On July 30th, Atlassian announced that it had acquired Mindville, creators of the incredibly popular app Insight – Asset Management. This is a fascinating, but not unexpected development. Coupled with their other recent acquisitions of Halp, OpsGenie, and Automation for Jira, this purchase highlights Atlassian’s desire to focus on improving Jira Service Desk and its overall ITSM offering. It may yet prompt Gartner to acknowledge what we have known for a long time – that JSD is the best value for money service desk solution on the market.
Here is what Atlassian’s Noah Wasmer had to say about the acquisition:
Mindville will bolster Atlassian’s ITSM capabilities. By combining rich contextual information from disparate development tools with infrastructure-related information from Mindville, IT teams can now leverage Jira Service Desk to better anticipate the impact of changes to critical business services and respond to the unexpected faster. Mindville gives organizations a place to store and share information about all their assets and infrastructure across their whole business, even areas outside of IT such as HR, sales, and facilities.
What is Insight?
Well, as the name suggests, it is an app to ‘manage’ your ‘assets’. It allows you to create “objects” within Jira for any piece of information relevant to you, be it other applications, servers, licenses, companies, or even people. Insight data can be linked to Jira tickets to provide a quick, at-a-glance index of the people, companies, and other information related to the ticket, making it much easier to contextualize the problem and understand its nuances.
A natural outgrowth of collecting and categorizing all this data in Insight is that it provides a way to comprehensively explore relationships between companies, individuals within companies, groups of licenses, etc, and to break-down that information in many different ways. Insight objects can also be pulled into other reporting apps such as Eazy BI.
Below are some images from Mindville‘s documentation illustrating these connections and relationships tracked by Insight and what example Insight objects and schemas look like.
Asset Management
Insight is a highly regarded app, with a 5-star Marketplace rating and well over 6,000 active instances. With this purchase, Atlassian have taken direct control of a huge percentage of the Asset Management category of apps, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to contextualize the Asset Management space and discuss who the remaining players are.
As you can see from the chart above, there are only a handful of other vendors making Asset Management apps, with only Snapbytes‘ Assets and Inventory Plugin for Jira breaking the 500-instance threshold that we usually use to designate major players in a category. That being said, total instances do not always tell the full story, as oftentimes new apps with strong capabilities and high rates of growth simply haven’t had time to reach the 500-instance level, but should not be ignored.
In the Asset Management category, one of those apps is STAGIL‘s STAGIL Assets – Advanced Links. As the chart below shows, STAGIL ranks only second to Mindville (the undisputed market leader) in both yearly and total rates of growth. While still a relatively small producer, they are definitely one to keep an eye on as their popularity grows.
As you can clearly see, Mindville was the absolutely dominant figure in Asset Management, and so it is no surprise that Atlassian, who wants the most bang for their buck, chose to acquire the already well-known and well-received apps that Mindville have created. But as you can also see from the ROG chart above, almost every app in the space is experiencing some kind of growth, indicating that there is a real interest in this category of apps, and it may well be wrong to assume that just because Atlassian have stepped in, the other offerings in the category will become irrelevant.
We will be doing a deeper category analysis of Asset Management apps to discuss the relevant apps and their benefits and drawbacks in more detail in the near future, and it is sure to be interesting. Mindville‘s incorporation into Atlassian and the likelihood that its apps’ functionalities will eventually be folded into the core Atlassian products will drive competition and innovation amongst the remaining competitors in the space.
We are excited about this acquisition by Atlassian and the knock-on effects it will have on the ITSM world and the Atlassian Marketplace in general, and we will have more to say about it and Asset Management soon, so be sure to stay tuned!
