"Among the 145 companies or so that are valued above $US1 billion there aren't very many that could point to fundamentals like Atlassian put forth in its IPO," said Matthew Wong, an analyst at research firm CB Insights. "It really puts the spotlight on this way of doing things for a tech company: really paying close attention to the fundamentals, operating on profit, not relying on outside money." Self-funded Atlassian was founded in 2002 by then 22-year-olds Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes using their credit cards. The co-founders eventually took outside money only in order to give employees and shareholders an opportunity to sell stock for liquidity. They allowed stockholders to sell $US60 million worth of stock to Accel Partners in 2010 and $US150 million in shares to investors including T. Rowe Price last year. In 2007, after Businessweek added Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes to its Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs list, Cannon-Brookes said they weren't "running toward some sort of exit, so we can take our time and build a proper business." The company's core values include "open company, no bullsh- -," "build with heart and confidence," and "don't #@!% the customer," according to the IPO prospectus.

In the 12 months ended June 30, Atlassian generated revenue of $US319.5 million, up 49 per cent from the year-earlier period. The company posted net income of $US6.8 million in the fiscal year through June. Jira, Hipchat Atlassian's best-known products include Jira, a project management and bug-tracking program named after Gojira (the Japanese name for Godzilla). Hipchat, a private group chat for teams, is used by Internet data-analytics company Splunk and Code.org., the non-profit working to expand computer-science education. Market research firm IDC ranks Atlassian as the third-largest provider of software-configuration management, behind IBM and CA Inc. While IBM currently dwarfs Atlassian, with 34 per cent market share compared with 8.3 per cent for the younger company, Atlassian is among a group of emerging providers posting "high-double-digit growth" according to IDC. IBM's growth has slowed to less than 10 per cent.

For the other burgeoning tech companies that provide similar cloud-based communication services for businesses, "Atlassian is now a public comp for a lot of those companies," Wong of CB Insights said. Proof points Still, Atlassian will face the same challenges most public technology companies do: competitors, capricious customers, and the growing pains that come with expansion. Among the technology companies that have gone public in the past year, the results have been mixed. Mobile-payments processor Square Inc. raised less than it sought in its November IPO, pricing the shares at $US9 apiece. While the stock closed Wednesday at $US11.99, it's still well below the $US15.46 a share the mobile payments company sold stock for in its most recent private round. Pure Storage Inc. sold its stock to the public in October at a valuation of about $US3.15 billion, little changed from its private round more than a year earlier. The company has a market value of $US3.3 billion based on Wednesday's close. "Public investors in this market are very discriminating," Nicole Irvin, on the corporate development team at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said on the firm's podcast after the Square offering last month. "Before I give you credit for a software and data business, I want to see that reflected in your revenues, and I want to see the growth there, and I want to see the proof points."

While Atlassian can show those proof points, it will have to sustain them. "The downside of marketing to developers and appealing to developers is they can be a little bit fickle," said Jeffrey Hammond, vice president at Forrester Research. If a company can't provide to the newest, best tools, customers may quickly move on to newer technology, he said. Also, younger developers may be more attracted to newer programming products. "There's a little bit of a cool factor at work," Hammond said. "Each new generation of developers may reject the previous generation of tools just because they are the previous generation of tools. It's hard to be a long-term classic in the developer space." Bloomberg