About 16 years ago, I was getting tired of working in software outsourcing – building solutions based on customers' ideas. I wanted to flip this around and build products that would do what I wanted, and then find customers who needed the same thing. Specifically, I wanted to make the life of a project manager easier and more organized.

Thus, ALM Works and our first product, Deskzilla, were born. I was lucky to quickly find my first teammates who would join me in this journey, and we started out from the luxurious office pictured below:

We launched Deskzilla in 2005. It was an innovative desktop application for Bugzilla — a then-popular bug tracker from Mozilla.org. Deskzilla allowed users to work with bug records from a feature-rich, responsive user interface aimed at power users. The product offered unique benefits, like letting you work offline and synchronize with the server later, or work with bugs from multiple Bugzilla servers at the same time.

In fact, under the hood, we were trying to build a server-agnostic system that would work with any bug tracking or project management software. It had a “connector” part that was specific to Bugzilla and the rest of the application didn’t know and didn’t care where the data — ”work items” — came from, be they bugs, features, requirements, tests, documentation, or anything else. We were aiming at comprehensive application lifecycle management.

So the next step for us was creating another product that would connect to a different system. Atlassian Jira was gaining popularity, and we joined the budding Atlassian Ecosystem by being one of the first teams to create an app for Jira. (Hey there, fellow Atlascamp 2008 participants!) A sister product to Deskzilla, Jira Client was launched in 2007. It offered similar benefits and also was aimed at power users, or at people who often had to work on the road or in places without internet access. (Back in 2007, there were still places like that!)

Over time, our focus has shifted to the Atlassian ecosystem. Bugzilla has become less popular, while Atlassian had tremendous success with Jira; its capabilities exploded in complexity and power. It was becoming more and more challenging to support all the new web-based features in a desktop application and keep up the pace of innovation.

Sometime in 2009 we started thinking about a new product. We were still working full-speed on Jira Client and Deskzilla, but the seeds of what would later become Structure for Jira had been sown. (See if you can spot them in this photo!)

Structure hit the market in late 2010 and quickly became a big success. As our company grew, we put most of our efforts into the series of apps we call the Structure Suite.

Meanwhile, demand for both Deskzilla and Jira Client had declined. Bugzilla became the bug tracker of choice for just a few open-source projects; Jira became so large that many of its benefits could not be realized through our desktop app; and internet access became so commonplace that offline mode — a prized feature of both Deskzilla and Jira Client — became largely irrelevant.

At the same time, providing support and maintenance had become increasingly difficult, particularly after the divergence of Jira Server and Jira Cloud.

So on May 27th 2020, with a heavy heart, we gave an end-of-life notice for both products. (If you’re an active license holder, you’ve probably received an email from us by now.)

It was a difficult decision. We know there are quite a few hardcore fans of both products out there, including some people here at ALM Works! While we stopped selling and supporting these products, we want to minimize the impact on customers — read our wiki pages for information on our plans for Deskzilla and Jira Client. We've also created free versions and made both products open-source; see below for links.

I’m truly grateful to our customers and loyal users of all these years, and to our wonderful team, many of whom have stayed with us for more than 10 years. If you want to proclaim your love of either Deskzilla or Jira Client, we can provide commemorative T-shirts! Just send us your mailing address, size and a note about which product you were using.

And so this story ends.

Best regards and stay safe!
Igor Sereda

Deskzilla free version
Deskzilla source code

Jira Client free version
Jira Client source code