As organizations become "more social" and employees create and share information more openly, it's easy for people to get overwhelmed not only with the amount of information, but also the number of sources. To help alleviate some of this chaos, many organizations are using Social Task Management tools which help people organize tasks around projects and events. Recognizing this trend, Atlassian announced on Monday that they are acquiring Trello, a Social Task Management tool currently used by 19M people, for $425M. Both companies blogged about the new on their respective sites: Trello and Atlassian.

I first wrote about this market in 2012 in the Constellation Research report: Getting Work Done With Social Task Management. More recently we've published two Constellation ShortLists™  Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites With Project Features and Social Task Management: Stand-alone vendors that highlight the key vendors in this space.

Atlassian is not the first collaboration vendor to add Social Task Management to their portfolio via acquisition, as Jive Software acquired Producteev in November 2012, and Microsoft aquired Wunderlist in June 2015. Microsoft also developed their a new application called Planner, which they released in June 2016.

I shared my initial thoughts on the acquisition in this video on Twitter:

Dr Natalie Petouhoff looks at the some of the business aspects of the deal in her blog post: Atlassian Acquires Trello for $425M: Will It Remain Free?

So what does this mean for your company?  

Chris Kanaracus and I discuss this in the CRInsights article: Atlassian Buys Trello for Collaboration Tools: What It Means

"As organizations try and shift some of their communication away from email to more social tools, they can quickly find that information overload increases rather than improves," he says. "The abundance of information shared in social networks and chat clients can be overwhelming. Social task management tools can help reduce some of the strain, by providing structure to the content, enabling people to organize, prioritize and act on tasks in a more manageable and repeatable way.  Constellation recommends organizations invest in collaboration platforms that either have native task management capabilities, or support very seamless integration with dedicated task management tools."

Are you using a Social Task Management tool to help you get your work done? If so, which one and how do you like it? If not, let us know how we can help you with your vendor selection process.

 

News Articles About the Acquisition

 

Business Research Themes

Future of Work