It seems fitting that a company called Atlassian would have global ambitions. The company that Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded in a garage 12 years ago is now valued at $3.3 billion and has staff numbering around 1000.
In January of this year it relocated its head office to London ahead of a much-anticipated listing on a US stock exchange. The company is growing strongly, with sales up 44% for the 2013-14 financial year to reach $215 million, following on from a 35% jump the previous year.
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have become heroes of the local tech start-up sector and are regular speakers at everything from major industry conferences. They can also be found speaking at high schools and universities about the opportunities that the tech industry holds.
At a time when federal government support for the sciences is at a 30-year low, Hugh Durrant-Whyte finds himself running an ICT research centre of excellence with an uncertain future. Federal government support for NICTA will cease in 2016, leaving Durrant-Whyte and his colleagues to find alternate funding sources or face a major scaling back of NICTA’s activities.
Durrant-Whyte has been passionate about NICTA’s role in getting the technology it develops into the hands of people who can use it. Under his leadership NICTA has begun spinning off a new company every three months, covering fields as diverse as cloud computing management, advanced electronic pain relief and gigabit-speed wireless networking.
Durrant-Whyte recently launched a new NICTA lab at Victoria’s Swinburne University. But NICTA’s long-term future – and the future of research-driven technology innovation in Australia – will depend greatly on Durrant-Whyte and his team’s ability to forge a new funding strategy.
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