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The 2006 Australian Entrepreneur Of The Year
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Overall Winners and 2006 Entrepreneurs Of The Year and winners in the Young Entrepreneur category Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar, Atlassian |
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“Winning the Australian Entrepreneur Of The Year award will go down as one of the highlights of our lives, without parallel. The entire process has been a joy, and we’d thoroughly encourage anyone to enter - win, lose or draw. The people we've met along the way, the contacts and the learning have all been more thoroughly worthwhile. It has been a humbling experience and the award is 100% attributable to our incredible team, friends and family - the support network that underlies our business. To see how excited everyone was the next day was a huge buzz. They deserve to be proud, for such a young group they've achieved the great things that we get credit for. I wish more of them could have been there on the night to experience the euphoria.” - Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian |
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At just 26 years of age each, university friends Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes have created an international technology house serving 3,000 clients in 60 countries. With two main products: JIRA – an issue tracking, workflow and project management tool; and Confluence – a knowledge sharing tool for teams in large organisations, their expertise touches hundreds of thousands of people globally in many well-known organisations including Cisco, Citigroup, NASA, and the BBC.
Working on a policy of transparency, Atlassian shares its software pricing and development processes and develops products based on their ease of use and affordable pricing. They work in close collaboration with the ‘open source’ community using open source components in their products, many of which were earlier developed by Atlassian and donated to the open source community. It is an approach that enables a more rapid development of widely-usable and affordable software.
With teams now in Sydney, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Atlassian is now one of Australia’s largest software exporters, with some 90 per cent of sales to North America and Western Europe. Scott and Mike’s professional standing was recognised in 2004 when they were named IT Professionals of the Year by Consensus and in 2005, Atlassian was named by BRW magazine as Australia’ fastest growing Australian software company.
Scott and Mike are also active in their community and recently launched the Atlassian Foundation, formalising the company’s commitment to ethical business, employee empowerment and charitable works.
Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year
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