Going in to 2020 Appfire was already a dominant force in the marketplace with their Bob Swift acquisition in 2014 and, to a lesser extent, Wittified (2015) brands leading the way.
In early 2020 Appfire secured $49 million in funding, assisting them in acquiring four major app vendors: Botron, Innovalog, Beecom, & Navarambh Software’s AIO apps.
Thanks to these acquisitions, Appfire apps now make up a remarkable 9% of all marketplace instances.
Botron
The first move Appfire made in 2020 was their takeover of Botron. Appfire claimed that the move “expands Appfire’s “administration at scale” line-up to create a more complete suite of products for Jira power administrators”. This is demonstrated in the data as the Botron takeover meant Appfire doubled its Administration instances and now accounts for 36% of the Marketplace total.
Beecom
Following the takeover of Botron and their suite of apps, Appfire turned their attention to Beecom and its JSU Automation Suite. Appfire saw natural synergies between themselves and Beecom, claiming that they “have a shared passion for helping the flow of work within teams” and that “with such a long and impactful history of helping teams customize and scale their Jira instances, Beecom Products is a natural fit to join the Appfire portfolio of brands”.
Appfire’s takeover of Beecom meant that it joined the two horse race of Scripting/Automation, with Appfire stating that they “will provide resources into Beecom’s key product JSU Automation Suite for Jira Workflows, ensuring the Cloud and Data Center growth markets are served and supported at all times”.
Innovalog
Appfire have moved into another two horse race in the Workflows category with their acquisition of Innovalog and their very popular JMWE app. Appfire and Innovalog believe that the takeover will aid Innovalog in this competitive market through “increased investment in product development and customer support” with further benefits from scale in terms of “additional marketing, finance, and operations”.
Navarambh (AIO)
Appfire’s takeover of Navarambh’s AIO series of apps, while making Harsh Agarwal (founder of Navarmbh) Chief Product Architect at Bob Swift, demonstrates Appfire’s desire to increase their knowledge and influence in business intelligence. Through this acquisition Appfire has close to doubled its instances in reporting apps while also entering Integration and Time Management.
We have some key tips for helping you decide on which of the almost thousands of apps from the Atlassian Marketplace you might use.
Read more here: Six steps to select and implement Atlassian 3rd party apps.
*Following the release of this blog post we re-categorized JMWE as a Scripting/Automation app. We welcome any feedback regarding our app categorizations–please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us with any questions or queries around our app categorization process.