Atlassian Partnership - JIRA Clustering / MultiSite

We announced a partnership with one of my favorite company’s last week - Atlassian. Founded by a couple of twenty-something-year-old Australians they are taking the developer world by storm. The interesting thing is they are doing it one customer at a time and the products retail for about $5K each. With over 9,000 customers they are doing well, very well indeed.

One of the reasons I am so enamored with them is because they have just got this space nailed. They understand exactly how to position, market and sell into the software development business. JIRA and confluence are their two main products and they are selling like proverbial hot-cakes. The number of our own customers who told us that they either were on or wanted to move to Subversion with JIRA and Confluence is amazing.

Like WANdisco, Atlassian is not venture funded. They are a company built from the ground-up where necessity is the mother of invention. JIRA was built, for example, because the company needed a decent defect tracking system. In fact the story is the same across most of their product suite. Not being venture funded is often a critical success factor for an early stage software company. Taking venture money too early can create an artificial marketplace, whereas building products to put food on the table makes you do stuff better than anyone else. Too many early-stage venture backed company's do too many unnatural things like hiring a huge operational infrastructure for a handful of customers - anyway don't get me started on that topic or we could be here all day.

Back to blatantly marketing our new stuff... We produced 2 great new products: JIRA Clustering and JIRA MultiSite. With JIRA MultiSite we have transformed JIRA into a distributed server implementation thus eliminating WAN latency and, by default, creating a series of globally distributed failover nodes. JIRA clustering, as you could guess, is a clustered version of JIRA that facilitates massive scaling.

From a selfish standpoint, we are not only excited by the partnership but we have also proven that we can embed our secret sauce (DConE) into a database-centric application. Mathematically we always knew it could be done, but there's nothing like seeing it with your own eyes. Secondly, and how we missed this in the past I don't really know, we have what is possibly the best clustering product in the world. Due to our unique architecture we scale disk, memory and CPU. There is no single point of failure, as you may see with traditional clustering architectures that rely on some sort of cache shield, we have a shared-nothing architecture. We will be announcing 2 other clustering products in the very near future...