ReadWriteWeb

As our thoughts turn towards non-work tasks for the holidays, I came across what I think is perhaps the best explication of a corporate values statement from Atlassian here. Ironically, it is NSFW, somewhat. I liked its playfulness but with a core of solid sensibility too.

One year after acquiring Bitbucket, Atlassian is taking aim at GitHub. The company announced Git support with free, unlimited private Git repositories today. Git support is new to the Bitbucket service, which started around Mercurial repositories.

In addition to Git support, the company also announced a new importer for GitHub as well as importers for other hosted code collaboration services like Google Code, CodePlex and SourceForge.

Atlassian, the company behind the bug tracker JIRA and the wiki Confluence, announced that its newest product, Bonfire, is leaving beta.

Bonfire is a plugin for JIRA and a browser plugin for testing Web applications. You can use it to file bug reports and take screenshots without leaving the page you are testing. It's specifically designed with agile methodologies in mind.

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."

In a post this morning, we looked at Atlassian, the platform provider that provides tools and services that people use to manage development and create tools they can use for workflow issues and other matters.

Atlassian is a company that is a darling among developers. Yet the company is making a big effort to appeal to end users.

I asked the team at Atlassian yesterday about their macrovision of the market and how they view the developer world. I found their answer revealing.

What they said made me think about the way companies have to build for developers and end users. It's increasingly almost a task that has to be one and the same.

Working in an indie town like Portland, I hear geeks drop "GitHub" in their lingo like they did about apps back in the day. Code repositories are hot. They represent how collaboration is moving deeper into development cycles and permitting universal ways to fork code.

GitHub is so hot that the company recruited Eston Bond, a product designer from Facebook. It's of note that Eston is the second Facebook star to take work in the more obscure world of enterprise and developer technology companies. Facebook's Monica Keller recently joined Socialcast, a startup with some well regarded activity stream technology.

But there's another code repository out there that also gets points in the geek circles. It's called Bitbucket and they were just acquired by Atlassian, the company that wants to be the Adobe of the developer world. Adobe has served as the designer's tool box. Atlassian seeks to be the go to source for product development tools.

Android has seen astounding growth in both the consumer and enterprise markets, but the iPhone and BlackBerry have dominated enterprise-specific app development. That may be starting to change. Today Box.net released its cloud storage app for Android, and other enterprise-focused apps have been released recently as well. Given the enterprise interest in the iPad and the fact that several Android tablets are supposedly just around the corner, we could start seeing more enterprise Android development. Here are a few apps that are available now.

In preparation for what looks like an IPO, Jive Software announced yesterday it had raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It's a funding story of relative significance that documents one company's rise to prominence and a venture capital firm's growing commitment to the social enterprise and cloud computing space.

The Jive investment is the second major funding that we have seen in the past several days. Last week, Atlassian raised $60 million from Accel Partners.

That adds up to nearly $100 million in funding for the social enterprise space in just the past week.

Atlassian has raised $60 million from Accel Partners, the venture capital company that has funded such companies as Facebook, Dropbox and Etsy.

The funding is one of the most sizable investments we have seen by any measure in the social enterprise community.

It's validating that a company focused on social product development tools can receive such a large amount of funding, and it shows the demand in the enterprise for tools that include a collaborative, social component.