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Atlassian looks at StatusPage, reaches for wallet

Pays out for status/incident communications specialist

Atlassian has made its first buy since raising $462m in its December IPO, snapping up StatusPage.

StatusPage, which is barely three years old, is described as "the leader in status and incident communication." More particularly, it offers a hosted service for status pages covering incidents, scheduled maintenance and the like – all those things that you need to look at when your favorite X-as-a-service kind of just isn't.

So there's a fair chance you haven't really heard of StatusPage, but a very good chance you've pulled your hair out looking at one of its more public facing creations, even if you haven't used it internally.

Like virtually every infant software company these days, it offers its product as a subscription, from $29 a month for a "Hobby" account covering two team members, two public metrics and 250 subscribers – delays on your trainset? – to a 5,000-subscriber plus, upwards of 50 admins, enterprise service starting at $1,499 per month.

Neither company is saying anything about the price Atlassian is paying, or the revenues of StatusPage.

However StatusPage cofounder Scott Klein said it had been "profitable since month three." He added that the firm grew out of the Y Combinator program, and that other than a little angel funding, it had been self-funded.

Which might explain why it is happily switching from having its 13 staffers and two contractors being split between San Francisco and Colorado, to being entirely Bay Area-based, skyhigh rents and all.

Klein said the firm had "a few thousand customers." These include Netflix, Whole Foods, Citrix and, unsurprisingly, Atlassian, right down to much smaller operations. He said most of these customers typically had one status page each, but that the firm reached thousands of its clients, staffers and customers through the status update emails and text messages it sends out.

It might seem odd that Atlassian didn't just build its own status operation. Atlassian president Jay Simons said as well as having a solid product, StatusPage had an established brand name in the IT market.

There were obvious opportunities to integrate StatusPage and Atlassian's other products, he added, for example kicking off collaboration to address issues via HipChat, or raising tickets through JIRA Service Desk.

Both companies have eschewed the traditional software sales model of hordes of highly paid, occasionally highly-stressed sales people. Asked if Atlassian could ever contemplate acquiring a firm that pursued that kind of model, Simons said "never say never."

But, he continued, Atlassian would have to consider how it should explain to clients what could justify the million-dollar-plus price tag such a model necessitates. At the same time, he said, those mega price tags would massively restrict its potential market. ®

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