Atlassian Summit 2018 – Review, Highlights and Interviews

On September 4th and 5th 2018, I had the opportunity to visit the Atlassian Summit again together with a team from Communardo. First of all: After my observation, Atlassian succeeded again to ignite a fireworks display with the Summit and to present some important, partly also surprising news. In this blog post, I would like to share my essential insights without claiming to be complete.

Strategic partnership with Slack – focus on integrations (e.g. with Microsoft teams)

Atlassian’s founders and management representatives have worked hard to explain the deal with Slack that was announced a few days ago to many customers and partners in a very surprising way. Ultimately, it was obviously an extremely difficult decision for Atlassian to write off its investments in HipChat and Stride and enter into a strategic partnership with one of the top real-time collaboration providers. In the end, it is the right decision to invest valuable development resources in Atlassian’s successful products rather than in a race that cannot be won. With this partnership, a focus on integrations that integrate Atlassian’s “best-of-breed” tools with those of the partners as deeply and seamlessly as possible became clear at the Summit. This obviously did not only apply to Slack but also to Microsoft Teams (part of Office 365) – Microsoft’s Group Messaging and Real-time Collaboration product.

Atlassian Cloud – on the way to enterprise deployment

In recent years, Atlassian has invested heavily in expanding its cloud platform, including building an independent development team and separating the code base. Atlassian now has more than 100,000 cloud customers. 80% of new customers last year use cloud products. More than 1000 cloud apps are now available on the Atlassian Marketplace. A number of important announcements were made at the Summit. Soon up to 5000 users will be served in one cloud instance and thus significantly more than before. In addition, Atlassian has earned important certifications, including ISO 27018 and ISO 27001, and invested in GDPR compliance. The performance of the Cloud products was considerably expanded. The announcement that, in addition to Ireland, there will also be a second data center in the EU in Frankfurt am Main at the partner Amazon Webservices is to be particularly emphasized. A migration hub supports customers in migrating from server to cloud. You can get more information about Atlassian Cloud in the recordings of the keynotes or in an interview I had with Anutthara Bharadwaj, Head of Cloud Platform at Atlassian, at the summit.

Atlassian continues to focus on server and data center customers

In addition to its strong focus on the Cloud, Atlassian has a strong offering for its server and data center customers. This is where Atlassian currently has the strongest customer base, especially the larger and thus high-revenue customers. In addition to the focus on scalability, reliability, and performance, Atlassian is now following up with important features for enterprise customers, such as archiving options for projects and issues as well as custom field optimization in Jira. A new “Data Center Approved Apps” program was launched for Data Center Apps. Communardo is one of the first app vendors to participate in this program. With Jira 8, native apps for iOS and Android will soon be available on the market and the email flood that many users find annoying will be reduced by batch notifications and improved configurability. In an interview with Cameron Daetsch, Head of Server Business at Atlassian, I was able to capture more about Atlassian’s data center offerings and a strong statement for all server and data center customers.

From Software Teams to Business Teams to Software Teams? DevOps as the focus of the Summit

Atlassian cannot and will not deny its roots in the field of software development. The company, which has grown strongly with >2,500 employees, continues to embody the strong and often inspiring image of a software forge. While at the beginning the focus was mainly on IT customers, in recent years “Business” users in many other areas of companies have also been addressed under the slogan “Unleash the potential of every team”, which represents an important growth area. This year, IT topics were again increasingly the focus of the lectures, which was also made very clear by the examples shown in most of the keynotes. With the acquisition of Incident Management provider OpsGenie and the launch of Jira Ops, Atlassian has achieved a real surprise at this summit. The new product now completes the portfolio for IT customers. The fact that this does not mean a departure from the collaboration offer for “all teams” and/or business customers was one of the topics of my interview with Martin Suntinger, Head of Product Strategy at Atlassian.

Communardo as App Provider for Enterprise Collaboration

For Communardo, the Atlassian Summit was an important highlight, as we were once again able to prove our efficiency as an app provider. In addition to the many good conversations with our customers and interested parties, we also exchanged information with important partners such as Bitvoodoo, Comalatech, and RefinedWiki. With our products Subspace Navigation, User Profiles and SharePoint Online Connector for Confluence, we have been able to win the “data center approved” seal right from the start. In addition to the SharePoint Connectors, our App Metadata for Confluence and of course the brochure “Hitchhikers Guide to the Atlassian App-Galaxy”, which is also available online, aroused particular interest at our booth.