Enterprise software company Atlassian is announcing today that it has appointed a new chief technology officer: Sri Viswanath.
Viswanath was most recently at Groupon, where he was chief technology officer and senior vice president of engineering and operations. That was a big role, as Groupon’s technology organization has more than 1,700 employees. Earlier in his career, Viswanath spent nine years at Sun Microsystems, where he was a senior engineering manager.
He’s joining Atlassian just after its big debut on the NASDAQ, and though it’s a smaller company, one with more than 1,400 employees, Atlassian is growing. It could certainly stand to have a few more people on its team now that it’s public.
And people matter at Atlassian. Recently, when I asked Atlassian president Jay Simons to identify the company’s biggest challenge, talent was his answer. “There’s a war for talent globally, and so finding and attracting people is always going to be the biggest challenge,” he said.
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As the company behind widely known software like JIRA and HipChat, it is odd that Atlassian never had a chief technology officer before. Atlassian has been around since 2002, and it competes with well-funded startups like GitHub and Slack. But there you have it. Now Atlassian has a CTO, and a seasoned one at that.
