Report from Atlassian’s Virtual Summit

Instead of a live Las Vegas Atlassian Summit, Atlassian hosted a virtual event April 1 and 2. Although it is not clear how many showed up, Atlassin reported that more than 25.000 registered for this event. At any rate, I attended the keynote and Alan was able to attend most of the other sessions. Here is a short summary.

Keynote. Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar, pictured above, opened from his home office by wishing everyone well in a time of uncertainty. Given what’s going on in the world, now, Scott pointed out that success is dependent more on alignment between teams than the success of any individual team. Furthermore, if working from home, Atlassian is the hub of work for any team, no matter the location. Everything works together.

Next up was Kelly Drozd, Agile Delivery, Marketing, ALSAC/St. Jude. ALSAC is the charitable foundation associated with St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and at $1.4B is one of the largest healthcare charities in the world. They are a huge Atlassian customer and raving fan. Even better, ALSAC also happens to be a RightStar BCM BCM customer. They have 175 projects going across the enterprise focused on enterprise ops, event management, gift planning, innovation, marketing, partnerships and HR. Kelly explained that Atlassian tools have empowered teams to take control of work with Agile adoption scaled across all projects with the customer at the center of all they do. ALSAC has saved millions of dollars in software costs and “won’t stop until no child dies from cancer.”

Other takeaways. The focus on cloud was the central theme of the Summit. And for good reasons. Here is a short update.

Cloud Offering Tiers. Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise are all available. Premium (announced 2019 provides unlimited storage, guaranteed SLAs, and extended support. Enterprise (new) offers an unlimited horizontal scale, unified command center, enterprise grade marketplace apps and 24×7 customer support.

NextGen JSD Cloud Projects. What’s most exciting are the new templates not only for IT and External Support, but also purpose-built templates and workflows for HR, Legal and Facilities teams (available for both NextGen or classic projects). Change enhancements include a bulk change feature and a change risk assessment.

ITSM Early Access Program. (now available, atlassian.com/itsm-ea) EAP includes stronger integrations for Incident and Change Management. For example, submitting a pipeline request automatically submits a JSD change. Additionally, a Service Graph feature determines the impacted service by relating repositories to services and automatically attaches the relevant JSW tickets to the JSD ticket too, so the Change Management has full context. Other enhancements include personal accessibility settings for 508 compliance, and multi-lingual JSD customer portal.

Overall, despite the current situation, Atlassian is on a roll and is making excellent progress with new products, features and overall strategy.

About dick1stark

I am the President, CEO, and founder of RightStar Systems, a leading ITSM and DevOps consultancy and BMC Software Gold Solution Provider and Atlassian Platinum Partner. My passion is customer success—whether it’s reducing the cost of service management, improving overall efficiency, or increasing end-user or employee satisfaction. Since founding RightStar in 2003, RightStar has made the INC 5000 list four times. In 2011, RightStar was awarded the prestigious National Capital Business Ethics Award (NCBEA) by the Society of Financial Service Professionals based upon RightStar’s foundation of honesty, ethics, and integrity. And in 2014, RightStar was selected by Forrester Research as one of 13 North American companies profiled in its ITSM Consultancy Wave Report. Finally, in 2019, BMC selected RightStar as its DSM North American Partner of the Year for its sales and partnership excellence. Dick is a graduate of Stanford University and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

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