By Dick Stark

Atlassian’s annual user conference, Summit 2019, was held a week in Las Vegas. Atlassian had a record-breaking turnout with more than 5000 customers and partners attending. Here is a short summary.

Partner Day is held the day before the main event. This year there were 750 partner attendees representing 234 partner organizations, 20% of which are marketplace vendors, 40% are solution partners, and 40% are both. Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO opened the session by describing how well Atlassian is doing–3000 employees, 25,000+ developers, and 500 partners. Highlights include:

IT Ops. After conceding the chat business to Slack, Atlassian is betting that IT transformation will drive more money into IT Ops which bodes well for Jira Service Desk (JSD) and OpsGenie, a 2018 acquisition. OpsGenie focuses on incident and alert management. It was an excellent pick-up, with a 130% annual growth rate, short sales cycle, “best rules engine on the planet,” and an aggressive price point that fills a current need that no ITSM toolset can match. Additionally, Atlassian demonstrated a new plugin between AWS and JSD that automatically provisions a new AWS environment in a fraction of the time it takes to do this manually. (As a comparison, BMC and ServiceNow can do this but not without an expensive runbook automation utility and lots of professional services.)

AgileCraft, another acquisition that closed two weeks ago, is now known as Jira Align. It is an enterprise portfolio management system that connects work performed to company goals. It answers the question of how new features impact performance and results.

Cloud. Anu Bharadwaj, head of Atlassian’s cloud platform reported that Atlassian continues to invest heavily in Cloud. Today, 90% of new Atlassian customers start out in the cloud. Anu announced that cloud performance is much improved as Atlassian now supports customers with as many as 10,000 users, moving soon to unlimited. The best news for Summit attendees–Atlassian offered a free one year Jira Software Cloud subscription equal to the max license for all active Server and Data Center users (up to 2,000) for all Summit attendees.

Channel Update. The channel team discussed how to best work with Atlassian Technical Account Managers (TAMs) and Enterprise Advocates (EAs). TAMS work with partners and customers to provide guidance, best practices, and advocacy. EAs work with Atlassian’s largest customers to market their Data Center offerings and sell priority enterprise support. In summary, it is clear that Atlassian is on a roll with a very loyal customer following. RightStar too is on a roll and I’m excited that we can be part of Atlassian’s success.