DEVOPSdigest

Atlassian Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Trello, a collaboration service that has amassed more than 19 million registered users in just five years.

Trello provides a visual system that solves the challenge of capturing and adding structure to fluid, fast-forming work for teams. The service has been rapidly adopted in more than 100 countries around the world by a wide range of teams, from disaster relief agencies in the UK to a cafe in Brazil.

Atlassian's suite of services supports all types of teamwork, from ad-hoc information sharing and planning to highly structured collaborative workflows like new hire on-boarding and internal help desks. Trello will be a key product in the Atlassian portfolio, providing a new way for teams to organize and prioritize the often complex range of information and idea sharing that feeds into great teamwork.

"Atlassian knows more about how teams work than any company on the planet, which is why our collaboration suite powers teams of all shapes and sizes, from bleeding-edge startups to the Fortune 50," said Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's co-Founder and co-CEO. "There is no silver bullet for teamwork. Teams have diverse ways of working and require a broad set of tools that adapt to their specific needs. Trello has built an incredibly sticky and useful product for organizing nearly any type of information simply and quickly. The addition of Trello will be a great complement to our existing portfolio of team collaboration software as we look to reach the 1 billion knowledge workers globally."

Trello is one of the fastest growing cloud collaboration services, nearly doubling its registered users to 19 million over the past year. Its simple versatility does for the new era of team productivity what Microsoft Excel did for the previous era of individual productivity. Similar to how Excel’s powerful simplicity was applied to everything from shopping lists to Fortune 100 financial models, Trello is reshaping how a wide variety of information is organized and shared between teams from the United Nations and Red Cross to Google, Fender Music, John Deere and National Geographic.

Through virtual 'sticky notes' and digital whiteboards for organization and prioritization of work, Trello's easy-to-use software has proven especially popular with business teams, including Finance, HR, Legal, Marketing and Sales. More than 50 percent of Trello's users work in non-technical functions, and the versatility of Trello extends well beyond office walls, providing a tool for personal as well as professional projects.

“We share Atlassian's mission of unleashing the power of all teams. As part of Atlassian, we will accelerate our efforts and continue to champion teams everywhere," said Michael Pryor, Trello's CEO. “Atlassian’s deep investments in research and development will help augment Trello's product offering. And the broader team collaboration portfolio Trello will integrate with will let us help customers in new and exciting ways.”

In addition to launching a new version of its existing Trello integration for HipChat, Atlassian will be launching Trello integrations for its other leading collaboration products, including JIRA Software, Confluence and Bitbucket. The integrations will be available in the Atlassian Marketplace.

Details Regarding the Transaction

The acquisition is valued at approximately $425 million, which is comprised of approximately $360 million in cash and the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares, restricted share units and options to acquire Atlassian shares, all subject to continued vesting provisions.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal 2017 ending March 31, 2017, subject to certain closing conditions and regulatory clearance.

For fiscal 2017, the acquisition is expected to be dilutive to IFRS earnings per share and to non-IFRS earnings per share. For fiscal 2018, the acquisition is expected to be dilutive to IFRS earnings per share and neutral to slightly accretive to non-IFRS earnings per share. These estimates reflect a reduction relating to fair value adjustments to acquired deferred revenue.

Trello is expected to remain as a standalone service after the transaction is closed.