This morning we announced some incredible news: Appfire is the new home of Spartez Software! This 35-person team includes a ton of engineering rockstars and the company’s four founders, who will all remain actively involved at Appfire. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome them into the Appfire family — along with their portfolio of 10 apps that strengthen our solutions sets across several strategic categories.

Atlassian ecosystem OGs

Based in Gdańsk, Poland, Spartez was founded in 2007, and our founders have known each other since the very beginning, before there was even an Atlassian Marketplace. After 14 years in the ecosystem, growing their products to nearly 9,000 combined installs worldwide, they decided to join Appfire. Being one of the first vendors in the Atlassian Marketplace, the Spartez team brings a wealth of knowledge building and scaling cloud-based Atlassian apps and will complement Appfire’s recruitment and scaling efforts globally. 

“This is a dream group to work with for product people like us.”

Wojciech Seliga, co-founder & CEO, Spartez

“We’ve known the Appfire founders since 2008 and have seen quite a few of their successful acquisitions, with the founders and employees of acquired companies thriving and their products being further developed to satisfy customer needs,” said Wojciech Seliga, co-founder and CEO, Spartez. “Joining Appfire allows us to focus on things that we are passionate about. We can now more easily reach a bigger customer base, extend our products with other complementary Appfire solutions, and look for even bigger growth opportunities. This is a dream group to work with for product people like us.”

Many people may not realize that while Wojciech and team were building a successful apps business at Spartez Software, they were also contributing to Atlassian’s core product offerings through their sister company, Spartez R&D. Over the course of many years, Spartez R&D became a trusted and indispensable business partner to Atlassian, playing an important role in the evolution of Atlassian’s on-premise and cloud offerings. Last October, Atlassian acquired Spartez R&D, with the founding team remaining committed to growing their apps business and developing innovative products for teams using Atlassian and other tools.

Appfire’s global footprint has grown over the years, and as we continue to aggressively scale our team in all our geographies, we’ll look to the Spartez team to bolster our efforts in recruiting, training, and managing talented developer teams. They’ve built some amazing things over the years, and we look forward to working with them and learning from them.

The future of visual collaboration

This acquisition includes the Whiteboards product suite, groundbreaking visual collaboration software that works right inside Jira and Confluence. Whiteboards lets teams brainstorm, plan, communicate with stakeholders, hold retrospectives, and more — all within the collaboration tools that globally distributed teams already use every day. 

The Spartez team has long enjoyed working together in their Gdańsk office. When the global pandemic hit and they transitioned to remote work, they found that many visual collaboration tools currently available had deep feature sets but poor integrations back to their Atlassian tools. Spurred by their own needs, they created a new solution that facilitates quick translation of ideas and requirements into rich visuals. 

“Whiteboards is a vital tool for these hybrid work environment times.”

Randall Ward, CEO, Appfire

With more teams working in distributed and hybrid environments and the increasing global diversity of teams, it’s more important than ever for teams to be able to capture and share ideas in a format that spans teams, languages, and time zones. Whiteboards currently works within Jira and Confluence, and has an integration with Microsoft’s GitHub, and we’re already exploring more integration opportunities within the Microsoft ecosystem and others. 

“Software within today’s enterprise has grown increasingly complex, and companies are making big bets on digital transformation,” said Randall Ward, co-founder and CEO, Appfire. “Working with the impressive team at Spartez, Appfire will reimagine work within the enterprise, making it easier for customers embracing digital to innovate quickly and confidently.”

Whiteboards is a vital tool for these hybrid work environment times, added Ward. The ability to convey complex ideas in a visual medium that can be shared by employees wherever they are working today is a preview of how everyone will work going forward.

Enhancing our IT Service Management, Agile, and DevOps offerings

This acquisition includes apps across several other strategic categories for Appfire. Another of its top-rated apps, Agile Poker, facilitates accurate and convenient backlog estimations for teams. Inspired by the most popular estimation methods, it derives the best Scrum estimating practices from each of them. Along with Planning Poker, which we acquired through the Lizard Brain acquisition earlier this year, our portfolio now offers the top two planning poker apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, complemented by several other agile apps from Spartez such as Agile Cards for Jira and Retrospectives for Jira and Confluence.

Also part of the acquired product line is Spartez Software’s TFS4JIRA. It offers an Azure DevOps (previously known as Team Foundation Server, or TFS) integration and migration app for Jira to connect the two powerful solutions and link relevant tasks and projects. Its developers are currently working on enhancements to create an even deeper integration that will help teams using both Atlassian and Microsoft work better together. 

Additionally, Spartez adds both live Chat and Canned Responses apps to Appfire’s IT Service Management offerings. In the digitally transformed world, companies can extend their capabilities with instant live chat to meet increasing demand for quick answers. Adding the “canned responses” app lets IT teams preserve and reuse their best answers, enhancing the overall knowledge base of their service organization.

What’s next for Spartez Software customers?

We’re committed to providing an all-star product support experience and to shipping continuous improvements to your Atlassian tooling through our innovative apps — and the Spartez Software team shares this mission.

Spartez customers can continue to manage app subscriptions and licenses through the Atlassian Marketplace or your preferred Atlassian reseller.

For additional information, read the full press release, visit spartez.com, or take a look at their apps on the Atlassian Marketplace.

As always, please reach out to our teams if you have any questions about this change or any of your Appfire products.