Atlassian Corporation PLC: Realizing Performance-Driven IT Team

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Atlassian Corporation PLC

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Atlassian Corporation PLCMike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder & Co-CEO
A person standing across the road takes out a mobile phone from his pocket, fidgets with it for a few seconds and keeps it back into its place. A few minutes later, he answers a call while gazing on the other side of the road. The next moment, a car stops in front of him, and he disconnects the call and boards the car. So, what happened here? This person, who had to reach a destination, booked a car through the Uber app in his phone, and within a few minutes, he was traveling conveniently. Digitally-driven cab aggregation applications, such as Uber, have revolutionized the way people move from one place to the other. This is just a relatable example of how digital mobile apps and services are becoming critical in the daily life of every individual. Now, imagine how this rapidly changing digital landscape is churning the activities of the businesses and their IT teams who are responsible for delivering these services. IT teams specifically are on the hook to maintain enterprise-class SLAs, high service availability, and quality of service, all with the current services and infrastructure load, while still struggling to better align with the needs of software teams.

But why is that so? The answer to this question comes loud and clear in the form of traditional ITSM tools that are extremely rigid with little or zero flexibility to be customized and be adapted to the current requirements of the IT teams. There are also multiple tools for different IT processes, which act as barriers, obstructing visibility across teams—stifling collaboration and innovation. Another outlook that stands out is that Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the gold standard of processes for IT teams, which has historically yielded significant value. However, the lack of compatibility of ITIL and legacy tools have left IT teams with choices of either changing their support process or having an IT solution that adapts to their needs. In an environment where IT teams think of service desk tool for incidents and service requests management, and require separate tools for the problem and change management, Atlassian Corporation Plc’s approach to ITSM is based on the needs of the project to make it easy for IT teams to collaborate in real time.

Atlassian’s approach to ITSM is based on the needs of the project to make it easy for IT Teams collaborate in realtime


Atlassian, a company that provides efficient tools to help every team unleash their full potential, has magic wands in store for IT teams that will allow them to excel and achieve greater agility.

Atlassian’s redefinition of ITSM as the optimization of service delivery to provide value to customers in the form of services syncs well with today’s business goals of high-value applications and digital services they deliver to their customers. The project-based approach of the company helps organizations to have a single solution for the team to collaborate and work on issues that scared them the most, with their own workflows, data schemas, screens, SLAs, and reports while gaining end-to-end visibility to IT management. As a company that architects collaboration tools for teams, Jira Service Desk is at the heart of the Atlassian’s approach to ITSM. As a collaborative service desk, Jira Service Desk is purpose-built for IT teams. Implementing DevOps, Atlassian has given significant attention to a high value on transparency for teams to avoid the “silo” mentality and keep lines of communication always open. Frequent collaboration between IT and software development teams is now seamless, helping them solve problems faster as they can easily link, track, and automate issue tracking from inception to resolution, across teams. With visibility into the queue, experts can get themselves involved in the process to solve issues faster, so developers and IT staff can solely focus on delivering better software and services.

On integrating Atlassian’s content collaboration software, Confluence, with Jira Service Desk, firms can minimize customer tickets by turning their service desk into a virtual self-service kiosk. In addition, the company also offers Jira Ops, a solution that provides IT teams a central hub to their incidents, to initiate incident management workflows and continuously improve processes. Jira Ops is an efficient and consistent way to respond to every incident. While deploying these solutions, there is no additional learning curve for the IT team and requires no cobbling of different modules. With Atlassian’s solutions, businesses just need to create projects, mapping incidents to problems and to change requests. The creation of a project allows for a logical division of data and processes to help IT teams stay organized.

Delivering Extra Value

With these solutions and their unique approach, Atlassian has made a cut above others in the industry and has helped IT teams of various organizations across industries to operate in a modern workplace where they can deliver better service, resolve issues faster, and drive business value. The instance of the engagement of Domino’s Pizza with Atlassian presents a strong case here. Domino’s, well-known for its quick service to satisfy hunger pangs for delicious pizzas, gives its customers the freedom to order pizza through phone apps, Facebook, Twitter, Alexa, and the Domino’s website. But, with these gateways to place an order for pizza, the demand seemed to only rise. To ensure a seamless customer experience irrespective of the platform, Domino’s’ IT team needed a way to streamline their DevOps process. Domino’s IT team relies on DevOps best practices to get pizza delivery innovations into the hands of consumers around the world. However, guaranteed technology security became a hurdle in the DevOps workflow, with developers tagging security input into projects too late in the process.

Domino’s’ security teams inspected the tools that DevOps team used to drive its workflow. It turned out that they relied on Atlassian’s Confluence to create and share specifications, and used Jira Software to track and manage tickets and tasks. The security team soon realized that even they could implement Atlassian’s tools to connect with developers and streamline the DevOps process. Without delay, Domino’s rushed to Forty8Fifty Labs, an authorized Atlassian partner, to build an app that used Confluence and Jira to link security to DevOps workflows. Forty8Fifty Labs worked in association with the Domino’s’ security team and created a 10-question Confluence form that generated Jira tickets based on the answers. Now the security team too joined the workflow that already worked well. What required more than 20 hours of meetings and review now took a few minutes to fill out the form, and about four minutes to get back the corresponding Jira security requirement tickets. With Atlassian’s app, Domino’s successfully automated a unique workflow and broke the barriers between security and development.

In an era where unlimited software-based services are available at fingertips, the IT arena must change to leap beyond just fixing incidents to enable the IT teams of a business to perform to their maximum potential. Atlassian aims to catalyze the necessary change in ITSM with its efforts and strategic approach.

- Daniel Holmes
    March 21, 2019

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Atlassian Corporation PLC News

Atlassian to Acquire AgileCraft to Help Executives Align Strategy to Execution

SAN FRANCISCO- Atlassian Corporation PLC (NASDAQ: TEAM), a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AgileCraft, a leading provider of enterprise agile planning software. AgileCraft helps enterprise organizations build and manage a ‘master plan’ of their most strategic projects and workstreams. Business leaders use AgileCraft to map strategic projects to the distributed work required to deliver them, providing better visibility into bottlenecks, risks and dependencies, and more accuracy around capacity planning and measuring return on investment.

AgileCraft helps business leaders answer the most important questions around their most critical projects:

what’s the true cost and expected value of the important work being driven by teams inside my company?

what does the overall roadmap look like for company-wide strategic imperatives?

what are the major dependencies and risks associated with what we’re trying to deliver?

how can we move faster, or do more with less?

how does work at the team level align with the company’s top objectives?

In every industry, there is increased pressure to respond to customers faster, increase the speed of innovation, and find new approaches to working. This pressure is amplified in large enterprises as they race to leverage technology to enhance customer experiences and adapt faster to new competitors and market conditions.

Atlassian tools are already at the forefront of enabling agile transformation for more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500. In particular, Jira serves as the collaborative backbone for how modern engineering and IT teams plan and execute work. AgileCraft helps connect the work of these teams to the business objectives and strategic outcomes of the entire enterprise. This alignment is a critical linchpin in helping large organizations move faster and scale the benefits of agile teamwork more widely across their companies. Many companies, including Anthem, AT&T, Dimension Data, Fidelity, and Nielsen, already trust Atlassian and AgileCraft to scale strategic direction and align top to bottom.

"Many leaders are still making mission-critical decisions using their instincts and best guesses instead of data," said Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO. "As Atlassian tools spread through organizations, technology leaders need better visibility into work performed by their teams. With AgileCraft joining Atlassian, we believe we’re the best company to help executives align the work across their organization - providing an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes.”

"Organizations lack the ability to easily gather and distill information across siloed teams – making it extremely difficult to assess progress and measure success," said Steve Elliott, AgileCraft founder and CEO. "We're excited to be joining the Atlassian family to enable the new digital enterprise, which is able to connect teams and align strategy to outcomes."

AgileCraft was founded in 2013 and is based in Georgetown, Texas.

Details Regarding the Transaction

The acquisition is valued at approximately $166 million, comprising approximately $154 million in cash, and the remainder in Atlassian restricted shares, subject to continued vesting provisions. The purchase price under the definitive agreement is subject to customary adjustments.

The transaction is expected to close in April, subject to certain closing conditions.

For fiscal 2019, the acquisition is expected to add approximately $1-2 million to Atlassian’s revenue. Additionally, for fiscal 2019, the acquisition is expected to reduce Atlassian’s IFRS operating margin by approximately one point and reduce non-IFRS operating margin by approximately half a point. The acquisition is also expected to be dilutive to the company’s IFRS and non-IFRS operating margin in fiscal 2020. These estimates reflect a reduction relating to fair value adjustments to acquired deferred revenue.

Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure

This press release includes forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, including risks and uncertainties related to Atlassian’s ability to integrate the business, technology, products, personnel and operations of AgileCraft, and the financial statement impact of the transaction on Atlassian. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including statements regarding: the ability of Atlassian to extend its leadership into enterprise agile planning software and other anticipated benefits of the transaction to Atlassian and to the combined companies; potential benefits of the transaction to Atlassian and AgileCraft customers; the ability of Atlassian and AgileCraft to close the announced transaction and the timing of the closing of the transaction; AgileCraft's technology; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. These risks, uncertainties and other factors, and the general risks associated with Atlassian’s and AgileCraft's business, could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied in these forward-looking statements. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, you should refer to Atlassian’s most recent Form 6-K (reporting our quarterly results) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as other documents that may be filed by Atlassian from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atlassian undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, Atlassian’s results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Forward-looking statements represent our management’s beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made.



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