Atlassian Positioned as a Leader in New Gartner ALM Report

We’re very excited to announce that Atlassian is positioned as a leader in the Magic Quadrant in Gartner’s new 2012 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) report, and we’re making the report available to our customers.

Here’s a Teaser

Check out the actual Magic Quadrant image below.  If you are interested in reading the full report, download one here.

ALM Atlassian Style

ALM has traditionally been sold much like other enterprise software — as an expensive six-figure system with multiple components, expensive add-ons, and professional services. Depending on the vendor you choose, it includes components for release management, change management, requirements management, a workflow engine to tie it all together, and more. Because of the cost and complexity of most ALM systems, it typically requires companies to adopt the systems globally, and enforces fairly rigid processes on teams.

We’ve taken a different approach to the same problem, one that we call “concept to launch.” In our experience, and the experience we’ve seen with customers, every development team is different — they have different workflows, QA, code review, build and release schedules, agile processes, etc. For us, everything starts with Jira, our issue tracker and project management system. Jira is at the heart of helping teams communicate, develop plans, assign tasks, and track their progress. From there, customers can add-on other pieces of the puzzle — Confluence for developing project plans, documentation and free-form collaboration; GreenHopper for agile project management; Bamboo for continuous building and continuous deployment; Crucible for code review; Stash for source code management; and so forth.

We sell our products as components that can be brought in anytime at a fraction of the cost compared to the big ALM vendors. Because our products and business model have been so radically different from traditional ALM vendors, it has been hard to classify what we do as ALM. That’s why we’re incredibly proud of being included in the 2012 report from industry analyst, Gartner, in their Application Lifecycle Management report.

Highlights from the Report

• “ALM is evolving, with a focus on coordinating the planning and execution of software projects with an emphasis on work items, planning iterations and coordinating actions across teams.”
• “The more diverse your business and technology, the more diverse the tools you will need to support delivery. Evaluations should place a high value on tool-to-tool integration mechanisms, using XML and representational state transfer (REST) or broadly adopted proprietary mechanisms.”
• “Most organizations still don’t procure tools from an integrated ALM perspective. This is generally because a specific group needs a specific set of functionality, and there isn’t a concerted effort to get the entire IT organization onboard with a single, integrated product. However, we are seeing vendors get a foot in the door with one group, and then expand their presence.”

This is Just the Start

Atlassian has evolved immensely over the past several years.  In February, we shipped Jira Enterprise to show our commitment to scale with Enterprise customers.  More recently, we’ve introduced Stash, a brand new product for Git repository management, the brand new GreenHopper with RapidBoards for Scrum, the Atlassian Marketplace with1,000 add-ons and 60+ commercial add-ons and Confluence Mobile (beta).  With each of these innovations, there is a huge groundswell of momentum for Atlassian to drive an even more potent position in years to come. Continue reading how Atlassian supports the entire application development process.