By Dick Stark

RightStar won the Atlassian “Rookie Partner of the Year Award,” on Monday, October 10, at the Atlassian Summit in San Jose, CA. Although most of our services involve Atlassian’s more traditional DevOps toolsets including JIRA Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket, we have seen an increase in ITSM opportunities.

To make JSD more competitive, Atlassian recently, “Pink Certified,” JSD for Incident, Problem, and SRM. But don’t expect JSD to take on the likes of Remedy or ServiceNow any time soon. JSD does not even show up in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSSM. I asked Atlassian why during a recent webinar. The answer is that Atlassian has no interest in getting in the Magic Quadrant or any other quadrant. Atlassian offers a very unique, very collaborative, and very customizable solution designed for teams and with direct integration to the Development side of the company.

Where then does JSD play?

With more agile and collaborative organizations trying to get “Dev and Ops under the same roof.” The service desk in most large organizations normally resides under the CIO or IT Director and is viewed as employee facing where people can get help with IT issues, problems, and requests. This works well for most computer related issues, but not so well when the development team is needed to fix a bug or create a new feature. What happens in this situation?

A common response is to transfer the call to the dev team and let someone there deal with it. Or, maybe the service desk is integrated to the dev bug tracking system so that when a fix is applied the ticket can be closed off and the caller alerted (best case). But more likely the service desk is stuck with the ticket and has little communication and little control over how the issue is resolved. It’s frustrating and inefficient and no one wins.

JIRA Software is one of the most popular, comprehensive, and flexible DevOps toolsets in the market today for design, code development, testing, issue tracking, and software project management. Combined with JSD, Operations is both literally and figuratively plugged into the Development team, which uses JIRA Software to manage the software development life cycle, smashing the wall between the two disciplines.

With JSD, support is able to track work across teams. And ITSM is no longer isolated from development. There’s a cohesion in how the two teams operate. This enables companies to organize their teams into new, more integrated, multidiscipline organizations.

Of course, JSD also plays with cost conscience buyers. With an average selling price of one third to one half the price of other similar offerings, JSD is a great value for organizations, especially when software lifecycle costs are factored in.,

Aligning ITSM and DevOps is not only smart, it’s easy to do with JSD. The result is improved collaboration and faster bug fixes. Everyone wins.