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$25K … No, $100K… No, One Million Dollars to Charity by Atlassian

Two years ago I reported on Atlassian’s initiative to to raise funds for the benefit of Room to Read, an organization that builds schools, libraries in rural communities in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, Zambia …etc. Giving away $1,200 worth of software licences for $5 in a 5-day drive, they first planned to raise $25K, then increased the target to $100,000.

@Krishnan and I thought we should put our money where our mouth (pen? keyboard?) is, and both purchased a bunch of licences just to help push Atlassian towards the finish line.  The last minutes were dramatic:

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve » Zoli Erdos)

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Atlassian Security Breach and Warning. >>> Update: Apology and Disclosure

crikey Well, well, hours after telling you not to change passwords, now I am telling you to change it… but this time with good reason. Minutes ago I’ve received a email from Atlassian:

We are sending you this message because we experienced a security breach and suspect that your Atlassian customer account password details (only) may have been compromised.
It is very unlikely that an unauthorised user has had the opportunity to log in to your account so far and if they have, there is very little in the way of personal information which could have been accessed. However, to minimise any further risk to your Atlassian account being compromised, we strongly recommend that you change your Atlassian account password as soon as possible using the procedure below.
Be aware that this security issue only affects Atlassian customers who created an Atlassian account and purchased one of our products before June 2008. Since then, we have been using a more secure user management system based on Atlassian’s Crowd product. When you change your Atlassian account password using the procedure below, your Atlassian customer account details will be stored in our updated Crowd user management system, which will further minimise the chance of a security breach occurring in future.
Procedure for changing your Atlassian customer account password:
1) Login to http://my.atlassian.com
2) Click “My Profile” (3rd tab)
3) Click “Change Password” (in Contact Information section)
4) Update your password to a new value
Atlassian apologises for the inconvenience caused. However, this is an extremely rare event for us and since we take security issues seriously, we are taking every precaution possible to minimise the effects of this security breach.

Sincerely/Best regards,
Glenn Butcher
Director of IT

Not fun .. and I expect to we’ll hear more from Atlassian soon.  For now they are obviously figthing whatever it is – status update from Twitter:

Atlassian had a security breach. Apologies for the confusion. Our site is experiencing heavy loads. We are working on getting back up ASAP.

Personally I am safe – I don’t have active accounts, just decided to help push Atlassian’s charity towards the finish line by purchasing 10 licences, but if you do, time to change the passwords…

Update:  co-Founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes posted the details on the Atlassian blog.

Apparently an old, inactive database table that had already been migrated in July 2008 to the secure Crowd identity management system was not deleted mistakenly.  That indirectly answers the speculation about Atlassian passwords being stored in plain text format.  They are not – anymore, but they used to be, prior to July 2008.

Mike goes on to detail what was / was not compromised:  read for changes, they are resetting potentially compromised account passwords now.

He does not BS, owns up the mistake:

We made a big error. For this we are, of course, extremely sorry. The legacy customer database, with passwords stored in plain text, was a liability. Even though it wasn’t active, it should have been deleted. There’s no logical explanation for why it wasn’t, other than as we moved off one project, and on to the next one, we dropped the ball and screwed up.

They are still investigating what happened and Mike promises full disclosure, coming this week.

It’s been a bad day for Atlassian and some of their customers – but I’m glad they live up to their “Open Company, No Bullshit” slogan, and respond as expected.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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Atlassian $timulus Package Inching Towards Finish Line

Quick update on the Atlassian $timulus drive I previously reported about:  at 2pm on the last day of the promotion, they are at $93K – the $100K donation is realistic… but they may need a little push.

So I decided to put my money (well, a little) where my mouth is and have just purchased 10 5-person  licences of Confluence, the market leading enterprise wiki.  Not that I can use them all – so I will find a way to give them away in the future.

If you want to help them donate $100K to Room to Read, you can do your part easily … and just as a reminder, you’re buying a $1,200 licence for $5.   What a bargain to close out the week. 🙂

Update: With 3 hours to go Atlassian is just $2.5K short of reaching the target.  See coverage map at Mike’s blog.

Update #2: Ah, the drama of the last minutes:

$640 short of $100k… with 20 minutes to go, my maths says we’re just going to miss! 🙂
$590 short. Need $30/minute now… at least we did $35 last minute! 🙂
Just tipped $99,510… I wonder if we should just leave it up for 10 minutes extra, or does that seem dodgy?
Well… computer says it’s…over $100k!!
Woo! Woo!!! Dancin’ around the room. Atlassian Stimulus Package 400% of $25k goal. What a week. Simply staggering. THANK YOU EVERYBODY!
Atlassian Stimulus Package (preliminary) final total – $100,350 for Room To Read in 120 hours from 7284 _awesome_ startups and teams!!

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Atlassian $timulus Package Supports Charity. Two Days Left To Get Your (Almost) Free Confluence or Jira Licence.

This must be do-good-week.  Amongst all the talk about Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN, how the follow-on Oprah show pushed Twitter to never-seen height, little attention was paid to the small fact that this initiative generated over $1 Million donations to Malaria No More.  Ashton started with his $100,000 check and was soon joined by Demi Moore, Ted Turner, Oprah and I don’t even know who else .. I lost count at $1M.   Hype aside, this is a major contribution to a good cause.

This week we’re also seeing a for-profit company, Atlassian drive to raise $100,000K for the benefit of Room to Read, an organization that builds schools, libraries in rural communities in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, Zambia …etc.  Doing good is in Atlassian’s DNA, likely coming from the co-Founder, who is a major Kiva Supporter.  His company had set up the Atlassian Foundation which donates basically 1% of everything:

  • 1% of company and employee time to Foundation projects
  • 1% of company equity to the Foundation
  • 1% of our products to non-profit groups

But wait!  This isn’t a post about charity only.  There’s a Deal in it for you!

The Atlassian $timulus package is a 5-day drive, during which you can get either Confluence, the excellent Enterprise Wiki, or Jira, the issue tracker – Atlassian’s first product that’s still an IT favourite  for $5 for 5 users.

Now I hear you ask: is that $5 per person per month?  That would by typical (actually low) pricing for most SaaS offerings.   NO!  It is:

  • A five-user licence (ie. $1 per person)
  • For a full year
  • For the full-featured entrerprise strenght products

My only regret is that it does not involve the hosted versions of these products.   But if it’s the downloadable, installable version, what’s this per year licence?  Most enterprise software is sold with a perpetual licence: you can use it forever.  But then the vendor pushes the (almost) mandatory maintenance fees to the tune of 20-25%, and major new releases every 4-5 years.

Atlassian does not play such games, their philosophy is transparency and simplicity. Software should be easy to learn, easy to use and easy to buy.  Hence the annual licence whish involves support. (Update: I misunderstood this part: the licence is a perpetual one, the additioal annual fees are for maintenance / support, and the are optional.)  And for comparison, the minimum annual licence for both Confluence and Jira is $1,200.

So Atlassian is essentially giving away $1,200 licences for free – but it’s actually a lot more.  This isn’t just your introductory price.  Customers who purchase during the $timulus week (only two days left) are locked in to their $1 per user price for the lifetime of the product, and those fees will be donated as well.   That goes way beyond giving up revenue – they can’t possibly provide support for $1 a year, so Atlassian is reaching into their pockets big time for years to come.

The initiative appears to be more wildly popular than they expected. The initial goal was to raise $25,000 for Room to Read, and they exceeded that target on the first day – hence the new objective of $100,000K.

Early this morning they were at 66% of the increased target:

Now, before someone thinks I am doing a paid commercial here: I am not receiving any form of compensation or incentive from Atlassian.  I simply like what they are doing.  A lot.

But I’m not naive.  This isn’t just charity.  It’s damned good marketing – in more ways then one.  First, as you may suspect is Brand recognition.

The second is perhaps less obvious: Atlassian’s initial product, Jira took several years to take off – the second, Confluence had much faster growth.  Part of their secret sauce has always been relying on a very loyal, very satisfied customer base, mostly IT-types who buy additional products from their trusted vendor.

So yes, Atlassian is seeding their market with thousands of free customers this week.  Which is fine, I’ve said before: you don’t have to be purely altruistic to do good.

Update: The Atlassian $timulus Package is now listed in Consumerist’s Morning Deals, along with Blu-Ray Discs and Casio Cameras 🙂

(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)

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Are Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship Compatible?

  • “Odd thing for an office ’style’ company to go into – cartoons”

  • “Brilliant strategic move or jumping the shark? I can’t decide.”

  • “At least all their eggs arent in online software; office”

  • I understand doing these things because you get people creating content that you can then monetize…”

The reactions to TechCrunch announcing ToonDoo, a comic strip creator were rather mixed – just as I expected. Not so much because of tool itself, but because of it’s relationship to Zoho, the Granddaddy of the Office 2.0 market. Here’s the CEO’s explanation:

unproductivity 2.0

Joke apart, ToonDoo certainly isn’t part of the Zoho Suite, and to dispel some of the myth, it’s not about keeping eggs in different baskets, and there are no evil monetization plans either.

I’ve always been fascinated with what really drives entrepreneurs. As Advisor to Zoho I got to know some of the team, and have been planning to share some of my thoughts for a while. Zoho is just one, albeit the most fashionable brand of a larger company, Adventnet. Adventnet is not a “hot name” like Zoho – even their website looks boring. But their product list is over a hundred items long. “Boring”, reliable, solid cash-cows. smile_wink

They are not a startup by any means: they have been in business for ten years, organically growing to 600+ employees and millions of dollars in revenue (without outside investment). Yet working with them feels like working with a startup: in the US they have a team of about 20, the key feature in the office is a pool table, although they are hardly ever in, often working remotely.

The solid position, and being self-funded allows them to do a few things that don’t directly fit business their strategy – they just like “doing good”.

One of these non-business projects funded entirely by Adventnet is Jambav, a site offering games and educational tools for children, ranging from toddlers to preschoolers, as well as resources for kids with special needs, (Update: read Scoble for some background) and community, forum, blogs for parents. Everything at Jambav is free, and so is their latest creation, ToonDoo. The Jambav team realized that us, “grown-up kids” can also use it, so they ended up releasing it under a separate brand.

Education is another subject CEO Sridhar Vembu frequently thinks and writes about:

He has a personal interest in the subject, having “wasted” 4 years getting his PhD in Princeton: “I actually had to unlearn a lot, to be in business. And I didn’t particularly enjoy the PhD experience either. If I were to go through life again, I wouldn’t repeat that PhD, that’s for sure.

He puts his money where his mouth is: he launched “Adventnet University” in India, bringing in disadvantaged teenage kids and putting them through 2 years of education, with a strong engineering / software focus. Is this all altruism? Probably not. Adventnet is hiring a lot of engineers and some will likely come from their own training program. One does not have to be entirely altruistic to do philanthropy. For these kids, who otherwise would have no hope of ever going to college, “Adventnet University” is a life-changing event. See fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani’s thoughts here.

But I am trying to make a bigger point here, so let me move on to another company now – one that I have absolutely no business relationship with.

A good year or so ago Atlassian was not a widely talked-about name, although they were already the market leader in the Enterprise Wiki space, and prior to that had achieved phenomenal success with their first product, Jira. Without the luxury of spending VC money, they had their priorities straight: first get the products right, let them sell on their own strengths, then start spending on marketing and PR. After financial success came recognition: they keep on winning awards, the Founders became Entrepreneur of the Year and are now featured on the cover of Business Week.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder and CEO is an avid blogger who openly talks about “life at Atlassian”. It’s through his blog that I found out about their commitment to philanthropy. Every employee can spend 6 workdays a year on their favorite non-profit or charity. Is that a big deal? Well, considering an average of 220 workdays a year, it translates to 2.75% of their productivity. Salesforce.com is known to devote 1% of revenues to charity. I am not underestimating that 1%, but it’s spent with a stroke of a pen… whereas in Atlassian every employee is personally involved. (Compare that to my experience in a very Big, very Blue company, where management kept on publishing reports on employee contribution to United Way (the only choice) until the desired quotas were achieved… ) Update: I stand corrected, Salesforce.com employees can also donate 1% of their work-time.

On a personal side Mike issued a Kiva Challenge. Technically speaking, Kiva is not charity, handing out micro-loans to small businesses – but these are interest-free, high-risk (?) loans. One could say it’s a very “inefficient” process: the loan amounts can be as little as $25, and typically not more than a few hundred dollars. Managing it, and – like Mike does – soliciting other lenders, matching their contributions is time-consuming, but I’m sure as a true Entrepreneur, Mike actually enjoys it. Now, the money could just be given to a large charity, and disappear in the labyrinth of bureaucracy, but helping small businesses take off does more good in the long run. “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

I could cite more examples, but this story has to conclude at some point.smile_embaressed

I admit I am biased, I do like these companies, and probably write about them more often than others.

There are business reasons: they both are leaders in their market, not only have best-in-class products but also provide excellent, personal support and are very transparent about business, strengths, weaknesses, even bug reports. But other than the business criteria, they are also just a bunch of “likeable” people, and I think their non-business, charitable activities play an important role in that. I’d venture to say that everything else being equal, as a small business I’d probably prefer buying from such a “likeable” vs. one with a great product, but with aggressive sales, arrogant support, and generally “unpleasant” people.

What do you think? Is “doing good” a luxury, does it just serve personal satisfaction, or does it have a place in business, especially in startups / emerging businesses? On the other hand, if there is indirect business “payoff”, is it just an investment, or still a philanthropic act?

Update (4/8): Talk about the importance of buying from a “likeable” company, check out: I Canceled My Basecamp Account Today.