With an impressive growth trajectory and a new acquisition, Avoset has become a power to behold among Atlassian consultancies

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Thanks to its comprehensive offering and ability to support customers in practical ways, Takeoff Partners’ portfolio company Avoset has rapidly expanded its clientele in Finland. Now, it has acquired a fellow Atlassian consultancy Polar Shift to further enhance its offering, particularly in cloud migration, and is aiming on growing its share of the approximately 1,000 potential new customers in Finland before turning its sights abroad.

March 2022

The leading Atlassian expert in Finland, Avoset Oy is merging with Polar Shift Oy, which also focuses on Atlassian solutions. In a corporate arrangement, Polar Shift will merge into Avoset.

"Together, Avoset and Polar Shift form a strong Atlassian center of excellence with extensive and long experience in the Atlassian tools and their versatile use," says Tuomas Saranen, CEO of Avoset.

The merger is expected to close definitively during approximately Q3 / 2022. In conjunction with the merge, Avoset will carry out an investment round involving investment companies Takeoff Partners and Netprofile Growth Plus as well as angel investors.

"Avoset has been able to take great advantage of the growth of the market for Atlassian products in Finland and at the same time increase its market share. By merging with Polar Shift, we are gaining new skills to open up growth opportunities, which the financial round will strengthen," says Markko Vaarnas, Chairman of the Board of Avoset and Partner at Takeoff Partners.

Avoset was already Finland's most significant expert in specializing only in Atlassian products, and the merger will strengthen this position. In 2021, Avoset's turnover doubled to EUR 5.8 million. This year, the company intends to continue to grow and reach a turnover of close to EUR 10 million, driven by the arrangement.

"Despite all this growth, we still have approximately 1,000 potential new customers in Finland alone, so for the moment we are focusing on growing our market share here. That said, we obviously already have our sights on mapping out the potential moves after that; we are looking around and are open to discussions on this front," Tuomas Saranen describes.

Atlassian and its partners have a long-term view

Atlassian is an Australian-based company that develops software for organizations, developing design, project management and teamwork software that are popular and particularly praised for their ease of use. The most known products include Jira, Confluence and Trello. They are already used internationally by more than 225,000 organizations and have a significant market position in Finland as well.

The core of Atlassian’s business model is to rely on consultancy partners for regional sales and support, which leaves more in-house resources for development work, leading to product development that is always ahead of competitors. In 2020, we interviewed Tuomas extensively on his experiences in how vital Atlassian consultancies are for companies using Atlassian products. Benefits include time and cost saved, more sustainable IT infrastructures and much smoother operations.

According to him, the partnership with Atlassian has bright future prospects from global perspective as well.

"Atlassian is still led by the original founders who have a very forward-thinking mindset. The company is growing and the leadership is already focused on identifying ways to utilize their tools to participate in resolving some of the great emerging issues of our time, such as climate change," Tuomas Saranen says.

A new momentum for cloud migration

Globally, Atlassian is moving away from traditional server-based products to cloud-based products for a variety of reasons including improved reliability, easier management and better innovation capabilities. Atlassian has announced that it will complete the move to cloud-based products by 2024, when maintenance of server-based server products will end.

A large proportion of the work Atlassian consultancies do has to do with supporting clients with this migration and related projects.

Avoset and Polar Shift have slightly different weightings when it comes to their core competencies, which means both can draw from each other’s strengths.

Polar Shift focuses on demanding, self-hosted Atlassian environments and manages challenging integrations across multiple systems. Thus, the merger will allow Avoset to better help their customers transition from server-based versions of Atlassian products to cloud-based products, while supporting their customers in maintaining both environments during the transition. Leveraging Polar Shift's expertise, Avoset can offer the Atlassian Data Center solution to customers who are not yet able to migrate to the cloud, for example due to security requirements.

Jesse Lahtinen, CEO of Polar Shift, says the merger will also benefit the customers of the merging company.

"Naturally, Polar Shift's services to their customers continue to operate normally. The merger allows us to boost our ability to offer our customers Atlassian's cloud-based products, which are among Avoset's strengths," he says.

For more information, please contact:

  • Tuomas Saranen, CEO, Avoset Oy

+358 50 540 8088 / tuomas.saranen@avoset.fi

  • Markko Vaarnas, Managing Partner, Takeoff Partners Oy

+358 40 540 3390 / markko@takeoffpartners.com