“The idea here is to make Git approachable for every enterprise team and the beauty is workflows and that comes from two main workflow types–branching and forking,” said Giancarlo Lionetti, group product manager for Atlassian’s developer products.

Forking allows an authorized contractor to access the code and get a copy to work on it, but won’t allow changes to flow back into the main project until they pass muster with admins, said Lionetti. Branching allows team members to take code off, work on it and then flow it back into the main repository.

Stash 2.4 also allows developers to build personal code repositories and, as needed, assign permissions to colleagues.

Stash competes with  Collabnet as well as Github Enterprise, a formidable task, given  the traction that Github has gotten among open-source oriented web developers. Stash claims some impressive customers including NASA, Nike, Intuit, eBay and Orbitz.

London-based Server Density, is a  Github shop, but CEO David Mytton  said via email that Atlassian is strong in the enterprise market, especially with its  JIRA bug tracking tool. That could give Atlassian a leg up vis-a-vis Github overall with enterprises. Mytton characterized Github’s issue tracking tool as “fairly basic.”

And for those web developers outside the firewall, Atlassian competes with Bitbucket.

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Based on what it’s seen from its users, the San Francisco startup considers collaboration a really big vertical, cofounder James Tamplin said in an interview.”Many people have tried to build collaborative text editors like Google Docs, but it’s really difficult. Users were using Firebase to synchronize their whole text block, but that’s not as efficient as Google Docs, which just syncs the changes,” he said. Figuring out how to just deal with the deltas and how to handle re-dos and un-dos when multiple people work on the same thing at the same time is a really hard problem.

“We actually replicated a full collaborative text editing library atop Firebase and are open sourcing it [under the MIT license],” he said.

As GigaOM has reported, developers use Firebase to easily create and debug web applications without having to worry about server infrastructure.

If several people are collaborating on a WordPress blog post, for instance, with a a Firepad plug-in, they would be able to work on the same document at the same time, with Firepad tracking edits and enabling re-dos as needed.

Atlassian is using Firepad in a plug-in for Stash, a tool for managing Git code repositories. That add-on lets different team members edit code together. and startup LiveMinutes is using it to build a way to pull content out of Evernote and work with that content collaboratively, Tamplin said.

What Firebase is doing with Firepad is similar to Etherpad, which Google bought in 2009. Firebase competes in a broader sense with companies like Pusher and Pubnub.

Being able to endow apps with collaboration is becoming table stakes for building the next wave of applications,  Tamplin said. “We want the next Twitter or Facebook to be built on Firebase,” he said.

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While Github is the repository and versioning system of choice in the open-source world, Bitbucket — which supports both Git and Mercurial repositories — is strong in private repositories and private coding teams, said Jay Simons, president of Atlassian. Bitbucket customers include Zillow, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Verizon, Orbitz and NASA, according to the company.

When GigaOM reported on a Github outage a few weeks ago, one commenter said that more developers will start looking for redundant repositories and that Bitbucket is a viable option. “It might be a good idea to mirror the central repo with multiple providers when it comes to [version control system] hosting,” commenter JohnB wrote. “It’s already becoming a best practice to do that with cloud hosting in general.”

Bitbucket user interface before (left) and after.

Atlassian also updated Stash, its 5-month-old on-premises Git-based code repository/version management offering, with support for pull requests. That means a developer using that piece of software at the time can be alerted of the update and sync up as needed. Stash targets companies that want to keep their code development inside the firewall.

While Github keeps a running count of active developers and repositories supported, Bitbucket is more interested in development teams and claims 20,000 of them use the service.  Bitbucket is free for teams of up to 5 developers who can use an unlimited number of repositories. There is a nominal $1 per user per month charge for each additional user. Github is free for open source developers but the company also offers price plans based on number of repositories used.

Other code repositories include Google Code and CodebaseHQ.

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Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips.

Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)

What tools like Jenkins do is replace chaos, said Ryan Campbell, software developer at Cloudbees. “Any time someone on the team changes something, Jenkins will check it out, test it and then email the developers if they’ve broken anything. Now [with] the App Engine integration, if the tests look good it will automatically deploy the code in GAE — probably in a test environment for your QA team to look at.”

According to the Google App Engine blog:

Jenkins will monitor your projects’ source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems – or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good. This process helps to prevent the deployment of broken code, and gives everyone a central record of what changes went into each deployment.

Developers can sign up at appengine.cloudbees.com using their GAE account and can continue using whatever source code service — GitHub, Cloudbees’ own Git and SVN servers as needed, according to the blog.

Jenkins competes with Hudson in open-source continuous integration. Other CI competitors include Atlassian’s Bamboo and JetBrains’ TeamCity.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Leszek Glasner

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Atlassian chairman Doug Burgum.

Doug Burgum, who once led Microsoft’s Business Solutions Group and was chairman of the board of SuccessFactors, knows a thing or two about business software. That’s one big reason Atlassian tapped him to chair its board of directors.

Atlassian, based in Sydney, Australia with offices in San Francisco, makes software development and project tracking tools that compete with offerings from Microsoft, IBM and others.

Burgum’s experience taking a company from fledgling to major power player will come in handy for Atlassian, according to co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. “Doug built his own company, another non-Silicon Valley company, into a big company. He has a huge amount of experience and he’s helped us navigate issues and has seen his companies grow to many thousands of people,” Cannon-Brookes told me in a recent interview.

Burgum nurtured Great Plains Software from a small startup in Fargo, N.Dak. to a major player in accounting and ERP software for small and medium businesses before selling it to Microsoft in 2000 for $1.1 billion. He then led Microsoft’s ERP and CRM effort. After leaving Microsoft, he became chairman of the SuccessFactors board in 2007; Five years later, SAP bought SuccessFactors for a whopping $4.3 billion.

Atlassian also named two other board members: Murray Demo, former CFO of Adobe Systems and Kirk Bowman, partner at Accel Partners and a former VMware executive.

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The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

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Jacob Morgan, co-founder of collaboration consultancy Chess Media Group, recently posted his answer to this question on his blog. His perspective: we’re still waiting for a breakout collaboration product, and it should look like “WordPress for the enterprise.” Of course, there is an enterprise version of WordPress, but assumedly that’s not what Morgan means. He explains how the collaboration solution he’d most like to see is instead like WordPress in key ways:

What we need is a “WordPress for the enterprise” and before its acquisition I thought Podio was the closest to moving down that road.  When you think of WordPress you think of a content management and delivery platform but it’s more than that.  Take a look at how many millions of sites all run on WordPress, each with a unique look and feel and each with it’s own set of features and plugins that can be customized and added to make every site unique and individual.  Currently we don’t have anything like this for the enterprise.  Sure, some vendors have their own app stores where you can buy and download application specific additions but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Atlassian is probably the closest vendor out there to building a complete enterprise ecosystem with apps but even those are focused on the single platform.

He calls this vision of DIY collaboration suites supported by an extremely flexible platform “the widgetized enterprise” and says there are several roadblocks keeping us from this version of the future. One, “we don’t have collaboration standards for all the vendors out there to get them to speak the same language,” and two the market lacks a true platform vendor. But Morgan has hopes that we’ll see something like what he’s after soon. “Eventually we will get to a more widgetized collaboration platform that allows us to take the bits and pieces we want from every vendor and combine them together to make something that works for us,” he concludes.

What do you make of Morgan’s vision of the future of collaboration tools – have you already found a platform that’s flexible and customizable enough to meet your business’s needs, or are does WordPress for the enterprise sound like the solution you’ve been searching for?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Phil Manker.

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The final session of the week-long conference opened with Daniel Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, now a “career analyst” investigating and examining the changing patterns of work around the world.

Pink has been the subject of much attention lately, with his assertions that “right-brainers will rule this century,” as well as high-profile appearances at TED and a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. These assertions offer some intriguing insights into “the future of work in a post-broadband world” — notably the patterns of work, business relationships, structures and skills that we’ll perhaps require in the future.

Pink’s latest book speaks of a “conceptual age” of work where “left-brained” reasoning will need to be augmented by what he describes as six critical “right-brain” qualities:

1. Design — The ability to conceive more than purely functional services or products, and develop emotionally engaging, joyful and attractive solutions.
2. Story — In a society abundant with data, the ability to weave a compelling narrative will become increasingly crucial.
3. Symphony — Being able to synthesize disparate, often disconnected, developments into something new, often straddling many industries, will be the basis of innovation.
4. Empathy — Looking beyond analytics to understand underlying motivations can provide unique and distinct insights.
   
5. Play — Wiring levity and play into cultures, experiences and solutions where appropriate.
6. Meaning — Moving past material abundance to “work on stuff that matters.”

Pink’s TED session focused less on these attributes and more on empirical analysis of how workers are usually incentivized, concluding that contemporary incentive systems actually destroy creativity and that autonomy, mastery and purpose are better notions of management than traditional compliance, citing Atlassian as a prime example of a company that incentivizes right-brain activities.

The six aptitudes discussed above may invite controversy and are there to be challenged, but I’m certain many of our readers are already exhibiting many of these qualities, though perhaps without an explicit awareness of doing so. The real value of Pink’s work is in providing labels and language that become the starting point for discussion and debate. For example, how do you get good at “symphony?”

In an interesting counterpoint to Pink’s assertions, Wired UK recently ran a piece, “Stand by for Google’s next market-changing move,” that explores the trends towards the left-brained in the advertising industry; where “data is valued more highly than relationships…and creative genius.”

Read more at TED, Daniel Pink’s site, Oprah and Cooltown Studios.

Are you practicing any of Daniel Pink’s right-brained qualities?

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Beginning today, the company is offering the “Atlassian Stimulus Package,” almost giving away its flagship products — JIRA & Confluence — for just $5 per year, including support. These starter editions are fully functional, but are limited to five users and so suited to freelancers and smaller businesses.

As the company’s Laura Khalil explained, the promotion’s goals are to sell 5,000 licenses and donate the proceeds to children’s education charity Room to Read. The promotion runs for five days only. At the end of the year, you’ll be able to renew for the same price, with that money also being donated to charity.

JIRA is very powerful bug-tracking software, while Confluence is an excellent wiki-based collaboration tool used by many businesses worldwide. However, the cost of these products may have put off many freelancers and small companies. By lowering barriers of entry for small groups and startups, Atlassian may well be enabling an entire generation of freelancers to quickly integrate powerful support and collaboration mechanisms into their businesses.

This “stimulus package” is an interesting marketing tactic. It should expand its user base and address customer needs simultaneously. It’s easy to picture this as a cynical maneuver, but it’s a shame more companies aren’t thinking creatively about how to navigate the recession. Imagine what a similar “stimulus package on” Microsoft Office or Adobe CS4 could do for small companies and startups!

What do you think of Atlassian’s offer?

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In describing the company and product’s history, Walker and Khalil indicated a corporate culture that was very much based around the notion of web working. While this isn’t completely unheard of for a large corporate, web working is a style that’s more closely associated with freelancers, startups and smaller organisations.

Khalil pointed me to a post on the company’s blog that discusses some of the cultural and technological adjustments the organisation has made as it needed to manage offices in Sydney and San Francisco:

• Internal communication is oriented around the Confluence wiki product: bringing together product management, HR, marketing, business metrics, template emails and PR.
• Task and project management, such as customer requests and bug reports, are tracked and managed using the company’s own JIRA product.
• Email is discouraged as a collaboration tool, being displaced by Confluence and JIRA, but still employed for 1-to-1 and “broadcast” communication.
• Lightweight tools such as Flickr and, notably, Delicious bring other collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities.

Interestingly, the company’s internal and external blog authors number around 160: an extraordinarily high figure for a 200-person company, with 80 percent of its staff publishing and sharing their work.

Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, I ran into Rodrigo Vaca, Zoho‘s director of marketing, responsible for leading efforts to promote the popular web-based office suite.

Like Atlassian, Zoho’s  solution to geographically distributed staff in many different timezones is to employ its own products and services as a component of the company’s culture. More so perhaps, with a thousand staff in offices from India and the U.S. to Japan and China, the web-based foundation of the company is critical. Vaca related how even the company’s COO works from home in order to minimize time wasted in physically commuting.

What both Atlassian and Zoho’s utilization of web working indicate is that it’s a working pattern that’s very much suited to large, mainstream, multinational organization – something we discussed a while back in Telecommuting Trends and our coverage of the emergence of Smart Work Centres.

Read more about Atlassian’s web worker culture and tools in An Insiders Look: Part 1 of 2 on how we (Atlassian) collaborate.

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