Sydney-based enterprise software supplier Atlassian Corporation has purchased incident management platform provider OpsGenie for $295 (£229) million, adding IT outage response capabilities to its portfolio.
Atlassian, founded in Australia in 2002, provides and develops products that are used by software developers, project and content managers.
The company is best known for Jira, an issue-tracking software written in Java that was originally used just by developers for bug and issue tracking, but which has been adapted for project management activities.
Boston-headquartered OpsGenie currently supplies incident management services for 3,000 customers including The Washington Post and Air Canada, bringing some significant new brands to Atlassian’s customer base.
In a blog on the announcement, Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar said: “OpsGenie helps notify all the right people through a sophisticated combination of scheduling, escalation paths, and notifications that takes things like time zones and holidays into account.”
The purchase of OpsGenie is seen as a competitive response in an effort to push into a market that is currently led by ServiceNow Inc, which provides an array of enterprise cloud computing solutions, in particular service management and mapping.
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Atlassian is meanwhile also launching a free beta of its new offering Jira Ops, which will provide enterprises with a unified incident command centre for IT teams.
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Jira Ops is designed to work together with OpsGenie, which acts as the canary in the mine. Once an IT team is alerted to an issue, service downtime manger Jira Ops walks them through the necessary steps, e.g. setting up the status page to keep customers informed of the developing issue.
It will also activate a customer service system in Jira Service Desk, this is to help small or medium business deal with the torrent of calls and emails that follow service downtime.
Farquhar notes that: “Jira Ops guides your team through the response workflow and automates common steps like creating a new Slack room for each incident.”
In July Atlassian also acquired a small stake in Slack Technologies which provides an enterprise messaging and video service, after selling off its own corporate chat software Stride and Hipchat Cloud to Slack for an undisclosed sum.
See Also: Software collaboration tool Trello acquired by Atlassian
While Atlassina’s stake in Slack is nominal it seems to be more of an indication of a strategic partnership moving forward as Atlassian abandons its own plans for corporate messaging applications, and Jira Ops comes with Slack integration.
