For more than a decade now, Sydney, Australia based company Atlassian has been offering tools that are widely used by software developers and project managers. The company offers products such as issue tracking application Jira, hosted code collaboration solution Bitbucket, and Git repository management platform Stash among others, which have together helped the company get to more than $150 million in annual revenues. Over the years, third party developers have built add-ons to Atlassian’s on-premise offerings to help further meet developer needs; these have been offered via the company’s online marketplace over the past year or so. Now, as development moves more and more into the cloud, Atlassian has continued to make its own transition as well, and last week the company announced it was opening up its marketplace to third party add-ons for its cloud products as well.

Issue tracking and version control have seen a lot of advancements over the past decade, partly driven by Atlassian and competitor Github, each of which is currently valued at more than a billion dollars. As competition between the two players continues to heat up, the key aspect here will likely be which company gains greater mindshare and usage amongst developers. In this context, Atlassian’s recent launch of Git Essentials (a product suite that combines Jira, Stash and other tools into a single integrated offering for enterprises) as well as last week’s marketplace-related announcement will help the company further engage its developer community. Github on the other hand has taken a slightly different approach; instead of building an affiliate marketplace program, it offers other avenues such as job postings to bring developers to its site. With both Github and Atlassian continuing to take such steps towards developing their ecosystem within this humongous software development market, the great news is that likely there will be three winners here: Atlassian, Github and finally the software developer!