This morning I work up to the exciting news that the team at StatusPage.io are joining the Atlassian family.
Most of the world will be ignorant of StatusPage.io – but this is exactly how it should be. StatusPage.io is an online service status dashboard. It’s externally hosted, which means that it shouldn’t be affected if you have an outage that affects your infrastructure. This means that you can communicate and connect with your customers – even when something is going wrong.
We’ve been using StatusPage at Real World for about 2 years. It’s transformed the way we handle service information and has made it easy to communicate and disseminate information – even when something is going wrong.
I’m a massive advocate of StatusPage internally, and also to our customers. We work with a number of ISPs who buy services from us, and upstream providers who often still lack this relatively basic, but essential piece of communications infrastructure. I’m always raving about how StatusPage makes it easy
So what’s the big deal?
The challenge for every startup is how they engage with their target market. They need to acquire customers, get access to infrastructure and be able to integrate their technology with other systems and platforms to deliver a customer experience that works. StatusPage.io has grown tremendously over the last few years; from a niche service tool to something that i now quite mainstream.
Merging with Atlassian gives them access to a wider customer base, infrastructure and scale teams and should help their platform grow. It mobilises sales and marketing teams to help them expand.
But what could go wrong?
About 3 years ago, another of my favourite tools, HipChat was acquired by Atlassian. They had a massive cult following as an amazing enterprise collaboration tool. We love it and it has transformed the way our business communicate. But Hipchat’s development has languished. They haven’t innovated at the same rate as their competition. They’ve also had a litany of infrastructure and performance issues.
So what happened? Well, from the outside it looks like HipChat grew exponentially. They started to try to do more. They grew and they lost their core focus – innovative enterprise collaboration and integration. Other tools like Slack have come into the market, and have begun to steal market share. Hipchat’s competitors have managed the conversation landscape.
Will the same happen with StatusPage? I hope not. Time will tell!
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