Atlassian Summit 2019: Review, Highlights and Interviews

With this year’s Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, our strategic partner has achieved a new visitor record. Approximately 5,000 enthusiastic customers and partners were present and were able to experience an impressive conference.

These were the highlights from our point of view:

Atlassian Cloud

Atlassian is investing heavily in the cloud platform with the goal of creating the best user experience for all Atlassian products through the cloud products. More than 100,000 customers already use one of their products in the cloud. With a new data center in Frankfurt, encryption, audit logs, scaling for up to 10,000 users (EAP) and the connection of Azure and soon ADFS, important prerequisites will be created for a broader use of the cloud products in Germany. With Cloud Premium, not only data storage limitations will be eliminated, but also special functions such as analytics will become available. Existing customers will be encouraged to switch from their own installations to the cloud. Even though Atlassian is doing a lot to make this step easier with the new Migration Center, there are still major hurdles due to a lack of provider options and important marketplace apps that are not yet available for the cloud. Investments will continue to be made in these areas in particular.

I was able to record the following interview with Anutthara Bharadwaj, Head of Cloud Platform at Atlassian. We talked about trust in the cloud, a cloud-first strategy and the challenges of migration.

As a partner, we are happy to support our customers in evaluating the Atlassian Cloud for their own use and during migration. Get in touch with us.

AgileCraft becomes Jira Align

With the acquisition of AgileCraft, Atlassian consistently completes its portfolio for “Agile at scale”, i.e. the mapping of agile development processes in large organizations that not only live agility at the level of individual or several teams, but extend this concept to the entire company. The strength of Jira Align (only available in the cloud) is the continuous connection of stories and epics up to vision and topics on the strategic level, in order to make clear to all participants – including management and top management – at any time, why the work on the current task (e.g. a function) makes an important contribution to the big picture. (see keynote video from minute 33:00)

Server and DataCenter

Atlassian is currently launching new major releases for all important products, including Jira 8, Confluence 7, Jira Service 4 and many more. The main focus was on the platform “under the hood” and especially on performance and scalability. For internationally distributed customers, the new CDN functionality (content delivery network) will be particularly helpful. With Cameron Deatsch, Head of Server at Atlassian, I was able to record this interview and talk about the new developments, of course also about the question “Server or Cloud?”

All Teams

Atlassian’s original focus is on providing optimal support for IT and software development teams. For some years now the motto has been “Unleash the potential of every team”. Over the last few years, we have been able to observe a significant increase in application areas outside IT in our customer projects. Even though important investments such as the acquisitions of Statuspage, Opsgenie and AgileCraft strengthen the portfolio for IT customers, we were able to take away from the keynotes (e.g. from Scott Farquar and Megha Narayan) and also from our personal conversations with Co-CEO Scott Farquar and Cameron Deatsch, how important customers from all industries and departments have become for Atlassian today.

Our favorite among the keynotes was also the one about “Open” – the chances and challenges of openness and cooperation in companies by Megha Narayan, Head of Brand at Atlassian. Rarely have we heard such a clear and honest presentation on this topic! (see video from minute 4:30)

We at Communardo have followed this philosophy since our foundation and support our customers not only with the use of tools, but also with know-how for the concepts of modern work and transformation.

Software Teams

Summit is always a good opportunity to cultivate long-standing contacts. With Sherif Mansour, Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian, I have already recorded several interviews on the latest developments, e.g. from Confluence for servers and the cloud. This year we talked about what it takes to build a strong development team and grow it successfully. Listen, it’s worth it!

The next opportunities to get in direct contact with Atlassian in our region are the Atlassian Team Tour in May in Berlin, the Atlassian Open in September in Vienna and the Digital Workplace Summit by Communardo on November 13th 2019 in Hamburg! We will be happy to welcome you there!