DEVOPSdigest

Appfire announced the acquisition of Spartez Software.

The acquisition includes the Whiteboards collaboration toolset, built to enable in-context visual communication for increasingly distributed teams. Spartez’s product portfolio also includes apps for IT Service Management, Agile, DevOps, and more.

Based in Gdańsk, Poland, Spartez was founded in 2007 and is an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner with nearly 9,000 installations worldwide. As part of the acquisition, Spartez’s full 35-person team will join Appfire with all four founders continuing their involvement in various roles. The Spartez team brings a wealth of knowledge building and scaling cloud-based Atlassian apps and will complement Appfire’s recruitment and scaling efforts globally.

“We’ve known the Appfire founders since 2008 and have seen quite a few of their successful acquisitions, with the founders and employees of acquired companies thriving and their products being further developed to satisfy customer needs,” said Wojciech Seliga, Co-founder and CEO, Spartez. “Joining Appfire allows us to focus on things that we are passionate about. We can now more easily reach a bigger customer base, extend our products with other complementary Appfire solutions, and look for even bigger growth opportunities. This is a dream group to work with for product people like us.”

Whiteboards provides a collaborative workspace for running remote creative brainstorming sessions, planning and retros, project management, stakeholder updates, and more — within the collaboration tools that globally distributed teams already use. The Whiteboards product set includes apps for Jira and Confluence and a GitHub integration, and Appfire is already exploring more integration opportunities within the Microsoft ecosystem and others.

“Software within today's enterprise has grown increasingly complex, and companies are making big bets on digital transformation,” said Randall Ward, Co-founder and CEO, Appfire. “Working with the impressive team at Spartez, Appfire will reimagine work within the enterprise, making it easier for customers embracing digital to innovate quickly and confidently.”

Whiteboards is a vital tool for these hybrid work environment times, added Ward. The ability to convey complex ideas in a visual medium that can be shared by employees wherever they are working today is a preview of how everyone will work going forward.

Another of its top-rated apps, Agile Poker, facilitates accurate and convenient backlog estimations for teams. Inspired by the most popular estimation methods, it derives the best Scrum estimating practices from each of them.

Also part of the acquired product line is Spartez Software’s TFS4JIRA. It offers an Azure DevOps (previously known as Team Foundation Server, or TFS) integration and migration app for Jira to connect the two powerful solutions and link relevant tasks and projects. Its developers are currently working on enhancements to create an even deeper cloud-native integration that will help teams using both Atlassian and Microsoft work better together.

Additionally, Spartez adds both live Chat and Canned Responses apps to Appfire’s IT Service Management offerings. In the digitally transformed world, companies can extend their capabilities with instant live chat to meet increasing demand for quick support available from any website. Adding the “canned responses” app lets IT teams preserve and reuse their best answers, enhancing the overall knowledge base of their service organization, improving the efficiency of support personnel, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Wardynski & Partners served as legal counsel for Appfire.