Downtime is a dirty word in the world of mobile apps and cloud services.
That’s why three-year-old startup StatusPage has signed up a few thousand companies that use its primary product, a service that keeps tabs on outages and keeps customers abreast of how long they may take to resolve. Companies create dedicated pages where information, including service hiccups, are reported. Their customers can subscribe to notifications, so that they are alerted when an incident occurs.
High-profile Internet companies that use the platform to communicate status about their cloud services include Citrix (CTXS), New Relic, Twilio (TWLO), and Venmo. StatusPage sends out more than eight million email and SMS notifications about cloud service statuses each month, according to the company’s website.
On Thursday, another long-time StatusPage customer, collaboration software company Atlassian (TEAM), bought the company for an undisclosed sum. The deal, effective immediately, represents Atlassian’s first acquisition since it went public in December, according to company spokesman Paul Loeffler. StatusPage’s Denver-based software development team will relocate to San Francisco, where they will join Atlassian’s software engineering team.
Atlassian’s motivation for buying StatusPage is to build a system that gives software developers and technology support teams just as much insight into cloud and mobile app service issues as customers receive, so that they can resolve incidents more quickly.
As part of that mission, the StatusPage technology will be built into Atlassian’s products including its flagship JIRA project management system, which many corporate software developers use to build applications. (Atlassian’s messaging app HipChat already supports StatusPage.) Atlassian has roughly 57,000 customers, but it doesn’t disclose which products they use. You can also expect Atlassian to connect the StatusPage platform with other widely used cloud services that could benefit from better insight into service levels, according to Loeffler.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s daily technology newsletter.
The existing StatusPage service will live on as a standalone product, he said. For the next three months, Atlassian will offer a 50% discount off the first three months of new subscriptions to the service (up to the first 1,000 signups).
StatusPage was founded in 2013 by three software developers—brothers Steve and Scott Klein, and Danny Olinsky—who were trying to solve a problem that bothered them personally. During the startup’s existence, the number of incidents reported by each of its customers has tripled. According to the company, StatusPage has been profitable since month three; it was primarily bootstrapped by the founders along with an unspecified round of seed funding.
“Our data confirm that the number of affected customers will only continue to grow as companies move away from building software an infrastructure in-house, choosing instead to invest in best-of-breed hosted services,” the co-founders wrote in a StatusPage blog disclosing the acquisition. “Any one outage has the possibility to domino through a chain of thousands of affected services and millions of end users.”