Enterprise software company Atlassian today announced beta availability of Atlassian Connect, a new distributed add-on technologythat supports third-party customizations and add-ons in its hosted suite of collaboration products known as Atlassian OnDemand. Atlassian Connect supports standard web protocols and APIs (HTTP, REST), giving developers new choices of programming language and deployment options for creating add-ons for Atlassian products. The Atlassian Marketplace, a platform for buying and selling 1,500 third party add-ons and plugins for Atlassian products, will begin supporting licensing and purchasing for add-ons in Atlassian OnDemand in June. Launched less than a year ago, the Atlassian Marketplace has quickly grown into a multimillion dollar business for Atlassian’s developer ecosystem. This next step in the Atlassian Marketplace evolution will be presented at the company’s upcoming developer conference,AtlasCamp, taking place in Amsterdam, May 21-23.
“We built the Atlassian Marketplace to remove barriers between our ecosystem of talented third-party add-on developers and the tens of thousands of customers looking to extend our products with add-ons. And itssuccess is exceeding our expectations,” said Rich Manalang, developer advocate for Atlassian Marketplace. “Atlassian Connect is a major step forward for OnDemand and for our ecosystem. It will benefit both the third-party developers who can now write in their preferred language, and our OnDemand customers who will gain access to a wealth of new extensions to their hosted applications.”
Atlassian Connect will allow developers to remotely host add-ons in isolated containers that can insert content securely into both hosted, and in the future, on-premise installations of JIRA, the industry-leading project management software; Confluence, best-in-class collaboration software; and Atlassian’s developer tools including Stash, a self-hosted Git repository management system. Atlassian’s OnDemand customers will be able to customize, integrate, and extend their applications beyond what is currently possible. The Atlassian Marketplace for OnDemand products opens new markets to third-party developers and new possibilities for customers.
Marketplace Business Model Proved Successful, Gaining Momentum
Small and large companies alike leverage the Atlassian Marketplace to sell plugins and integrate their services with JIRA and Confluence. Application performance manager New Relic, collaboration tool Flowdock, and mobile app monitoring service Crittercism are just a few of the hundreds of integrations available on the Marketplace. Other teams who havebuilt add-ons to deeply integrate additional features into JIRA, Confluence, and Stash, have now joined the Atlassian Marketplace to take their businesses to the next level. These companies include:
· RefinedWiki (Malmö, Sweden): Beautiful themes for branding Confluence for use as a company intranet or product documentation
· Ad hoc Workflows (Vancouver, Canada): Document management, approvals, and compliance workflows built into Confluence pages
· ALM Works (St. Petersburg, Russia): Enterprise-level issue organization, aggregation, and synchronization for JIRA
“A year ago, I struggled to find time to keep my open source plugins up to date,” said Bob Swift, an independent software developer. “These days, I have an established presence with 1000 customers purchasing my software through the Atlassian Marketplace. Over nine months, I’ve created three new add-os, delivered 102 new versions, and resolved more than 552 issues. My company can focus 100 percent on supporting customer needs while Atlassian Marketplace handles sales, billing, andlicensing. Simple and productive for all!”
“I’m consistently blown away by the size and vibrancy of our developer ecosystem,” said Nick Wade, group manager for the Atlassian Marketplace. “Our goal is to bring the benefits and efficiencies of the Marketplace to more developers and customers through technologies like our new add-on framework, and enable more developers to create their own businesses like Bob Swift. By expanding our platform to non-Java developers and allowing third parties to sell add-ons to OnDemand customers via the Marketplace, we’re setting a new bar in terms of power and flexibility for ecosystem developers in the enterprise software business.”
More details coming at AtlasCamp
Experienced Atlassian add-on developers can learn more about the new development framework at AtlasCamp 2013, the sixth edition of Atlassian’s annual event for developers. Part-conference, part-meetup, AtlasCamp will offer support and training for developers building add-ons for the Atlassian Marketplace, as well as provide detail on current and future development of Atlassian’s SDK and APIs. AtlasCamp will take place May 21-23 at the Renaissance Hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands. For developers unable to travel to Europe, AtlasCamp content will be made available after the event.
