Software companies seem to be popping up all over the place peddling team-oriented productivity applications. It's not surprising either. The status quo has been whiteboards, emails, and sticky notes that haven't scaled well to serve distributed teams working remotely. On a Fool Live episode, recorded on April 14, Fool contributors Brian Stoffel and Brian Feroldi discuss what gives Atlassian's (TEAM 2.80%) software tools an edge over the competition.
Brian Feroldi: Brian, there is a lot of competition in the work productivity space. Microsoft has been acquiring in there. We've seen companies like Asana come public and get access to capital. What gives Atlassian an edge in the long term?
Brian Stoffel: I think what gives Atlassian an edge are two things. One is that Jira, which is their way to collaboratively work on code, is so popular that developers, I've literally read them say, "You have to pull this out of my cold dead hands, I will not leave it." The company was bootstrapped with $10,000 of credit card debt [when it was first founded]. They had to make a product that was so good that it would sell itself without a sales force, and they did that. That's the first part.
Then the second part is just that they're building a large enough umbrella of good-enough tools that I think that they are becoming the de facto choice for people to use when they just want to have one vendor for all of their collaboration tools. That's why.
Brian Feroldi: There we go. They're adding customers left and right. That's a good metric, too, to look at.
