tighter integration between the applications. For example, right now a lot of companies use JIRA and FishEye to connect their issues to their source code but they're not as easy to connect as they could be! That will all change.

Mike: All our applications focus on enabling collaboration and communication between developers, not just tracking tasks or displaying source code. The addition of FishEye allows much greater insight into the trends within your source base and Crucible allows teams to perform code reviews in a simple, efficient manner. This is one of the worst performed practices in software teams today but incredibly valuable. Combining this ability to do code reviews into JIRA's workflow is another example of how the merged product line can evolve.