Tempo + ALM Works

With their acquisition of ALM Works and its Structure suite of apps, Tempo has ended a year of major takeovers in the Atlassian ecosystem with one of the most significant of them all.

ALM Works are the makers of Structure – Project Management at Scale. Structure is one of the big two Planning applications on the Atlassian Marketplace (along with BigPicture). Structure is an incredibly popular product with 10,989 active installs while ALM Works’ more stripped back Structure.Gantt product has 4,779.

Tempo’s takeover of Roadmunk (an end-to-end roadmapping solution for building and communicating product strategy) in November gave us an indication that they were looking to make moves into the Planning space. However, this takeover has taken everyone by surprise. Although the acquisition is still fresh we think that this is great news, both for Tempo and ALM Works and for the wider Atlassian community.

Tempo believes that by combining their flagship Tempo Timesheets product with Structure they will be able to “provide the first suite of purpose-built program management apps to meet project, program and portfolio management needs”. Essentially, Time Management and Planning are like peaches and cream. By bringing the most popular Time Management product and one of the two big players in the Planning space under one roof, Tempo is aiming to create an even more comprehensive project and portfolio management solution.

With the natural synergies available between Time Management and Planning and the quality of these two products individually, we’re very excited to see how this solution develops as these apps become more and more integrated.

ALM Works, Tempo, and Planning

Structure and Structure.Gantt have both had an excellent 2021. Structure has grown by 20% while Structure.Gantt has grown by 42%–for apps of their size, this is very impressive.

When compared to the other major Planning apps available on the Marketplace, Structure, and Structure.Gantt compare very impressively (Figure 2). In terms of growth, Structure leads the way over BigPicture for 2021. However, BigPicture’s products are still larger than their equivalent Structure products.

However, how much this data means going forward is up for debate since the whole Planning space has been turned on its head in 2021, not only with Tempo’s takeover of ALM Works but also Appfire’s takeover of BigPicture in June.

Planning is the largest Jira category (Figure 3) and with the two biggest Planning products under the control of two major app vendors, it’ll be fascinating to see how this category develops going forward into 2022.

Tempo vs Appfire

Category Breakdown: Tempo & ALM Works

With Structure being a part of Tempo, Tempo (remarkably) now has a larger Planning footprint than Time Management when all of its Planning products are combined (Figure 4).

Furthermore, Structure has been going strong over the past year, and with increased integration to Tempo and its 28,638 instances, it’s easy to see Tempo users who are not currently using Structure adopting it as their Planning solution.

Planning: Tempo vs Appfire

Meanwhile Appfire, in response to Tempo’s combined Time Management and Planning prowess, will likely want to strengthen their Time Management offering to ensure they are able to offer their customers as comprehensive a solution as Tempo and ALM Works will be seeking to do.

Appfire still has more Planning instances than Tempo (Figure 5), but with this acquisition, Tempo is really looking to challenge Appfire’s supremacy in the planning space.

Market Share: Tempo & Appfire

When looking at the Marketplace overall Appfire is also still the larger vendor with their 191,000 paid instances making up 18% of the Marketplace as a whole while Tempo’s 58,000 make up 5%.

Wrap

Overall we think this is great news for all of us in the Atlassian ecosystem. Both Tempo and Structure customers are going to see major benefits as these two products are integrated more deeply than ever before and product support is further consolidated.

2021 was by some distance the biggest year yet for takeovers and acquisitions in the Atlassian ecosystem–we believe that this reflects just how large this market is getting and how much it is going to grow in the future.

Please contact us if you have any questions on MARS or any of our Atlassian offerings.