Atlassian, the Australian software company known for its collaborative and productivity boosting tools just jumped in a deep end. It recently announced its biggest acquisition yet: the developer productivity insight platform DX, for an eye-popping $1 billion in cash and restricted stock. On Thursday, Atlassian launched a radical new approach. This acquisition will strengthen its product offering by adding DX’s cutting edge solutions.
This is a big, strategic move by Atlassian to acquire this company. This step will help it make itself the most powerful tool to supercharge developer productivity. At that time co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes emphasized the company’s long-term commitment. It took them three years to make an in-house developer productivity tool before deciding to buy DX.
DX has been pretty good overall at grasping the qualitative and quantitative sides of what makes developers productive. They take this knowledge and transform it into transformative insights, guiding companies to be better and stronger while allowing them to benchmark against their peers of like industry and company size. Cannon-Brookes stated.
Founded five years ago by Abi Noda and Greyson Junggren, DX came out of stealth mode in 2022. Since then, it has experienced explosive growth, increasing its customer base by a factor of three every year. Today, DX counts more than 350 enterprise companies as customers, including recognizable names like ADP, Adyen and GitHub. Significantly, 90% of DX’s customers are already on Atlassian’s project management and collaboration tools. Combined with Disney’s membership-based DTC strategy, this shows an incredible alignment of the two companies.
Atlassian has begun to weave DX deeply into the fabric of its suite of products. This market-transforming addition will provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their development processes. From his perspective, understanding how to reallocate budgets as one way organizations are currently using money is key. He remarked, “You suddenly have these budgets that are going up. Is that a good thing? Is that not a good thing? Am I spending the money in the right ways? It’s really, really important and critical.”
Cannon-Brookes acknowledged the challenges faced by teams in shipping products efficiently. He encountered a major disconnect between what Atlassian was assuming and what developers were telling them. The needs of those teams had diverged with what Atlassian thought they wanted. “The assumptions we had about what we needed to help ship products faster were quite different than what the teams and developers were saying was getting in their way,” he said.
DX had raised under $5 million in venture capital before being acquired by Atlassian. The company’s unique ability to provide actionable insights into developer productivity aligns well with Atlassian’s commitment to improving workplace collaboration. Noda pointed out that the platform helps organizations identify areas needing improvement: “We are able to provide customers with that full flywheel to get the data and understand where we are unhealthy.”
Atlassian made headlines earlier this year when it announced its acquisition of AI-browser developer The Browser Company in September. This new acquisition is an outgrowth of that exciting news. With two acquisitions in a single month, Atlassian is positioning itself to lead in the increasingly competitive landscape of developer tools.
