Appfire has made their biggest acquisition so far, buying the 46 app strong portfolio of Anova Apps taking their total number of apps to 154. The takeover gives Appfire another 20,000 instances and takes their total instance count to 155,000 (11% market share).
The impact of the Anova acquisition on Appfire can largely be seen in Scripting/Automation, Utilities, and Integration.
Figure 1
As Figure 1 shows, Anova’s strong portfolio of Scripting/Automation apps (in particular Power Scripts) has increased Appfire’s Scripting/Automation instances from 38,000 to 47,000.
As demonstrated by Figure 2, this now gives Appfire 53% market share in Scripting/Automation (up from 44% before the Anova acquisition). Appfire already held a greater share of the Scripting/Automation market than Adaptavist and is pulling further away.
Figure 2
Anova Portfolio
As Figure 3 demonstrates, this year Anova’s portfolio has not experienced the kind of growth that would be expected from apps of their quality. Appfire is acquiring a number of excellent apps and it is likely that their general app expertise and more specifically their cloud expertise will help these apps against experience the growth they deserve.
Furthermore, as Anova’s apps largely fall into categories in which Appfire is already strong (Scripting, Utilities, Integration), they should be able to benefit from existing expertise within these categories as well as experiencing synergies with other Appfire apps.
Figure 3
Marketplace Leaders
As we have noted, Appfire’s 155,000 instances gives them an 11% share of the Atlassian Marketplace.
Figure 4 demonstrates how they stack up against the other top vendors on the marketplace.
Figure 4
Appfire is by a long way the biggest player on the Atlassian Marketplace: it has 2.5x more paid instances than its closest competitor //SEIBERT/MEDIA and 3x more total instances. In terms of free instances, Appfire is second only to GitHub.
We Are Workflows™
Importantly, Appfire’s acquisition of Anova represents an investment in another vendor who’s main product is workflow enhancement (on top of Beecom and Innovalog who were acquired last year). In investing in a vendor specializing in workflows (Power Scripts and Power Utilities for Jira are Anova’s two largest paid apps), Appfire is highlighting the importance of workflows and the fact that when it comes to workflows, Atlassian is the market leader.
A lot of time, energy, and money is being put behind Atlassian workflows and that they are increasingly being noticed as the most flexible, cost effective options out there.
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