Exclusive: Atlassian dresses up Stash to take on Github Enterprise

It’s clear that there are two major types of dev projects. One is for webscale and consumer-oriented apps. Then there is behind-the-firewall development for enterprise applications. As popular as Github has become, many companies still won’t trust their workloads to that code repository and version management system. That’s the audience Atlassian wants to woo with Stash, its Git repository management system, which has just been updated with support for more flexible workloads to encourage team development.

Stash Pulls “The idea here is to make Git approachable for every enterprise team and the beauty is workflows and that comes from two main workflow types–branching and forking,” said Giancarlo Lionetti, group product manager for Atlassian’s developer products.

Forking allows an authorized contractor to access the code and get a copy to work on it, but won’t allow changes to flow back into the main project until they pass muster with admins, said Lionetti. Branching allows team members to take code off, work on it and then flow it back into the main repository.

Stash 4.2 also allows developers to build personal code repositories and, as needed, assign permissions to colleagues.

Stash competes with Collabnet as well as Github Enterprise, a formidable task, given the traction that Github has gotten among open-source oriented web developers. Stash claims some impressive customers including NASA, Nike, Intuit, eBay and Orbitz.

London-based Server Density, is a Github shop, but CEO David Mytton said via email that Atlassian is strong in the enterprise market, especially with its JIRA bug tracking tool. That could give Atlassian a leg up vis-a-vis Github overall with enterprises. Mytton characterized Github’s issue tracking tool as “fairly basic.”

And for those web developers outside the firewall, Atlassian competes with Bitbucket.