Monterrey, Mexico is dwarfed by large mountains, yet the city seems to be reaching up towards them with aggressive growth as a leading technology hub in Mexico. It is here in the shadow of majestic peaks that Mexico appears to be establishing its own 'Silicon Valley'. Numerous buildings, in mid-construction, reach for the skies with surprisingly modern architecture. Yet with horses grazing under highway overpasses, the city maintains the classic charms of Latin culture.

BTG has been leveraging near-shore support from Monterrey with good success and is now expanding into Monterrey with a permanent facility.

"Monterrey is a dynamic city," says Cody Burleson (a co-founder of BTG). "They have great talent in Monterrey and we know that a near-shore model works better for our customers than off-shore. Expanding into Monterrey is just one way that we are improving our service delivery capability. It allows us to meet the prices our customers demand while still giving the excellence they deserve."

BTG will continue to provide top-tier business and technology consulting services from the U.S., but now with improved service capability from BTG Mexico (BTG MX). BTG MX brings a host of new skills to compliment our existing strength in Java/J2EE and enterprise-class platforms such as IBM WebSphere Portal (WPS) and IBM Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM). With more technical range, BTG is better poised to deliver solutions that are right for our customers and at prices they can afford.

Our PopKong plugin is now free to customers who purchase Atlassian Confluence from BTG.

• Confluence is a simple, powerful wiki that lets you create and share pages, documents and rich content with your team.
• PopKong is our plugin for Confluence that provides a unique theme and practical macros to help you improve user experience and adoption.

Contact us for purchasing, installation, training, support, custom development, and more.

Video and slides from Summit 2009 are now available at http://www.atlassian.com/summit. You can watch any of the sessions you missed and download all the slides. Note, there are a handful of sessions that Atlassian did not have permission to post.

In today's keynote at the Atlassian Summit, Mike Cannon-Brooks, CEO and co-founder, announced the acquisition of GreenHopper. GreenHopper is a plugin for Atlassian JIRA that has been recognized for its support of Agile Software Development, but as Cody Burleson points out in his recent review, GreenHopper's good for JIRA whether your using JIRA for Agile development or not.

In concert with the acquisition, Atlassian has also launched a new minisite called "agile @ Atlassian" to share perspectives on agile software development and explain how Atlassian engineers use agile software techniques themselves.

GreenHopper now comes fully integrated into JIRA Studio, Atlassian's agile development suite, at no additional charge. JIRA Studio integrates popular Atlassian products as a hosted integrated service, including JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible and the Open Source source control manager, Subversion.

GreenHopper can be purchased as an add-on for JIRA Enterprise Hosted and JIRA on premise software. Pricing for GreenHopper starts at $350 for a perpetual-use license.

JIRA is used by more than 12,000 organizations for bug tracking and software project management. Customers include Adobe, Accenture, American Express, BBC, Boeing, Deutsche Bank, Lockheed Martin, Nikon, Oracle, Rackspace, Sony, US Navy, and many others.

We use JIRA on our own software development projects and we've been using GreenHopper now for a couple of weeks. We love it and so, we're glad for this good news. Atlassian's acquisition should ensure even greater support and evolution for an already extraordinary plugin.

For more information, a free evaluation, or pricing, visit http://www.atlassian.com/greenhopper

If you are one of the many customers who bought a $5 license during Atlassian's limited Stimulus Package promotion, you'll be happy to know that you helped Atlassian stomp its original $25,000 goal. Atlassian customers helped raise a total of $100,360 for Room to Read - a non-profit organization that helps create better education for children in the developing world.

There were some teary eyes in the room at the keynote speech at the Summit when John Wood, founder of Room to Read told his touching story about Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. A big heart-felt thanks went out to Atlassian and all the generous customers who participated.