In July, product development software company Atlassian said that it would be putting its recently raised $60 million investment towards M&A in the enterprise space. It looks like the company is moving fast—Atlassian has just acquired Bitbucket.org, a hosted service for code collaboration. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Bitbucket, which hosts over 60,000 accounts, is the premier hosted code collaboration provider for the Mercurial distributed version control system and provides a service for developers wanting to share and collaborate on projects. Bitbucket, which is similar to GitHub or Google Code, hosts code for Adium, MailChimp, Opera and other great opensource projects.
Distributed version control systems decentralises the software repository, allowing each user to have a full copy of the source code repository on their local machine. It allows users to work without being tethered to a network.
BitBucket will be incorporated into Atlassian’s family of development products. Atlassian’s software development and collaboration tools to help teams conceive, plan, build and launch products. Products include JIRA (issue tracker) and Confluence (content collaboration). The company’s offerings are used by 20,000 customers around the world, including Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe.
As part of the integration, Atlassian is going to make Bitbucket completely free, offering free hosting for 5-devs, with unlimited private repositories. And as a launch promotion, Atlassian is offering a free year for a 10-user account.
Atlassian says that the acquisition helps the company helps fill a gap in product offerings and makes Atlassian a more comprehensive platform to developers. So developers now have a place to dump and host their code, and a place to track their projects issues and bigs within Atlassian. As Atlassian’s Jay Simons tells me, the company wants to do what Adobe does for designers, except for technical teams.