Team collaboration and productivity software company Atlassian (TEAM 0.11%) announced two meaningful updates recently. Though these updates may be small enough announcements to slip under some investors' radar, they're notable enough to matter over the long haul.
First, there's Atlassian's just-announced acquisition of AgileCraft -- a move that will help solidify Atlassian's value proposition to organizations when it comes to big-picture planning and strategy. Then there's Atlassian's decision to start charging teams on its Trello platform with more than 10 boards in order to help support the product's ongoing growth.
Here's what investors should know.
Check out the latest earnings call transcript for Atlassian.
Image source: Trello.
Acquiring AgileCraft
On Monday, Atlassian announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire AgileCraft, a provider of enterprise agile planning software.
Atlassian explained this business in its press release:
AgileCraft helps enterprise organizations build and manage a "master plan" of their most strategic projects and workstreams. Business leaders use AgileCraft to map strategic projects to the distributed work required to deliver them, providing better visibility into bottlenecks, risks and dependencies, and more accuracy around capacity planning and measuring return on investment.
Though Atlassian already plays a role in helping businesses in agile transformation, AgileCraft extends Atlassian's impact beyond its primary emphasis on teams to higher-level planning, empowering executives with a construct that connects the work of teams to larger business objectives and strategies of the whole organization.
The $166 million acquisition comprises $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted Atlassian stock. The deal is expected to close in April.
New features and a growth lever for Trello
Along with an announcement on Tuesday that more than 1 million active teams are now using Atlassian's visual project planning tool Trello, Atlassian said free teams in Trello would now only get access to 10 boards. But Trello is making the transition as painless as possible by allowing existing free teams with more than 10 boards to keep those boards but requiring them to upgrade to Business Class to add more. In addition, current free teams can add up to 10 more boards up until May 1, 2019, without upgrading. Finally, Trello noted that this change only applies to teams -- not to users. Individual users can still have unlimited boards, lists, and cards.
"We're making this change to accelerate our ability to bring world class business features to market," said Trello product lead Michael Pryor in a blog post on Tuesday, "and Trello Business Class and Enterprise will get more useful and powerful to address our customers' pain points in the workplace."
Putting action behind this move, the company is upping its investment in the platform already, announcing new features for the Enterprise-level Trello teams (those with more than 100 people) on Tuesday. New features focus on making it easier for Trello Enterprise-level teams to share content securely, helping companies better "control how their users display and share information in Trello," said Pryor.
