Atlassian hires Groupon’s Sri Viswanath to be its first CTO

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.

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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.

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.