Seth Agulnick, [email protected] REPORT

Atlassian Is Primed to Widen Its Appeal Beyond IT

Companies: CA, CRM, GOOG/GOOGL, HPE, IBM, , MSFT, NOW, ORCL, TEAM, ZEN February 11, 2016

Report Type:  Initial Coverage ☐ Previously Covered Full Report ☐ Update Report

Research Question:

Will ’s workflow tools continue to grow quickly with teams while also expanding into new use cases?

Summary of Findings Silo Summaries . Atlassian Corp. Plc’s (TEAM) tracking and collaboration tools, widely 1) Atlassian Software Users considered the best-in-class for software development, are gaining and are both effective tools for team traction among nontechnical teams. collaboration. JIRA can be customized to suit nearly any team’s development process, though setup is . The company’s two flagship products, JIRA and Confluence, are complicated. Confluence is much easier to use and slowly being rolled out in departments like human resources, sales, tends to be deployed more widely. Atlassian’s biggest customer support and product management. These represent a advantage is the way all of its software pieces work together. Atlassian products—which already are being much larger market than Atlassian’s traditional core in IT. branched out beyond software development—can grow . JIRA was praised for its flexibility and advanced customization even further with business teams. options, though the latter trait makes setup and maintenance a challenge. It has great potential for sales growth with any business 2) Users of Competing Software Three of these five sources said Atlassian’s JIRA is not team that needs to track numerous tasks through a multistage the right fit for every company. A fourth source said JIRA process, provided Atlassian can make it simpler out of the box. probably is the best available tool for software . Atlassian’s Confluence is easier to use and less expensive than its development but that his team has not switched to it because of the time and effort required for setup. The biggest competitor, Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) SharePoint. remaining source said his company could save money Confluence is picking up steam as an internal company and by switching to JIRA but is satisfied with VersionOne. document management platform, in some cases reducing One source thinks open-source alternatives are employee reliance on email and certain Microsoft Office programs. Atlassian’s biggest threat. Confluence got high marks as a companywide collaboration tool. One source who . Atlassian’s biggest obstacles include deeply embedded solutions uses Slack said HipChat needs better search and from providers of broader enterprise suites, such as IBM Corp. notification features. (IBM), as well as the wide availability of free open-source tools that are not as robust as Atlassian’s but are adequate for many uses. 3) Atlassian Channel Partners Atlassian’s software is flexible and easy to use, and the . Although some competitors come close to or even surpass company’s active third-party marketplace is a key Atlassian’s technology for individual products, no single challenger advantage over competitors. Confluence is the best matches its complete portfolio of well-integrated collaboration software on the market for managing documents and tools. The company also benefits from a vibrant marketplace of organizing content. It is easier to use than SharePoint third-party vendors developing add-ons that extend the versatility of and less expensive than both SharePoint and Jive. its software and create stickiness as they build up over time. Collaboration tools like Atlassian’s are often difficult to displace once a company starts using them. Slack and . Atlassian’s messaging tool, HipChat, is losing the battle to rival HipChat are comparable, but Slack seems to be winning Slack. HipChat’s main advantage over Slack—easy integration with the marketing battle. Atlassian has great potential to other Atlassian tools—is not enough to get companies to switch. expand beyond technical teams.

. Atlassian’s decision to split JIRA into three products could be a 4) Industry Specialists good step toward breaking into nontechnical teams. Still, the JIRA Atlassian is well suited for wider enterprise use, as Service Desk version may be experiencing some growing pains as it evidenced by JIRA’s popularity with project leaders, takes on established solutions from Zendesk Inc. (ZEN) and engineering teams and product managers. Although ServiceNow Inc. (NOW). time and expertise are needed to configure Atlassian’s tools, experienced users become big fans. Atlassian has room to raise prices for its large enterprise clients. HipChat has been losing share to Slack but still has strong potential among teams using other Atlassian tools.

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

TEAM’s Strength of Strength of Growth

JIRA Confluence Potential Outside of IT

Atlassian Software Users

Users of Competing Software

Atlassian Channel Partners

Industry Specialists

Background Australia-based Atlassian, which had its initial public offering in December, makes software to help teams collaborate. Its flagship product, JIRA, is widely used among IT and software development groups. JIRA and Confluence, the wiki-style document-sharing software, account for about two-thirds of Atlassian’s revenue, which has been growing nearly 50% per year during the three fiscal years prior to its IPO. The company said its fiscal second-quarter revenue was up 45% year to year and that its revenue for the fiscal year ending in June will be about $445 million, up 38% to 40%. Atlassian has a very small direct sales force, choosing instead to sell its products mainly through self-serve online channels and through a series of third-party vendors, some of which also develop plug-ins to increase the functionality of Atlassian’s software. These vendors provide much of the support for Atlassian, including implementations, training and troubleshooting.

Although its products initially were geared to software developers, Atlassian is trying to expand into other parts of the enterprise. In October, it split JIRA into three products: JIRA Software for software teams, JIRA Service Desk for IT and service teams, and JIRA Core for business teams. Atlassian also has been trying to increase use of its HipChat messaging tool as part of its effort to become more widely used across companies.

Competitors with software development tools are plentiful and include VersionOne, CA Inc.’s (CA) Rally and IBM’s Rational. For broader collaboration tools, Atlassian finds itself up against the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOG/GOOGL) Google Docs and Microsoft’s SharePoint. Also of note are the many free, open-source alternatives like GitLab and Jenkins.

Current Research Blueshift Research assessed whether Atlassian could continue to grow among software developers while also bringing in different business teams. We employed our pattern mining approach to establish five independent silos, comprising 21 primary sources and seven relevant secondary sources focused on uses of Atlassian tools outside of software development, reviews of JIRA Service Desk, and the battle between HipChat and Slack: 1) Atlassian software users (9) 2) Users of competing software (5) 3) Atlassian channel partners (6) 4) Industry specialists (1) 5) Secondary sources (7)

Next Steps Blueshift Research will further assess Atlassian’s outlook for winning large enterprise deals. We also will take a closer look at how the split of JIRA into three products is being received by end users, especially those who might consider JIRA Service Desk as an alternative to Zendesk.

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

Silos

1) Atlassian Software Users Atlassian’s leading products, JIRA and Confluence, are both flexible and effective tools for various team collaboration tasks. JIRA, used mainly within these nine sources’ IT and software teams, can be customized to suit nearly any team’s development process. That broad configurability, however, complicates the initial setup and the system maintenance. Confluence is much easier to use and tends to be deployed more widely, often as a companywide wiki for managing content. Atlassian’s biggest advantage is the way all of its software pieces work together, but that integration is not enough of a catalyst for companies using Slack as a messaging tool to switch to Atlassian’s HipChat. Still, Atlassian products—which already are being branched out beyond software development—can grow even further with business teams, especially if the company can make JIRA easier to initiate and more targeted toward specific business functions. Splitting JIRA into three versions was a smart move toward that end. Some larger enterprise clients want more direct support and better responsiveness than what Atlassian offers. Meanwhile, many open-source products compete with some or all of JIRA’s and Confluence’s functions. Such free tools generally are not as robust or comprehensive but sometimes are good enough.

Key Silo Findings Atlassian - 9 of 9 sources use both JIRA and Confluence; 4 said JIRA is used mainly within IT teams while 6 said Confluence is more widely deployed. - 3 said JIRA’s flexibility and configurability are great strengths but make it challenging to set up and maintain. - 3 said Confluence is a great tool that is easy to use by teams throughout an organization. 1 complained that it is difficult to format and manage pages within Confluence. - 2 said HipChat is a good messaging tool but not good enough to displace Slack. 1 said he would like to replace various messaging systems in use at his company with HipChat. - 1 complained about the lack of email customization in JIRA Service Desk. - 1 said Atlassian’s Bamboo is better than Jenkins at encouraging good development habits. - 3 offered mixed reviews of Atlassian’s support, including 1 who thinks the company should develop closer relations with its biggest customers. - 2 said the lack of compatible plug-ins is a drawback with cloud-based versions of Atlassian’s software. Competition - 5 said Atlassian’s biggest technology advantage over competitors is the integration of its full suite of solutions. - 1 said Atlassian is in a constant fight with open-source tools like GitLab, Jenkins and , which may be good enough for some clients. - 1 said Atlassian’s vibrant third-party marketplace provides an edge over competitors. - 3 said Atlassian’s development tools are pretty well embedded and get stickier over time as more plug-ins are installed and as more historical data is built up. - 1 replaced Microsoft’s SharePoint with Confluence because the former was too expensive and complicated. - 1 is considering replacing Zendesk with JIRA Service Desk but thinks the latter still is missing some key features. Growth Potential - 6 said Atlassian either can or has already started to branch out beyond software development teams. o 2 of those think the company’s tools need to have simpler, more targeted functions out of the box to succeed with a wider audience. o 1 said expansion beyond software teams will require a lot of support during implementation. - 1 said trying to reach a broader client base could backfire if products start to lose their appeal to the company’s core customer. - 1 said splitting JIRA into three versions is a smart and significant step toward expanding beyond development teams. - 1 thinks Atlassian needs to be more responsive to customers in order to grow.

1) Director of product engineering for a developer of healthcare-related software

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

JIRA is a great tool for software development though one of its biggest strengths—numerous configuration options— means it requires some expertise to set up and manage. Atlassian’s integration among its different tools is a helpful feature. The company has a great opportunity to expand beyond software teams but will need to make JIRA easier to use out of the box, such as with business-specific configurations. Tools like JIRA can become pretty well embedded within an organization, making it difficult to switch to another platform. HipChat is a good messaging tool but does not have any great advantages over Slack. Atlassian . “We use JIRA primarily for software development. It serves the purpose of a standard ticket system. It does a great job of that. The latest version really If you’re using a lot of Atlassian integrates well with an Agile process, whether Scrum or Kanban. So it tools, the integration is pretty provides a lot of the functionality you want with constructing sprints and fantastic. If your code is in generating charts to help you understand how you’re doing.” Stash [now called . “We use JIRA mostly within development teams, but it also gets used for Server], the JIRA ticket will give office requests, things like ‘These light bulbs need changing.’ So we use it for that kind of workflow as well. Everyone in the company has it.” you links to the code to fix that. . “If you’re using a lot of Atlassian tools, the integration is pretty fantastic. If If you’re using Confluence, it your code is in Stash [now called Bitbucket Server], the JIRA ticket will give will identify the pages where you links to the code to fix that. If you’re using Confluence, it will identify the that particular ticket is pages where that particular ticket is referenced. They do a very good job of referenced. They do a very integrating their products together.” . “A lot of the Atlassian tools I’ve used, they’re incredibly configurable, which good job of integrating their can be a challenge for getting started. If you’re new to it, it can be tricky to products together. Any get going. They do provide you with some standard configurations, but if you weaknesses with JIRA are want to deviate from that, it’s a little involved. That’s always the cost of around things it lets you do. It something that’s highly configurable.” . “That also means it’s an ongoing maintenance and management task. You doesn’t save you from yourself. can opt to say that every single project has its own standalone You can debate whether JIRA’s configuration, and that’s OK but then you lose some economies of scale. is responsible for that, but it But if you have a standard configuration across all your projects, it becomes lets you [mess] things up. a little challenging to roll out changes to those configurations.” . “You can define workflows that restrict, say, moving a ticket from this stage Director of product engineering for a to that stage unless this has happened, which is good if you want a high developer of healthcare-related software level of control over your workflow, but you need to manage that. If you make a mistake, you start to slow people down because they can’t move a ticket backward from ‘in progress’ to ‘open.’ Let’s say you have ‘open,’ ‘in progress’ and ‘done’ [as your status options] and I accidentally grab the wrong ticket and put it ‘in progress.’ If I say, ‘No, no, no, I need to move that back to “open” and start another one,’ if your workflow doesn’t allow that, [it takes some work] to get it fixed.” . “Any weaknesses with JIRA are around things it lets you do. It doesn’t save you from yourself. You can debate whether JIRA’s is responsible for that, but it lets you [mess] things up.” . “It’s tempting to provide people with lots and lots of choice, and JIRA lets you do that, but a lot of choice can lead to a lot of confusion. It’s one of those tools that people get and think, ‘This is going to solve all our workflow issues or all our process issues.’ Yes, it can do that but only if you know how to use it.” . “Confluence is just a wiki, so you can use it anywhere [within a company]. It has all the strengths and weaknesses of a wiki in that they can get out of hand pretty quickly. We do have an add-on called Confluence Questions that adds a Q&A interface into the wiki, a lot like Stack Overflow or Quora. Confluence really is just a wiki that has support for a variety of plug-ins.” . “One of those features is you can a JIRA ticket and it can pull information from JIRA to put into the wiki page, so if you go to that ticket, it knows that it’s referenced in a wiki page. So it’s a nice reciprocal link between your ticket tracking system and your wiki.” . “I like HipChat. I used it at [my prior job]. We use Slack here. HipChat is a really good tool. It and Slack, it’s hard to separate the two. They’re in a bit of an arms race with regard to functionality.”

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

. “The HipChat-JIRA integration is much cleaner [than Slack]. That’s pretty solid. But for a company using Slack, pivoting to HipChat just for the integration would be overkill, really.” . “[Atlassian] can be hit-or-miss [on support]. If you engage with them, they can be pretty good. If you dig through the tickets on their feature request board, they’re not afraid to say, ‘We’re not going to do this,’ even for things that appear to be popular. I think it’s actually great to have a company say Atlassian has a real opportunity they’re not going to put this feature in. For people who are waiting for it, [to expand beyond IT teams]. they get all crabby about it, but I’d rather be told I’ not going to get What they’re probably going to something than be told they’ll put it on the backlog and be strung along.” . “I use Bamboo, which is [Atlassian’s] continuous integration server. I had a need to do is really make sure problem with that, and they didn’t really have anyone in support I could there’s a lot of out-of-the-box reach out to.” [functionality]. They have to . “They have a very sizable ecosystem of plug-in creators. Sometimes that’s have some workflows that are great and sometimes it’s not. It depends on the plug-in creator. You end up being somewhat skeptical if there’s a plug-in that hasn’t been updated in [preconfigured] for lead six months. You know you’re not going to get any support.” generation or things like that. “One of the things I like about Bamboo over Jenkins, which is the . Director of product engineering for a competitor, is it is designed to help construct deployment pipelines. It’s developer of healthcare-related really designed around the idea of a pipeline. That helps cultivate good software engineering habits. Jenkins can do anything, but it doesn’t guide you to good practice.” Competition . “The other tools [similar to JIRA] that I’ve used were IBM proprietary tools. I’ve used Bugzilla as a submitter of bugs to various projects. Pivotal Tracker is another competitor though I haven’t used it. I’ve been using Atlassian for the last four or five years now. I use JIRA for my own private projects.” . “We moved from Skype to Slack at the end of last year, and it wasn’t that difficult, at least for our team, which is an engineering team. I don’t know how difficult it was for the less technical folks. But if you start really using Slack or HipChat to their full extent and you start using plug-ins and have bots in your chat rooms providing information, moving from one platform to another would become increasingly difficult to maintain that level of situational awareness.” . “That’s also true with [tools like JIRA and Confluence], but there’s also history. Those things contain a historical record of what you’ve done. Moving away from one to another [tool], you’d lose a lot of historical data. So reimplementing your workflow is one going to be one of your main tasks to move off of or onto JIRA.” Growth Potential . “Atlassian has a real opportunity [to expand beyond IT teams]. What they’re probably going to need to do is really make sure there’s a lot of out-of-the-box [functionality]. They have to have some workflows that are [preconfigured] for lead generation or things like that.” . “They need to understand that it’s a different market when you’re not talking just to software engineers. [Business executives] don’t have the time or inclination to configure JIRA. If they nail that, they can be very successful. And they’re really good at the user experience stuff, so it’s well within the realm of possibility that they can do it.” . “Their big strength is that the user experience is generally pretty great. If they can combine that with figuring out how to make it more than just a ticket tracking system, how they can provide analytics data around that, they can [branch out]. They have the tools. They just need to deploy them correctly.”

2) Head of development at a large financial services provider Atlassian has plenty of room to grow as the software development industry expands globally. The company’s advantage is it can sell and integrate an entire suite of tools. Use of its software at this source’s company has grown steadily. However, threats to Atlassian’s dominance abound as competitors likely will continue to learn from and mimic its products and strategy. Numerous free tools with comparable functionality are nipping at the heels of every Atlassian product. Not having a direct sales team hurts Atlassian in terms of on-site presence and support for its biggest clients.

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

Atlassian . “We use Jive [Software Inc./JIVE] as a company intranet for communicating things very broadly. But when we’re talking about workflow for product, we’re really pretty heavy users of the Atlassian stack.” One of the things I find . “JIRA and JIRA Agile are used for requirements planning. Confluence is interesting about software increasingly getting used as the wiki of choice because it has the tight integration with JIRA. If you’re a product manager writing a product spec, it’s development is that, if you not an actual workflow to write a whole bunch of JIRA tickets; it feels a lot haven’t done it in recent years, more natural to write a doc. With Confluence, you can write a doc, and then you have a perception that it’s you can sit with all the managers and leads, highlight a paragraph and a couple of guys in a garage. make it a link on the spot between the doc and JIRA.” The reality is it’s nothing like . “That’s a very, very powerful thing to have because you’re letting a product manager work in a tool that feels natural to them. And then you can use that. It entails very different what they’ve done as a shared version, with people able to comment on it, expertise and very different and it becomes an open workflow that works around the world.” skill sets working together. . “All of our products are built with various technologies. And we’re starting to Atlassian really is glue for that. see these tools used in product management, development. And In each silo, you can have an increasingly even some of the business people on the management side are starting to work—maybe not as deeply—with the tools, but they’ll look at argument about whether dashboards for reporting.” there’s a better tracker than . “One of the things I find interesting about software development is that, if JIRA or a better wiki than you haven’t done it in recent years, you have a perception that it’s a couple Confluence. But if you’re of guys in a garage. The reality is it’s nothing like that. It entails very looking for a toolset to build different expertise and very different skill sets working together.” . “Atlassian really is glue for that. People had been trying to do this by product within collaboration sending around spreadsheets and documents for years, which is a misery. that cuts across from the You have 16 different versions in the same spreadsheet, and there’s no product management/planning single version of the truth, what’s happening on the project. … And it’s just side of the game, all the way to very hard, I think, for organizations to plan financially, to plan for release dates and prioritize efforts based on revenue opportunities. Atlassian tools deployment of code, you really are very good at tying all that together.” would be hard-pressed to find a Competition toolset that’s completely . “A lot of things compete with Atlassian in different silos. You have , integrated that’s better than which is open-source. You’ve got IBM’s whole toolset, which is based on Atlassian’s. Rational. Things like Trello are a competitor. The people behind Ruby on Rails did an online management tool [called Basecamp] that’s pretty cool. Head of development at a large There’s a lot of things out there.” financial services provider . “The advantage for Atlassian is that they can sell and integrate the stack. So we use JIRA, we use Confluence, we use /, and we use Bamboo.” . “The strength of what Atlassian is doing is they’re really playing on the integration side. In each silo, you can have an argument about whether there’s a better tracker than JIRA or a better wiki than Confluence. But if you’re looking for a toolset to build product within collaboration that cuts across from the product management/planning side of the game, all the way to deployment of code, you really would be hard-pressed to find a toolset that’s completely integrated that’s better than Atlassian’s.” . “IBM’s playing with tools I worked with almost 15 years ago now. Most of what IBM did in that space was via acquisition. [When] they bought Rational, they bought a toolset that is well regarded and originally built around Waterfall [development], and they added some Agile extensions. It’s nowhere near as good as Atlassian.” . “The other thing about Atlassian is that they’ve managed to grow their market share without [ticking] anybody off. They’re not locking anybody out of their ecosystem. So if you’re using Slack and not HipChat, Atlassian can support both. We have teams that use Jenkins and others that use Bamboo, but they’re still using other parts of the [Atlassian] tool chain.” Growth Potential

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

. “For a long time, because there are so many fiefdoms in our company, we probably had 10 to 15 instances of JIRA and a few other tools all in place. But very steadily, what’s been happening is a consolidation. And instead of It’s not like Atlassian’s toolset having smaller instances where you have a license for 100 users, now we is incredibly expensive; it’s not have a few instances where we have [JIRA] licenses for anywhere from like they’re squeezing a pound 1,000 to 10,000 licenses, globally.” of flesh for what they do. But . “I don’t think that the software industry is shrinking any time soon, and the amount of software development globally isn’t shrinking any time soon. And there’s a delta between doing it’s done by people who have to work together closely. So that in itself will most of what you need to do present an ever-growing market for Atlassian.” with a free tool or something . “[Competitors] are going to learn from them. For example, Trello adds a few great that I have to pay for. features and is a full-blown Agile board, and it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a set of Internet-based services that do a lot of what Atlassian Head of development at a large does. It’s hard to keep innovating against the entire Internet.” financial services provider . “Bamboo fights an uphill battle against Jenkins. I would argue that Bamboo is more feature-rich, does a better job of handling branches and a bunch of things. But a lot of people use Jenkins for free. There’s no purchase process or renewing licenses. The lack of payment is key: Developers tend to gravitate towards things that have no friction.” . “It’s not like Atlassian’s toolset is incredibly expensive; it’s not like they’re squeezing a pound of flesh for what they do. But there’s a delta between doing most of what you need to do with a free tool or something great that I have to pay for. As one example, our tools group did not go with Stash [Bitbucket Server]—they went with GitLab.” . “[Atlassian may want to rethink] pushing the big players like us to arm’s length. They’ve been successful with this [to date] because we certainly have bought their product, and [this distance from their big enterprise clients] keeps Atlassian from getting sucked into crazy requirements. But they don’t have much of an enterprise sales capability, where they can come in and really spend some time with their bigger users.” . “Atlassian is very democratic about that, but when you’re an enterprise customer, you’re used to taking vendors around. … They might think about giving at least the illusion of doing that every now and then.” . “It’s a philosophy that will probably result in a better product. I mean, IBM is wonderful at reaching out to enterprises … but Rational, the tool they produce, is awful.”

3) Software architect for an IT firm providing networking and communications solutions Confluence and JIRA are both used throughout this source’s organization, including such departments as logistics, billing, HR and customer support. Both tools are extremely easy to use and flexible. Those same strengths, however, can result in user-created problems, so they require training and significant oversight. Confluence is less complicated and cheaper than SharePoint, and Atlassian has a big tech advantage in product integration. It can expand beyond software development teams, but implementations will need strong support. The source’s firm uses Slack for communication, and employees have not shown much interest in moving to HipChat. Atlassian . “We are around the 500 range [of users] for both [Confluence and JIRA].” . “I have moved several [teams to Atlassian software] and have a backlog of more coming. [Departments using Atlassian] include logistics, revenue, finance, change management, sales deal reviews, internal IT support, HR and network operations.” . “[Use of JIRA and Confluence] is always expanding. We have a new project in JIRA to track all the enhancements we want internally, and that project is always busy.” . “JIRA’s strengths are that it’s flexible. The workflow [function] is easy to change and pretty powerful, with post functions and conditions that can be set on each step in the flow. With Issue Navigator, you can find anything. Even users can without too much guidance. The dashboards [allow you to] find it and then display it visually.” . “Don’t see what you need? Use the API and build your own tool to use JIRA.”

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

. “Its weaknesses are the flexibility and maybe scale. Because changes are easy, without proper consulting or too many cooks, JIRA can be made into a huge mess real quick. When it happens, it is your own fault, but it’s easy to blame the tool.” . “You can also get into issues with performance depending how you use JIRA. As one example, we love the database field plug-in. … We used it a lot, and then suddenly performance started to decrease with the size of the table/query we were relying on.” Because changes are easy, . “Confluence is flexible and simple. Once you learn that just about without proper consulting or everything in Confluence is a page and has the same options, you can too many cooks, JIRA can be transform content with ease. After teaching users some ways to translate their current formats and layouts into Confluence, they start self- made into a huge mess real supporting.” quick. When it happens, it is . “[Atlassian software is] very intuitive once you get going. Because the your own fault, but it’s easy to platform is consistent, once the users get it, they need far less help.” blame the tool. Getting people . “It was harder than I anticipated to train users. Our software team did various web meetings to run through several examples with users. A to use Confluence and JIRA at transition from something like SharePoint, for example, took some training. all was sort of an uphill path at It’s a mentality shift in some cases.” first. Sure, now that people use . “Many people really prefer to use their locally installed Office tools instead it, they mostly love it. However, of the cloud. Younger generations pick it up fast as they are already in tune nontechnical teams never with modern web technologies and cloud functions.” . “Understanding what the tools can and should not do [is a common issue]. would have taken the route on Sometimes I get a request for a new [Confluence] space where they should their own. The development use a page, or a new JIRA project where they should just use a component team had a year of experience or version.” by the time we pushed it to the . “Administration takes effort. You have to keep some policies or the rest of the company. applications get extremely difficult to maintain. Do you use roles or groups to control permissions? Or a mixed bag of the two and have to reverse- Software architect for an IT firm engineer each time someone needs more permissions?” providing networking and . “No matter how large your team, there is a point in which content, communications solutions resources, responsibilities and stuff get broken down into smaller more manageable parts. I think [Atlassian’s tools] can scale to very large teams.” . “We are hosting [Atlassian software] on a nice machine [rather than in Atlassian’s cloud]. We decided putting our work on Confluence and JIRA meant it deserved a good infrastructure. We tried to use the cloud, but found the transition limited us on some things as we use plug-ins not supported in the cloud. In retrospect, using the cloud would have been easier day one before I added stuff.” Competition . “We used to have SharePoint. It was complicated and very expensive. I do not have the exact [cost], but SharePoint is easily north of six figures and a real pain to run and administer. SharePoint does so much but feels like so much work when the majority of our content needs are served better in Confluence.” . “We have used other open-source or in-house solutions too.” . “Integration [is Atlassian’s biggest tech advantage]. Confluence, JIRA, Bamboo, [FishEye/Crucible], Stash—they all see each other. They also have what appears to be really detailed UX [user experience] work. It feels like Atlassian really listens to their customers.” . “[Atlassian’s prices are] very competitive. It is like the economical car of the industry that is even fun to drive, which explains their large customer base.” . “Considering the development team uses most of [Atlassian’s] products and uses them to support the rest of the company, it’s pretty [embedded]. As an example, if we tried to bring in some other wiki or ticket system, the integration would have to work well. I am not sure what it would look like if we did not have developers on staff, as that would change the leverage.” . “Getting people to use Confluence and JIRA at all was sort of an uphill path at first. Sure, now that people use it, they mostly love it. However, nontechnical teams never would have taken the route on their own. The development team had a year of experience by the time we pushed it to the rest of the company.”

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

. “We started using Slack, and nobody has shown a lot of commitment to moving to HipChat. I think HipChat integrates better than Slack so we should consider it, but it might be tough. I am also not sure if cloud HipChat works correctly with our hosted HipChat. I spent a couple minutes on it, and that was a buzzkill.” Growth Potential . “I would say [Atlassian can expand beyond software teams], but it will require a lot of consulting. It is easy to make the experience a nightmare. All it takes is a couple messy deployments and it is out the door for a nondevelopment enterprise. If I move positions and go to a company that does not use [Atlassian], I would suggest it but might be in the minority.” . “I cannot pinpoint the best place [for Atlassian outside of development teams]. Anyone that has workflow, tasks and content to keep up with can benefit.” . “The best way to break into other markets is to keep making setup fast and easy. The more out-of-the-box features, the better.”

4) IT services director at a midsized software organization One of Atlassian’s big advantages is the way tools like JIRA, Confluence and HipChat work seamlessly together. The ecosystem of third-party plug-ins for JIRA and Confluence also is a huge selling point. Atlassian is trying to appeal to teams beyond IT, as evidenced by its decision to split JIRA into three products. This source is considering replacing Zendesk with JIRA Service Desk, but the latter seems to be missing some key features and has received some negative client feedback. Also, Atlassian must better communicate with and respond to clients in order to maintain its growth. Atlassian . “The two biggest [Atlassian tools] we use are JIRA and Confluence. We also use Crowd, which is their user management layer that can simplify the way applications can validate users. The IT team uses Bitbucket Server, but we couldn’t persuade the rest of the company to use it or the repositories. They insist on that being open-source.” . “We’re currently evaluating HipChat because we have a multitude of chat tools in use at the moment, and I’m trying to get senior management to see that we need to consolidate on just one. And I think that for us, HipChat would provide the best of all of the bits of the different tools that we currently use.” . “The other tools that Atlassian offers, we don’t use; we instead use open-source alternatives. For example, we use Jenkins for continuous improvement [rather than Atlassian’s Bamboo].” . “Atlassian is very easy to engage with. They make it very easy to submit ideas for improvement to the products, without having to go via a support process first. But that’s also an area where users are finding some frustration.” . “Atlassian is very clear about the fact that they have a process by which they decide what they’re going to fix, what changes they’re going to make, etc. Nevertheless, the process end users go through that allows people to vote on issues that are of interest to them … gets people particularly frustrated when they see something that’s been in the system for years has high numbers of votes. And yet Atlassian seems to be ignoring it or even saying, ‘It’s not on our road map to deal with.’” . “The thing about Atlassian is that their products do attract that broad spectrum of user base. Their licensing system starts at 10 users, and for the 10-user license, it’s really cheap. It gets very expensive after that.” Competition . “If we didn’t use Atlassian, we’d probably be using more open-source tools—and not enjoying it as much. [Our company] works deeply in the open-source community.” . “Our people don’t necessarily like using commercial tools but are thankfully pragmatic about it, and they accept that at the end of the day we’re a business and we use the best tools that we can find.” . “We were using JIRA for bug tracking, but [our engineers] pushed hard to move to an open-source , so we use Bugzilla. But it’s not as easy to manage [as JIRA was]. I’m in overall charge of the IT infrastructure for [our company], and I think the biggest challenge that I have with open-source software is that it often isn’t developed with an enterprise hat on. So you often don’t get features that an enterprise needs—like centralized user management and features like that.”

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. “It’s interesting to see how the tools space is changing. Taking GitHub as an example—that started out as a service just holding source code repositories. And yet now you can have a wiki on it, you can do bug tracking on it.” . “And there are other platforms as well. If you want to get feedback from customers on your products, you’ve got UserVoice. A lot of these are free as The interesting thing about well.” both JIRA and Confluence is . “There’s actually a lot of choice out there for small businesses. I think that, out of the box, they seem where Atlassian does win is they do have a very rich portfolio—you’ve got JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, Bitbucket Server—and they all integrate with to be fairly simple products. each other. So you can be using Confluence to do documentation and it can Where I think those two reference JIRA issues. You can have HipChat up and running, and a change products win over, say, in JIRA or Confluence can spark a notification in a HipChat room.” SharePoint or Bugzilla is the “That’s not to say you can’t do that with other platforms, because you can. . plug-in ecosystem, where third You can use Slack, for example, and have that integrating with GitHub. But sometimes things do work that little bit better when they’re all from the parties have been able to same company. Look at Microsoft: Their products work better when they’re extend the functionality of in together because they have that advantage of knowing how to get the those products quite best out of their tools together.” significantly. Atlassian may be . “The interesting thing about both JIRA and Confluence is that, out of the struggling with the pace they box, they seem to be fairly simple products. Where I think those two products win over, say, SharePoint or Bugzilla is the plug-in ecosystem, need to keep the customers where third parties have been able to extend the functionality of those happy. The number of feedback products quite significantly.” items on Service Desk at the . “In some respects, [Atlassian] actually doesn’t have competition because I moment are quite don’t know of anyone else’s product that is quite that flexible. I might have said SharePoint, but SharePoint gets extended in very different ways to the overwhelmingly negative. And way Confluence does.” they’ve got to sort that out. . “If I want a Confluence plug-in, for example, I can search for add-ons [on the IT services director at a midsized Atlassian Marketplace] and click ‘buy,’ and it sorts out the payment and software organization installs it. … Within 30 seconds I can have that software sitting on my copy of Confluence. It’s really well done.” . “We currently use Zendesk, but we’re seriously looking at JIRA Service Desk [as a replacement]. Zendesk is quite expensive, but there are features missing from [JIRA] Service Desk at the moment that would stop us moving.” Growth Potential . “With the latest version of JIRA, Atlassian has already taken significant steps to break out of that silo of software development teams. They’ve split it up into core JIRA, JIRA Service Desk, and then the more historical bug-tracking aspect of it. The idea of that is to give the tools functionality to allow nonsoftware teams to get into it more easily. Service Desk is a really good example of how [expanding into other parts of the enterprise beyond software development] is where Atlassian is heading.” . “It’s a smart move on their part. JIRA started out as a bug tracking system, but we actually use it more for project management and [Bugzilla] for bug tracking.” . “What we want to do with [JIRA] Service Desk is set up separate teams for these departments but all on the same platform. Then HR can have a ticketing system; finance can have a ticketing system; marketing can have one and so on. That really shows how the Atlassian tools are growing outside of software development, to our benefit.” . “As wonderful as Atlassian’s approach is … there are also problems with it. For example, with Service Desk, they said it was going to sit on top of JIRA, but JIRA’s actually quite a complicated platform to get into. With Service Desk, they decided to simplify it right down, so you can just install it and pretty much get going with it straight away.” . “But because they took that approach, Atlassian focused really hard on being used as a web-based service desk. And if you’ve ever had to deal with a ticketing system or liaise with a customer service company, a lot of them deal by email. Out of the gate, the email handling in [JIRA] Service Desk was really poor; there’s still no customization of how those emails look. From a Service Desk perspective, that’s actually quite poor. You cannot brand those emails.”

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. “If you’ve got external customers, there’s nothing on there, logo-wise, that says it’s from your company. And the user feedback [from Atlassian customers] is reading more and more like complaints rather than ‘Here’s an idea, why don’t you do this?’” . “We’re looking very closely at [whether to implement JIRA Service Desk], which is why I’ve been looking at a lot of the feedback users are putting in, more so than, say, JIRA [Core] or Confluence or the other products. The feedback is starting to get really negative.” . “Atlassian may be struggling with the pace they need to keep the customers happy. The number of feedback items on Service Desk at the moment are quite overwhelmingly negative. And they’ve got to sort that out.” . “The other area where Atlassian has been putting a lot of focus is their cloud version—probably similar to the approach that Microsoft takes with Office 365 vs. Office on your PC. The cloud versions get more rapid releases because they’re in full control of that environment, so they can make the change and push it out there for the cloud customers to start using, and they can get feedback.” . “It’s a smart move, but it does mean that companies like ours, which host the products [on-premise], have to then wait for those all to be bundled up into the next release that we can get hold of. It has pros and cons.” . “When they did this last release of JIRA, which they split into three parts, people almost felt that Atlassian was focusing on that split for the company’s benefit over the customers’ benefit. They felt that it might have been done for licensing/revenue benefit.” . “This is a complaint I see quite often about Atlassian, that new releases of products may be coming with new features, but they aren’t necessarily features that people have asked for, and they’re not necessarily coming with fixes to problems that have been reported.” . “They probably can sustain their growth but only if they do start paying attention to what the customer is asking for.” . “I’ve been to the Atlassian conferences, and the two CEOs of the company are very nice guys—very approachable. But my overwhelming fear is that communication increasingly seems to be one way: It’s from the customer to Atlassian, and there isn’t anything coming back.”

5) Abraham Sultan, co-founder and VP of engineering for Apprenda, a developer of enterprise platforms-as-a-service JIRA can be challenging to set up but is an exceptional tool for development teams. Confluence also is a great product and is more widely used within Apprenda’s sales, marketing and support teams. Apprenda even uses Confluence for some customer-facing functions, and its easy integration with JIRA is a plus. Apprenda uses the cloud versions of Atlassian’s software and, thus, cannot take advantage of many potentially useful third-party extensions. Atlassian could expand beyond development teams, but its products might suffer if it shifts focus away from its core customer base of software developers. Apprenda tried HipChat but plans to stick with Slack as a messaging tool. Atlassian . “JIRA is used by about 80 people [at our company], mainly for software development.” . “It’s a sophisticated configuration engine to help you define whatever workflow you want. That’s great and also challenging.” . “It’s great because as you mature through understanding your processes, you can customize JIRA to closely follow whatever you want to do. It’s challenging because with all that great power, it can become quite difficult to figure out what you want to do.” . “If you just want some basic workflow and project management, it can be a little tough to get started, a little harder to understand that you might not need all these other configuration options and that you can just have a really quick and simple tool. Some of the later versions have simplified some of that, but there is still a bit of that belief that JIRA is a complicated thing even though it’s very powerful.” . “That’s the biggest hurdle: getting started. Once you learn it, you can get a little crazy and do some more and over time, you’re always tweaking little things. That’s one of the benefits. Once you know what you’re doing, adapting it and evolving your processes can happen because the tool doesn’t prohibit you from doing it.” . “We use the on-demand [cloud] version; in that [version], when you’re starting a new project, now there are a few templates for this type of project or that type of project. There’s still a whole bunch of options, but at least it configures that easier.”

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. “[The third-party ecosystem] is one of the areas that we’ve been a little disappointed about. We’ve tried to use lots of add-ons, but a lot require that we use the on-premise version. There’s not a huge number of them for the [The third-party ecosystem] is cloud version. We’ve found several plug-ins that we’ve wanted to use but one of the areas that we’ve can’t. That’s been a bit frustrating.” . “That can be a great value, knowing there are all these plug-ins and such a been a little disappointed huge ecosystem and people writing these different extensions. But there about. We’ve tried to use lots of are all these plug-ins we can’t use even though we need to do exactly [what add-ons, but a lot require that they provide].” we use the on-premise version. . “With the on-demand version of JIRA, one thing we haven’t been able to get There’s not a huge number of great information from is the reports. It’s great for the team to manage their work, but it’s hard to generate reports and get useful information as to them for the cloud version. metrics for your team.” We’ve found several plug-ins . “Confluence is used by a wider audience, pretty much everybody in the that we’ve wanted to use but company. Our development team, sales teams, marketing teams, support can’t. That’s been a bit teams, everybody uses it. It’s a great tool.” . “We started using it as a wiki, but then you start learning the power of it and frustrating. [JIRA] is fairly the templates and it can be quite sophisticated. Now we use it to organize engrained, and we’re happily information and to track different things in the development process. We using it. We’re not expecting to have a retrospective and meeting notes that we track.” switch. If we were [to switch] … . “We’ve also used it as a documentation and information portal for our it would be a bit complicated customers. We created a sales portal using Confluence, and we configured it so that only certain pages are available to certain customers so they can and troublesome. only see the information we want them to. It includes training materials and Abraham Sultan, co-founder and VP of videos and different resources. They can submit requests through it as engineering for Apprenda, a developer well.” of enterprise platforms-as-a-service . “For teams that have meetings, they can get an aggregated view of all the action items to be completed so you can quickly follow up. It’s been quite useful in a whole bunch of ways.” . “Confluence is fairly simple to use. Most of our users are very familiar with Office tools, so trying to use it as a simplified Word document works for some people. Others are using the more advanced and sophisticated features, like our technical staff. Different users can leverage different features.” . “We tried using Confluence to create some dashboards, but we learned it wasn’t necessarily great for that. I think it’s quite powerful for a wiki though.” . “The development team will plan new stories in Confluence and then they’ll reference the ticket, and it automatically creates that link in JIRA, which is nice because when you’re reviewing the story in JIRA, you can jump back and see its planning document. … You can see the status of a particular ticket directly in Confluence. … Our support team has also used Confluence create pages for customers where they can see the status of their tickets.” . “We tried HipChat, and it didn’t seem that useful. Maybe it was because the only interaction was through the web client at the time, but it didn’t seem to stick. Instead, we use Slack. The nice thing about Slack is that it has all the bot capabilities, so we’ve been able to integrate JIRA into Slack seamlessly.” Competition . “Prior to JIRA, we had used a few others, including one called . It had worked well for us and was inexpensive and simple, but as the team matured, we found we wanted to do some things that Assembla couldn’t.” . “Whenever we were trying to find issues and things like that, it wouldn’t work and it was complicated. That’s why we switched to JIRA: Search capabilities are extremely robust, and the infinite configurability of it meant we weren’t going to get locked in [to a standard setup]. It took us a little while to get started because of the configuration, but it works great for us and everyone is really happy with it.” . “When we were using our previous tool [from Assembla], we built a migration tool to import all of our data into JIRA that first time around.” . “[JIRA] has a very powerful API, so we can extract a lot of the data. But a migration like that [to another solution] is always painful—mainly because I don’t know if we can find another tool that allows us to configure our workflows as neatly and as seamlessly as JIRA.”

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. “So right now [JIRA] is fairly engrained, and we’re happily using it. We’re not expecting to switch. If we were [to switch] … it would be a bit complicated and troublesome.” Growth Potential . “What made JIRA so good for software developers is that they focused on software developers. If [development team clients] started to see [Atlassian] wasn’t continuing to improve it or the improvements were more generic, that is going to hurt them.” . “If they can improve the software developer experience by addressing some of the issues that make it tougher for nontechnical teams, that could be a benefit.” . “It does confuse things a bit to have all these different options. Before, all of the features were in one product, but now it feels like you might not get all of those innovations. Instead, they’ll be going into other products and you’ll have to pay extra for it.”

6) Strategy executive for a distributor and supply chain services firm JIRA is used primarily within this company’s IT department, but Confluence is deployed throughout the organization, including sales and marketing. Confluence in particular is easy to learn and very flexible, unlike some competing products that take a lot of time and resources to use and maintain. Atlassian has a great opportunity to grow beyond software development, and this source plans to evaluate JIRA Core, which is aimed at business teams. Atlassian . “As far as JIRA, it’s primarily [used in] IT now, but I just asked how to get plugged into JIRA Core so I can begin to explore this new business side of JIRA.” . “As for Confluence, it is well-deployed into the organization in almost all departments, even sales and marketing—200 spaces total. We also have [several] Atlassian plug-ins and a diagramming tool that ‘versions’ diagrams Unlike some products from just like Confluence versions web pages and attachments.” . “We also have an awesome tool for company knowledge collection [using establishment companies that I Confluence]. When I mentioned it in our local Atlassian User Group, many describe as cruise ships that others were interested in the concept. I am not aware of anything like it, have a high cost of entry and and it is our most contributed to space from first-time users—over 6,000 take a lot of resources tools unique terms or topics currently available with a dedicated search widget.” . “In the case of the more than 100 business-side Confluence spaces we like Atlassian are more like have out there, there is a business owner who is the space administrator, kayaks — easy to learn, easy to so there truly is very little IT engagement required on an ongoing basis. They turn in whatever direction you build their pages and manage who is in their space. I refer to this as like and easy to pull out of the ‘democratizing’ technology that previously had to always go to central water. experts, which slowed things down, sometimes glacially.” . “We actually just fired up HipChat Server this week, so have a ways to go to Strategy executive for a distributor and have a story on that.” supply chain services firm Competition . “I do believe a very strong benefit of Atlassian products—and Confluence in particular—is the ability to determine your path organically.” . “Unlike some products from establishment companies that I describe as cruise ships that have a high cost of entry and take a lot of resources and investment to acquire, build, maintain and extend, tools like Atlassian are more like kayaks in my view—easy to learn, easy to turn in whatever direction you like and easy to pull out of the water.” Growth Potential . “We and a growing group of customers are very enthused about Atlassian’s potential for [moving] beyond software development circles. We were one of their customers who I believe saw it before they did.” . “They do realize today that’s another market for them to penetrate. Some evidence of that is their recent release of JIRA Core and their support for marketplace tools that allow businesses to ‘bend’ tools to business needs, as the business may desire to do so.”

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7) Design analyst at a cloud technology and web applications company Atlassian’s products are not especially innovative in a modern software organization but are good enough for most developers. Software teams that use its tools often pull other parts of their own organizations into Atlassian’s user base. Still, Atlassian’s user experience must improve in order to ensure succeed with a broader audience. However, even when an Atlassian product is inferior to the competition, clients can easily integrate Atlassian products with outside tools. JIRA is an important tool for organizing offshore work, which is an emerging market in some countries. Atlassian . “I’ve worked in software consultancy trying to help companies be more agile, and I don’t think Atlassian is doing anything particularly different from what modern software organizations are expected to do. They are following established principles for engineering culture. But they’ve been able to conquer [collaboration and task management] that [had not been] previously mastered. “ . “Open architecture and third-party applications are a way that [Atlassian] has been able to improve considerably. The third-party stuff many times makes things more accessible for users. But they have some work to do on the user experience. They do pretty well in satisfying the demands of [Atlassian] has a pretty good developers, but the development world is not necessarily representative of foothold on what it is doing, but the whole organization.” they have some potential to be . “HipChat is an illustration of where [Atlassian’s] UX is barely acceptable for disrupted unless they keep generic users. Atlassian has been doing good work in terms of improving the developer experience, but if we generalize that to a broader user improving and developing. experience—I think the standards for the users of HipChat are higher than Design analyst at a cloud technology [Atlassian] can deliver at this time.” and web applications company . “[HipChat is] clearly an inferior product to Slack, but they’ve been able to bundle it with their other products.” . “[Atlassian] offers different types of integration and openness. Our company uses both Atlassian products and Slack. We have a lot of integrations from JIRA to Slack.” . “It’s important that Atlassian is not binding customers to themselves. One surprisingly long-lived example [of the opposite] is Microsoft Office. If anyone were to try to come to the market with [Microsoft’s] proposition nowadays, it would be impossible. You have to have much more openness.” . “Confluence is improving slowly but surely. But there’s always this tradeoff with being easy to use. You usually lose some flexibility, which has happened with Confluence.” . “The most important thing is they are able to keep on a continuous path of improvement and development.” Competition . “A lot of software providers have been big and bulky and slow to react. IBM and other competition have been slow to adapt [to a more collaborative business environment]. Atlassian has not yet fallen victim to this kind of giant disease.” . “Not all developers love the Atlassian products. Some of them aren’t that great. The competitive environment is such that people perceive the Atlassian products as good enough.” . “[Atlassian] has a pretty good foothold on what it is doing, but they have some potential to be disrupted unless they keep improving and developing.” Growth Potential . “Organic growth is very important for a software-as-a-service provider. In [Atlassian’s] case, I think their flexibility has been one of the main reasons they have such a good reputation. They have enough promoters to support the organic growth. I’ve written about how development teams create pull demand for the product, and I’ve heard a few more stories about this kind of thing happening since.” . “People who are used to following heavier processes are switching to JIRA.” . “We are seeing more integration and need for collaboration and use of software all over the place.” . “In the Finnish economy, we are outsourcing about one-fifth of IT projects offshore to lower cost sites. Finland is nothing compared to the development costs in New York and Silicon Valley. Our projects might cost 50% less, but you can still find locations in Eastern Europe and Asia that are more affordable. Tools such as JIRA are very important in order to organize offshoring work. That’s one of the emerging markets I see.”

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. “It’s hard to tell if [Atlassian’s] low-touch approach will scale. I’ve seen that they started to build on top of their organic sales. They have their account management network as well. I think that this is a sign they’re trying to take this larger scale more seriously. It indicates they might be entering a period where they will have to spend more money on customer acquisition.”

8) Project delivery manager for an enterprise software developer This source’s 20-person software development team uses JIRA and finds it intuitive, customizable and an overall great tool for an Agile development process. Its easy integration with Confluence is another plus. He also has experience with VersionOne, which he liked, and with Tuleap’s Open ALM (Enalean SAS), which he found lacking. Switching from Open ALM to JIRA was painless. Atlassian has a chance to expand beyond software development as any team that needs to manage a complicated to-do list could benefit from JIRA and Confluence. Atlassian . “We are using JIRA in my team. I have a team of 20 people in an Agile [JIRA] is intuitive, and the [development group]—product owners, product managers, developers, quality assurance, etc.—delivering e-commerce suites, front end and back connection to Confluence was end, to clients. In our [overall] department, we are three sections of about a real benefit for the team. The 20 people each, running three to five concurrent projects.” customizations and plug-ins . “[JIRA] is intuitive, and the connection to Confluence was a real benefit for were very good too. Any the team. The customizations and plug-ins were very good too, allowing us organization that has a list of to integrate [Google’s] Gerrit [an open-source coding tool], for example.” . “We are using an older version of JIRA, so some of the benefits are not things to do that require a WIP there. However, the ability to access the information anywhere, anytime— [work in progress] processing not a unique feature—is very handy. And the reporting is good but can be queue could use JIRA. It could improved with an upgraded version.” be used as a task manager, Competition highlighting all the activities . “I have experience with VersionOne, JIRA and Open ALM.” . “Each has their own way of doing things, but the basics of the Agile Scrum required and allowing whoever or Kanban boards are pretty similar. What I liked about VersionOne was the it may be to pick up tasks or be connected collaborative approach, the team-based functionality and the assigned tasks—a marketing ability to link stories at the epic and story level as well as the test cases. The team, for example, that has a reporting was quite good too.” launch to prepare for. . “As for Open ALM, the implementation that we had in our team was really not optimal, but I saw other teams at [a prior company] that did a lot more Project delivery manager for an with the tool. To me, it was the weakest of the three, but the team had enterprise software developer gotten used to it so the change curve was too high until there was external pressure to change.” . “When that pressure came, we started using JIRA.” . “JIRA has everything that was good about VersionOne, and removed a lot of the issues that we had with Open ALM.” . “It really depends on the teams and their ability to adopt something new. Personally, I didn’t like Open ALM after having a great experience with VersionOne. I think JIRA is definitely fit for our purpose, but it’s much more about how much investment the team will put in to ensure that the tool meets the process needs.” . “I would like to see a burn-up chart so that we can demonstrate the accumulated value over time as we deliver to the client. I know it can be done but not on the current JIRA version, and not without some local investment.” . “The switch from Open ALM to JIRA was relatively easy. We gave the full team an hour presentation and recorded that presentation. The main things to be taught is the difference in terminology—a story defect vs. a development issue vs. a bug, etc.” . “Another thing with JIRA is the term ‘issue,’ which, at least in North America, has a negative connotation. In VersionOne, I think it was an ‘item,’ which could be a defect, a task, a story, an epic.”

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. “The transition from Open ALM to JIRA was done in one sprint. We basically froze the Open ALM system and had the team use JIRA in the next sprint after the training. There were some lagging things to adapt of course, team by team, but that was OK.” . “There are so many things going on [with Agile development], and I’m not sure if they are already covered with the existing tools. The key [software feature that may be missing from existing tools] would be continuous delivery and deployment—bridging the gaps between the development organizations and the deployment organizations.” Growth Potential . “Yes, of course [Atlassian can expand beyond software development]. Any organization that has a list of things to do that require a WIP [work in progress] processing queue could use JIRA.” . “It could be used as a task manager, highlighting all the activities required and allowing whoever it may be to pick up tasks or be assigned tasks—a marketing team, for example, that has a launch to prepare for. There is likely a project manager with a long, complicated go-to-market plan, but the list of things to do could be managed [in JIRA] as a Kanban. The communication tools are useful too, and of course, a Confluence wiki could help them.”

9) Project manager at a professional services firm providing custom technology solutions This source has only seen Atlassian products in use at software development firms. JIRA is fairly straightforward for nonsoftware professionals, so business teams should be able to use and even administrate it after some ramp-up time. Atlassian’s recent split of JIRA into three products did not improve in performance, and the changes to usability are a mixture of good and bad. Also, pages in Confluence are difficult to format and manage. Atlassian If a [nonsoftware professional . “We don’t develop for Atlassian at all. We just use it for our own development.” were] to come in and try to use . “Overall, I wouldn’t call [JIRA 7.0] an improvement.” JIRA, I think it would be pretty . “In performance, I haven’t noticed much of a change [from JIRA 6.5 to JIRA straightforward for them. 7.0]. I haven’t noticed a difference in speed at all.” . “In terms of usability, there is some stuff I do like. I like that while before Project manager at a professional projects and boards were separated, now on the left-side panel they have services firm providing custom technology solutions boards and issues. I like that you can collapse and expand these. It makes it cleaner and easier.” . “I don’t like some of the stuff in the admin portal. I spend a fair amount of time there. They’ve reduced the clutter a bit, but in doing that, it takes longer to get things done.” . “I can see why they did it, but I don’t much like it.” . “I’ve been using Confluence for a long time. I find it a pain to format and manage my wiki pages. It’s very tedious for me. I end up settling for something that isn’t my vision at all.” Competition . N/A Growth Potential . “If a [nonsoftware professional were] to come in and try to use JIRA, I think it would be pretty straightforward for them.” . “What does take a long time is admin. It would take a bit of a ramp up for someone who isn’t familiar with this kind of software. They could do it, but an experienced user would be faster.” . “We work for a variety of clients, but the only ones who are using [Atlassian’s] products are software development houses.”

2) Users of Competing Software Three of these five sources said Atlassian’s JIRA is not the right fit for every company, but they offered different reasons. One

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source said JIRA lacks certain project management features; the second said it has too many features for a small operations; and the third said his company’s product managers prefer VersionOne. A fourth source said JIRA probably is the best available tool for software development but that his team has not switched to it because of the time and effort required for setup. The remaining source said his company could save money by switching to JIRA but is satisfied with VersionOne. One source thinks open-source alternatives are Atlassian’s biggest threat. Confluence got high marks as a companywide collaboration tool, though one source said his organization will not use it because it does not allow customers to access pages for free. Another source reported a push from some newer employees to switch from Confluence to SharePoint, but he has not been pleased with the results so far. One source who uses Slack said HipChat needs better search and notification features. Atlassian’s entire suite could expand beyond development teams, but the company also allows for easy integration of its products with outside tools.

Key Silo Findings Atlassian - 3 of 5 sources said JIRA is not the right fit for their company. o 1 said it lacks the agile project management features for large programs. o 1 said its features are overkill for a small company. o 1 said developers like it but that product managers prefer VersionOne. - 1 said JIRA may be the best-in-class for software development, but his company is not using it yet because it requires substantial time and effort to set up. - 2 said Confluence is a great collaboration tool. o 1 has been shifting to SharePoint but may reconsider that decision. - 1 said his company won’t use Confluence because it does not allow external users, such as clients, to access pages for free. - 1 said HipChat needs better search functions and configurable notifications. His firm uses Slack. Competition - 2 said they use GitHub rather than JIRA and 2 use VersionOne. o 1 said GitHub is inadequate and his team could switch to JIRA. The other said it is sufficient for a small team. o 2 said VersionOne is a great tool for project management and Agile development. 1 said it is more expensive than JIRA, but the other said the cost is comparable. - 1 thinks Atlassian’s biggest competition is from open-source tools that are good enough for many uses. - 1’s company uses Polarion Corp. rather than Confluence in its engineering and development departments, but the source would like to switch. - 1 said switching from VersionOne to JIRA would be very difficult. Growth Potential - 1 thinks Atlassian has as good a chance as any company at becoming the standard provider for software development teams. - 1 said Atlassian’s entire suite could be used beyond software development, but he is more inclined to stick with JIRA and connect outside tools to it.

1) Technology executive for a developer of workplace productivity solutions This source’s company uses both VersionOne and JIRA. Product managers tend to prefer VersionOne, finding it easier to use and more conducive to the company’s development process. Engineers, however, like JIRA better because of its configurability and its easy integration with other development tools like Bamboo. The cost of the two products is similar, though being forced to purchase add-ons in order to get certain functions in JIRA can be irritating. Atlassian could expand its presence in enterprise with its full suite of solutions, but for now this source is more likely to integrate outside tools into JIRA rather than adopting all of Atlassian’s products. Atlassian

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. “We have about 20 to 25 people in one business unit—a mix of roles—using VersionOne. We have about the same number in another division using JIRA, with a 25% crossover between team members. The split is a historical one related to an acquisition.” . “[JIRA and VersionOne] solve the same thing as a goal, just done in different business units.” . “Developers like JIRA more because of the native integration via Bamboo, Product managers don’t like FishEye, etc. We have been using Greenhopper [now called JIRA Agile] for [JIRA] because it is built around Agile development for a while, though I guess it is built in [to JIRA] now.” . “Product managers don’t like [JIRA] because it is built around tickets, not tickets, not around releases, around releases, epics, themes and such. It has limited reporting and epics, themes and such. It has visualizations around releases and themes or product management-centric limited reporting and areas. Sure, you can write a query to get data, but that is for an engineer, visualizations around releases not a product manager.” and themes or product . “The user interface is poor for sprint management—moving things around. It’s hard to move blocks of items at once. Onesie-twosie drives product management-centric areas. managers nuts. There are some bulk options in JIRA, but they are not user- VersionOne has things out of friendly and are way beyond a product manager’s interest.” box and ready, though perhaps . “The fact that a sprint has to tie to a product is a limitation.” not as tweakable. It’s sort of “QA [quality assurance] seems to be equally comfortable with [JIRA and . giving you the sandwich vs. VersionOne].” . “No problems [with support for either]. Fast updates, and JIRA has a great giving you the bread, forum.” condiments, meat and cheese, . “JIRA Agile still feels like a bolt-on, even though we’ve had Greenhopper for and letting you make your own maybe five years. It just isn’t there naturally. The strength is add-on [as JIRA does]. libraries, integration and developer satisfaction.” . “We’ve written our own Salesforce.com [Inc./CRM] integration with each, Technology executive for a developer of and both integrate with our customer portal for item status. As VersionOne workplace productivity solutions did not have integration with more tools when it was purchased, we had to write our own. Those tools exist now, but since we already wrote them, we didn’t pursue [buying them]. JIRA comes with purchasable options for these [integrations], which we have.” . “HipChat needs better search and configurable notifications. It’s been a little while [since we have used it], so maybe it has these. The marketing team likes Slack, so we all ended up using it.” . “Confluence didn’t have free external users, last I looked. We need a tool that allows us to collaborate with customers, not just internally but something with more ‘oomph’ than Basecamp. Basically, our product support team can’t use Confluence. Thus, it is a nonstarter.” Competition . “VersionOne’s strengths are that it’s more product management-, planning- and Agile [development]-friendly. Its sprint and folder mapping is perfect for how we handle things.” . “It’s also good in dealing with large volumes of items. It can filter, search and check 50 or 100 items and perform an action on them. … We have thousands of items to track.” . “Developers like [VersionOne] less, specifically around build and source integration. To be fair, this could possibly be better with add-ons like we’ve done in JIRA.” . “VersionOne seems [built for] Agile [development] from the ground up, and you can tell based on product management ease, with reports and views that are [usable] out of the box. It’s not as engineer-centric. Product managers like working with lists and grids, which VersionOne has and JIRA does not.” . “VersionOne has things out of box and ready, though perhaps not as tweakable. It’s sort of giving you the sandwich vs. giving you the bread, condiments, meat and cheese, and letting you make your own [as JIRA does]. The engineering team doesn’t mind [JIRA’s make-it-yourself approach] and actually prefers it. Product managers and planners do not. The product support and service team, when looking for things or statuses, do not [like JIRA’s approach].” . “[The cost between the two is] comparable for us, perhaps due to favorable terms and long-term usage. The add-on cost in JIRA is annoying sometimes. The tool should do some of those things [that we have to buy add-ons for].”

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Growth Potential . “We need and use tools like Slack, Asana or Wrike. We use Basecamp sometimes with a couple of our vendors. Could that all happen in the Atlassian suite? Sure, although I am more inclined to start with connectors. To me, Atlassian seems to do a better job with that than VersionOne.” . “Atlassian has struggled to get buy-in from other departments, though again, the tech team loves it.” . “Atlassian has done a great job with connectors and developing a platform for tools integration. I guess they could simply look at connectors with heavy download or usage and assess if they should build or buy that kind of product for their platform vs leaving it to a connector.”

2) Software architect for a legal services firm This organization has more than 400 employees using VersionOne, mainly in IT-related teams. VersionOne is more expensive than JIRA, but the firm has no interest in switching because VersionOne works well and swapping solutions would be difficult. The firm has been rolling out SharePoint to replace Confluence as a collaboration tool across both IT and business teams. However, it may reconsider that decision as SharePoint requires more support and is not as agile. Atlassian . “We recently took a quick look at JIRA. We stayed [with VersionOne] because it has helped make us highly successful, and no one wants to switch. Everyone is pretty happy with it.” . “Switching would also be a huge endeavor, given the size of the user base and with over 13,000 backlog items open across dozens of teams.” . “[VersionOne] is more expensive [than JIRA], but we believe the features make it worth it. [JIRA] would probably save us $15,000 to $20,000 per We recently took a quick look year to switch to it. We’re only paying maintenance on VersionOne, so the price difference is steeper for someone who’s making their first buying at JIRA. We stayed [with decision.” VersionOne] because it has . “JIRA seems to have a lot less Agile project management features for helped make us highly managing large programs, large backlogs, etc. But … switching cost and the successful, and no one wants fact that no one is unhappy with VersionOne has us sticking with the status quo.” to switch. Everyone is pretty . “We’ve used Confluence for about 10 years, and it’s already used happy with it. Switching would extensively across both IT and business teams. It’s been a great product, also be a huge endeavor. but new organizational blood has pushed an initiative to replace it with [W]e’re finding that SharePoint SharePoint.” requires a lot more resources . “We have a camp of very happy Confluence users and some vocal parties touting SharePoint as the premier collaboration platform. [SharePoint’s] to support and is not as agile integration with Office/Office365 and Shared Folders/OneDrive does seem as Confluence. It’s possible we superior. It has some basic workflow and other development tooling may reconsider the SharePoint capabilities, although I’m not sure how much we’ll use them.” direction. . “However, we’re finding that SharePoint requires a lot more resources to support and is not as agile as Confluence. It’s possible we may reconsider Software architect for a legal services the SharePoint direction.” firm Competition . “VersionOne has been a great tool for managing distributed Agile teams. It’s been the first project management tool that I’ve seen developers and team members be happy to use.” . “Up this point, we’ve mostly used it to define product backlogs—epics, stories, defects—and assemble, estimate and execute releases. It supports all of the key Agile processes like estimation, sprint planning, sprint execution/daily standups, and retrospectives.” . “In the past few years, the product has started to become more useful in higher-level planning like roadmaps and managing pipelines. The new DevOps features also seem promising in linking to CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous delivery] automation.”

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. “We have over 400 users, including offshore partners. [VersionOne] is used by development, infrastructure and a few non-IT teams are dabbling with it.” . “[Support is] pretty good, but we haven’t needed it very much.” . “[VersionOne is] trying to become more of a PPM [project portfolio management] tool, and they still have work to do to get there. Their analytics add-on is kind of clunky and seems to break with almost every upgrade. It’s also on the expensive side compared to JIRA.” Growth Potential . N/A

3) Technical marketing manager for a software startup Atlassian has a good chance of becoming the standard tool for software development in enterprises, but may be challenged by less complex tools that appeal to smaller businesses. GitLab, for example, provides a good all-in-one solution for smaller teams. In its favor, Atlassian has excellent customer service, and its decision to make JIRA available to open-source Apache Software Foundation projects gives a lot of developers exposure to its tools. Spreading collaboration software like Confluence beyond development teams and into wider enterprise is difficult, given the strong attachment among many executives to email and Microsoft programs like PowerPoint and Word. Atlassian . “I’ve mostly used JIRA and Confluence, more at my previous [midsized software] company.” . “[At my current company] we’re 100% on GitHub, for source code and for If they’re trying to position the issue tracking.” . “For the level of workflow stuff that a company our size needs, something Atlassian stack as a good like JIRA seems to be overkill.” solution for small companies, . “Issue tracking on GitHub … is really primitive, and it’s something that I can then they have to come up with see our company will end up outgrowing. But if you’re working from the some kind of default setup that point of view of a 22-person team, then GitHub issues are perfectly adequate.” they can give those smaller . “Atlassian has done an interesting thing where they make JIRA available to companies. It won’t be as good Apache Software Foundation projects. And the project that we’re doing is out of the box for the larger compatible with several Apache Software Foundation Projects. And so we projects, but there’s always read and navigate and search their instance of JIRA—and I believe some of some tension. our developers have gotten into some discussion with [Atlassian] on their JIRA bug tracker.” Technical marketing manager for a . “Atlassian is the default choice of where you’d look once you outgrow software startup GitHub. GitHub gives you the basics of everything, and it’s super easy to get started, but the Atlassian products let you do a lot more customization.” Competition . “The big competitor is an all-in-one project hosting/issue tracker/wiki tool. Of course, GitHub is out there and has been doing its thing for quite a while, but it’s remarkably static. … GitHub doesn’t come up with many new features.” . “GitLab is definitely popping up in more people’s consideration. They used to be kind of a lightweight, self-hosted clone of GitHub, but lately they’ve been doing some good stuff around user experience for those kinds of all-in-one project hosting sites.” . “There’s the real possibility that something like GitLab that’s simpler and all-in-one, and is probably good enough for most places. It could end up being the small/medium company alternative, and Atlassian [could end] up being more of the system for larger projects, which have more technical and customization needs.” . “If they’re trying to position the Atlassian stack as a good solution for small companies, then they have to come up with some kind of default setup that they can give those smaller companies. It won’t be as good out of the box for the larger projects, but there’s always some tension.” . “There’s the gap between zero price and one dollar—and that’s the biggest gap. Once you’ve started paying for something, where you’ve agreed that whatever product is worth paying for, then these types of tools are about

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managing people’s time. So once the company is paying for the service in general, it seems to be not completely price-elastic but price becomes not as big of an issue.” . “If it’s something where there’s an open-source angle to it—for example, a web group or an IT infrastructure group, or a small enough amount of work that it doesn’t get management attention—[developers] can start using a product like GitLab, and then it spreads out from there. Then the classic open-source adoption model is definitely possible [which makes GitLab a threat].” Growth Potential . “Atlassian has as good a chance at [becoming the standard in software development] as anybody. But it’s really hard to bridge the gap between office space and developer/web space. In a lot of companies, there’s usually somebody whose full-time job is to take things that live in Microsoft Office documents and put them on the web, and vice versa.” . “As soon as a company hires a new vice president of something, and they’re all on PowerPoint and email attachments, then people start looking to that stuff before they use whatever collaboration software is out there.” . “The company where I used to work, IT was using JIRA. Marketing was not. At the company where I am now, we do use the GitHub issue tracker across everybody, whether it’s developers, infrastructure, marketing. … And I can see that the simple GitHub system is easier to get marketing people to deal with the issue tracking than it would be to get marketing trained up on JIRA.” . “I can probably see how you would make a simpler interface to JIRA that would make a more marketing-friendly version of it—it’s just a matter of somebody coding it up. There are Atlassian integrations where they might get a third party to do it.” . “Atlassian has good service, and they do a great job for their existing customers. When I was at a company that was using Atlassian products, the administrator for Atlassian had a much better experience with them than he had with other enterprise software support. And they’ve got that deal with Apache Software Foundation, which gives a lot of exposure to their tools.” . “The only thing that would be a question mark for me would be the challenge from below. Developers [in small teams] can just grab GitLab, say, and work with that because it may be good enough. I know Atlassian’s a great choice for companies that are already big. But the area I’m wondering about is for small companies—are they going to be able to be able to use something [other than Atlassian] and grow with it?”

4) Principal product engineer for a mobile startup based in Silicon Valley Atlassian’s JIRA may be the best and most flexible tool available for managing the software development process, but it takes significant resources to get it properly set up because of all the configuration options it offers. That has so far held back this engineer’s team from switching to JIRA despite some dissatisfaction with its current development software. ’s web-based, open-source collaborative tool is another alternative under consideration if a switch is made. Atlassian . “My general impression of JIRA is that it can function as a best-in-class product if you have somebody with sufficient expertise to configure it to match your company/group’s workstyle. It’s nearly infinitely configurable, but the way it operates out of the box is probably a poor fit for most groups. There is a substantial startup cost.” . “[JIRA has] been around for a while and has acquired enough configurable flexibility and integration with other important pieces of software that it can be made to do whatever you like. You want Waterfall? It can do that. You want Agile? Check. Some other kind of hybrid? No problem.” Competition . “We’re using [CA’s] Waffle.io on top of the GitHub Issue Tracker, which everyone regards as inadequate for our needs. There seems to be a general consensus that were we to switch, we would move to JIRA or , an open-source alternative developed at Facebook [Inc./FB], but no one yet has volunteered to do the dirty work required.” . “Apparently, the associated code-review tools [with Phabricator] are quite good.” . “We decided to switch to [JIRA at my former company] after outgrowing Pivotal Tracker.” . “Tracker is the software manifestation of Pivotal Labs’ development methodology. It has extremely strong—I daresay ideological—opinions about how software development happens. If you don’t buy into their development religion 100%, you’ll find that Tracker is completely unwilling to support you.”

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. “The reality is that very few shops operate under the 100% pure Agile methodology that Pivotal advocates, but I think lots of people make do because they believe, I guess, that it’s so good at the things that it does do My general impression of JIRA that it excuses its inadequacies in the things that it doesn’t.” . “[My former company was] an Agile-ish shop, but found that Tracker sucked is that it can function as a best- at doing things like long-range planning and was awful as a bug tracker.” in-class product if you have . “GitHub’s Issue Tracker is low-featured and designed to appeal to the somebody with sufficient broadest possible audience. It’s well integrated with GitHub, which is really expertise to configure it to it’s only other plus beyond being easy to use. But it’s poor for tracking and match your company/group’s planning and visualization.” . “Waffle.io is an independent application that is able to scarf up the issues workstyle. It’s nearly infinitely that are stored inside GitHub and present them as a Kanban board, which configurable, but the way it is handy as far as that goes. But you end up dealing with the underlying operates out of the box is data through both [Waffle and GitHub], which just feels weird. The whole probably a poor fit for most thing seems like kind of a hack.” Growth Potential groups. There is a substantial . “I don’t know [whether Atlassian’s business model will hamper its chances startup cost. of winning enterprise deals].” Principal product engineer for a mobile . “I would not be surprised if enterprises would actually buy through resellers startup based in Silicon Valley who provide the consulting/support services if Atlassian supports that model. It’s my impression that that is a common way for enterprises to receive service.”

5) Software development lead at a European audio technology company This source brought in Atlassian tools when he joined his company to build out its software development team. Both the company’s software and hardware teams make effective use of JIRA though the product lacks some features. Also, a previous investment in Polarion has stalled adoption of Confluence. Many people in the company acknowledge the limitations of Polarion, but the high cost of changing has quashed any move to switch. Atlassian . “Atlassian is well-known in the software community, but I can see how it We actually are using wouldn’t be that known outside of it.” Confluence for a company wiki, . “We’re not a software company; we used to be a hardware company, and but unfortunately for the software slowly crept in. Now there’s not a single product that doesn’t use a engineering and development microprocessor and software to run as expected.” departments, it was only two . “When I arrived, my company didn’t have a software department. This all started when I joined. I brought in the tools. I had been using Atlassian years ago that it was decided to before. The first thing we brought in was Crucible for code review. We’ve cover the whole engineering been using JIRA for about a year.” work flow with Polarion. It was . “I would appreciate it if we could use Confluence. The integration with JIRA the wrong decision. But they seems to be pretty good.” . “What should be a lot easier in JIRA is that if we do sprint planning, I don’t invested a lot of money in have an easy way to see the team loading. That’s a large minus. I don’t there, and I think it’s not going really see why they don’t have it. There are plug-ins for that, I know, but it away any time soon. should be in there from the start.” . “What’s even more important is what we try to use JIRA for right now. With Software development lead at a European audio technology company the hardware-software thing going together, the organization doesn’t catch up that fast. So for quite a while there will be a hardware department and a software department. Even if we put together a virtual team, there’s still separate reporting. If there were an easy way to connect the two different parts, it would be a big help for us.”

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. “The way [Atlassian’s support] usually works is we scroll through the forums and all that stuff has been asked numerous times by numerous customers. A lot of the times their response is, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to do that.’ We think we’re probably going to have to live with it. … I appreciate the approach that obviously they’re trying not to do the usual thing and cram features in there, but some of the stuff really should be there.” Competition . “We actually are using Confluence for a company wiki, but unfortunately for the engineering and development departments, it was only two years ago that it was decided to cover the whole engineering work flow with Polarion.” . “It was too bad. It was the wrong decision. But they invested a lot of money in there, and I think it’s not going away any time soon.” . “I don’t know why they chose Polarion. I asked around a bit—it was before I joined—and it seems all my colleagues were favoring Polarion. Most people now would be happy to switch.” . “I do have the hope that maybe in a year or two from now we would be able to change that again.” Growth Potential . “Atlassian seems to be mostly on the right track. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have bought it. I’m pretty happy with the stuff that’s in there.”

3) Atlassian Channel Partners Atlassian’s software is flexible and easy to use, and the company’s active third-party marketplace is a key advantage over competitors. Its Confluence is the best software on the market for managing documents and organizing content. It is easier to use than SharePoint and less expensive than both SharePoint and Jive. Atlassian faces a variety of other competitors for different segments of its platform, including Zendesk, IBM and GitHub. Collaboration tools like Atlassian’s are often difficult to displace once a company starts using them. Slack and HipChat are comparable, but Slack seems to be winning the marketing battle. All six sources in this silo believe Atlassian has great potential to expand beyond technical teams, including several who said such branching out already is happening. The company’s efforts to preconfigure its products for more specific business uses will help its chances to move beyond IT.

Key Silo Findings Atlassian - 6 of 6 lauded Atlassian’s software. o 2 said the flexibility of Atlassian’s tools are key, though 1 of those said that’s also a challenge. o 2 said its software is easy to learn and use. - 2 said Confluence is the best solution for document management and organizing content. - 3 said Atlassian’s third-party marketplace is a key advantage. - 1 said the integration of Atlassian’s various products with each other is a big selling point. Competition - 2 named Jive and SharePoint as the common competitors for Confluence. o 1 said employee adoption level of SharePoint tends to be low. o 1 said Jive is a good product but is more expensive and less configurable than Confluence. - 3 listed various other competitors for different parts of Atlassian’s suite, including Salesforce.com, Zendesk, ServiceNow, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), CA’s Rally and GitHub. - 2 said collaboration tools like Atlassian’s are difficult to displace once deployed. - 2 said Atlassian’s products are generally cheaper than its competitors’. - 1 said Slack has a marketing advantage over HipChat but is not necessarily better. This source also said HipChat’s ability to work within a company’s firewall is an advantage for security reasons. - 1 said it will be slow going to get many customers to move to the cloud from on-premise versions of Atlassian software. Growth Potential - 6 said Atlassian has great potential to move beyond software development uses. o 4 said nontechnical teams already are using Atlassian products, including HR, customer support and sales. - 2 said Atlassian’s efforts to make its products more targeted for specific uses will help it grow with business teams.

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- 1 said the use of Agile development outside of IT teams bodes well for Atlassian, and 1 said the growth of DevOps— automating tasks rather than people’s roles—could be a growth driver.

1) Technology executive for an IT services firm Atlassian is in a solid position to grow, particularly within large enterprises. JIRA’s flexibility as an all-purpose tracking tool is fueling its expansion beyond software development teams and into departments like HR, facilities and product management. JIRA is already the default tracker among tech-savvy firms, and Confluence is the default wiki—and not just for software companies. More established companies are starting to adopt Atlassian tools throughout their departments. The huge demand for trained support staff to help with enterprise use of Atlassian tools is a potential barrier to even more rapid growth. Atlassian . “We [support all Atlassian products]. JIRA and Confluence are the tools we most frequently work with large customers with, as well as HipChat and the Around Silicon Valley, if you go JIRA add-ons.” . “JIRA’s done a good job of staying relatively fresh. It’s got a lot of features.” to a VC [venture capitalist] and . “JIRA’s flexibility is a strength, but it’s also one of its weaknesses. If an IT they ask you what your toolset person who doesn’t know any better decides to change JIRA, it can break is, you’ve got to explain why everything for everyone on Monday morning—and that’s where people fear you’re not using JIRA. JIRA is the seven JIRA [configuration] schemes. It’s often when they call in the consultants.” the default tracker, and . “It’s a bit of a dinosaur to change it because it’s so large—but it’s really Confluence is pretty much the solid. Around Silicon Valley, if you go to a VC [venture capitalist] and they default wiki. Security groups ask you what your toolset is, you’ve got to explain why you’re not using JIRA. hate the idea that everybody’s JIRA is the default tracker, and Confluence is pretty much the default wiki. discussing the company’s This goes for software-focused companies but also for anything that’s hot and new.” internal issues on a platform in . “A good example is a 3D printing shop [client]. We went in to help them, and the cloud, so the fact that they’re using JIRA to track all their 3D printing jobs. The guy that introduced HipChat server can be behind it had come from a solar power company where they’d used it to track all the firewall is a big plus for a lot sorts of other pieces of work. Once people find how useful JIRA is as a of big companies. general purpose tracker, they take it with them when they move jobs. It’s long, long grown past software.” Technology executive for an IT services . “[Another] thing that sells a lot of Atlassian tools is that a company might firm have two or three [Atlassian products] already, and then they decide they may as well put another one in because it will just plug-and-play with JIRA— which for the most part is true. I do sell a number of Atlassian systems, just by saying, ‘You’ve got JIRA, so you might as well use Confluence because they play well together.’” . “Atlassian is still pretty focused on [selling] to the smaller companies, which is pretty low-touch [in terms of service and support]. Ninety-eight percent of [support] is done through JIRA issues [online].” . “But for enterprise, for large companies, the way Atlassian has moved in recent years is that you’re expected to pay $35,000 a year for Premier Support, which basically jumps you to Level 2 support. And that’s pretty worthwhile. And then there’s another option called the technical account manager, where for $60,000 a year, you get a third of a person dedicated to you [from Atlassian]. And they’re your champion inside Atlassian.” . “Atlassian probably has 200 people in their [internal] support team—so they do put a lot of effort into that. Yes, [the lack of trained support people could be a barrier to growth]. And that’s one of the reasons why Atlassian says they recognize it could be. It’s why they work with partners who will enhance their support team.” . “It’s a pain to move on from Atlassian products [to a competitor] or any product, but if [clients are] sufficiently irritated by Atlassian not fixing their JIRA bug, then eventually they will move on to something else.”

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. “One of Atlassian’s real strengths is its Marketplace. It adds real strength to the company, because once you’ve got a tool and you know what it does, there’s still the question of how it’s going to be developed. … Will it just be abandoned? What’s the tone in the community?” . “Marketplace is like an in-app purchase. It’s pretty powerful. You’re sitting inside JIRA, and you decide to search for an add-on. You can quickly install it, you get sent the bill a month later, and it’s pretty slick. There are one-man add- on shops that turn over more than $1 million in revenue a year, and Atlassian gets a significant chunk of this.” Competition . “[Our company] is about relationships with the customer and making them happy—it’s not about a particular tool. So if I saw a really strong competitor to JIRA, I’d have to really start looking at it. But honestly, in the last 10 years I haven’t seen a really good competitor at the same price.” . “These things used to cost a lot more. Ten years ago, you used to pay $100,000 for what you can get for $5,000 now. There’s been a big drop in the prices of enterprise service for this kind of feature.” . “Individual groups within a large company will often jump out [of Atlassian] and use their own tools; they’ll use things like Asana or Rally for product management. The other one I see is Trello as a competitor for JIRA Agile. Often we get called to migrate data back into JIRA from these, because when it comes to bug tracking, the engineers don’t want to track their bugs in Trello, for example. And then the executives at the company start to say they want to have one system that does it all.” . “Sometimes you get software developers who decide that JIRA’s got too many fields and they just want a simple bug tracker, so they jump into GitHub. There are a lot of different choices, and different teams have their different priorities for what they get in a tool. But there’s an awful lot to be said for having a single tool that everybody plays in.” . “Jenkins competes with Atlassian on its Bamboo product.” . “Slack is definitely [winning] against HipChat in marketing, but I haven’t Demand is so strong that the seen any proof [that they’re ahead] when it comes to income. I know Slack is the cool new kid on the block, but I use them both. I use Slack for various majority of our sales customers, and I’m not convinced about the difference function-wise engagements are inbound between the two.” rather than outbound. It’s all . “It’s nice that you can have HipChat behind the firewall, which is why [one of people calling to say they want our largest enterprise clients] banned Slack from all their teams and moved Atlassian tools, and ‘Can you to HipChat. HipChat originally ran outside the firewall, like Slack does. But now Atlassian does a HipChat server option, which means you get a HipChat help us?’ server on a box as a VM [virtual machine], and you deploy it inside your own Technology executive for an IT services firewall.” firm . “People are very keen on that. Security groups hate the idea that everybody’s discussing the company’s internal issues on a platform in the cloud, so the fact that HipChat server can be behind the firewall is a big plus for a lot of big companies.” . “If you’re an entirely Microsoft shop, then it might compete [with Atlassian], but then it’s not going to be that great for everyone else. If you try to get your facilities crew to log their problems about a light bulb in Microsoft, they’re going to look at you like you’re crazy.” . “The flexibility of JIRA lets companies say, ‘Well, it starts with the engineering, then IT,’ and then I see how everybody else is going to be able to track new provisioning—HR, legal, facilities. It’s pretty common that [JIRA] spreads virally.” Growth Potential . “We’ve seen very strong growth [of Atlassian products] at the enterprise level, but I know that they’re still growing rapidly—thousands of instances per year—in the smaller end as well.” . “As long as Silicon Valley is expanding, people here and in other tech hubs know about Atlassian—JIRA and Confluence—and I think that means it still has great potential for expansion. There’s no way it’s saturated yet. I’m just seeing more and more demand. Demand is so strong that the majority of our sales engagements are inbound rather than outbound. It’s all people calling to say they want Atlassian tools, and ‘Can you help us?’” . “All the game companies—anywhere from 10 to 500 people—that’s a pretty common [industry] asking about Atlassian. But a lot more established and traditional companies are coming to us too. [A media client] … just needed to track things and needed a decent tool to do it, and that was JIRA. That’s for departments across the board.” . “I don’t think I see many JIRAs where companies are not tracking software development in it. But equally, most of the JIRAs I see are tracking lots more than software as well. Many are also using Confluence. It’s an easy pair to put in.”

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. “Confluence is also pretty sweet because you get the restrictions and security that upper management want on these things. As a company grows, you don’t want everybody to see everything—and you certainly don’t want your third-party contractor poking their nose in every place you’re doing your planning.” . “JIRA started off as a tracker, and it got remade to be an issue tracker. And the way that I describe JIRA to people is, it really is as generic as a big, old ‘to do’ list.” . “It’s the sensibility of JIRA that’s been the reason for its huge growth. Because in my experience, if it’s just a software bug tracker, then it will only cost up to what the VP of engineering can approve. But because it’s now an issue tracker for the whole company, [Atlassian] can charge that much more—and provide that many more features.” . “A good example is facilities tracking. When a light bulb goes out in a bathroom at LinkedIn, it’s tracked using a JIRA issue, which has nothing to do with software development at all—it’s just facilities maintenance.” . “Legal issues tracking would be another use [outside of software teams]. I don’t recommend the tools for deeply confidential information, but for just a generic ‘to do’ list, or a request for something, it’s a really great tool. It has a lot of features for the price point. I haven’t seen an obvious competitor to Atlassian for this kind of market, and the market’s huge. Every company wants some tool that will be a big ‘to do’ list across the whole company, and JIRA, Confluence and the other tools supply that need really well.” . “I work pretty closely with the senior Atlassian PMs [product managers] and also with enterprise customers. … When Atlassian makes statements like ‘We expect to see all of our customers move to the cloud,’ which they said at their Summit at the end of last year, a lot of the older consultants know that this won’t happen soon because the security and legal people working in these big companies are not ready to [move to the cloud].” . “There will always be an on-premises, behind-the-firewall need for whatever Atlassian is doing. Does that mean it’s going to be Atlassian’s focus? No. I think they will be pushing the cloud more because they see how it scales, and they see where the future’s going.”

2) Darryl Duke, founder of Brikit, a designer of collaboration hubs based on Atlassian’s Confluence Atlassian has huge potential for growth outside of IT and software development teams. Brikit has been making inroads with marketing and HR departments, especially with Confluence. The company’s revenue was up 50% in 2015 year to year. Confluence is easier to use, more flexible and significantly less expensive than competitors like SharePoint and Jive. Atlassian’s products also benefit from a thriving ecosystem of add-on developers and support partners. Atlassian . “Our focus, since we started partnering with Atlassian, has always been with nontechnical teams, so it was a little more natural for us to start with Confluence rather than JIRA. But from there we have spread out into other platforms—service desk, questions about calendars, JIRA for business workflow.” . “We have a split role. We have one side of the house that’s the product side [developing add-ons to Atlassian software] and then another side that takes all our products, rolls them up with Atlassian and tries to be more solutions focused—configuration, training, design, rollout support.” . “For a lot of our customers, when we roll these [Atlassian] tools out, they’re not going into software development teams but rather into intranet or companywide models, hitting across business teams. What we’re hearing from our customers, which tend to be HR and marketing departments, is they’re trying to solve the problem of engagement and on-boarding and alignment as well as brand projection inside the company—cultural amplification. It’s solving the problem of collaborating in one place, getting people out of email, making sure things are organized, sticky.” . “Confluence is a very free-form way to have content put together in one spot. … It’s also a very good integration point to tendril out into other systems. One of the big uses we see at the corporate level is they have tons of systems out there … and they’re trying to make it easy for people get access to that and yet consolidate those views. Confluence is a plug-in point. It becomes a central first stop.” . “JIRA is very structured. You’re defining workflows, so it’s very configurable that way. Confluence is more free-form. It still has structure, but if you’re creating a page, there’s not a ton of configuration needed to do that. But we do get asked frequently to help organize corporate data.” . “Confluence is definitely a simpler tool to use [than JIRA]. If you’re using it at just the department level for one team, it doesn’t take a lot of configuration, but when you’re doing it for an entire company, the organization is complex, so you want to make sure the tool fits the organization.”

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. “[Atlassian’s software] is pretty easy for people to dive in and figure out. In many ways, it’s a far easier product than what Microsoft Word has become. The basic usage is definitely something people can figure out. But as with any tool as capable as Confluence or JIRA, as you get further into it, you see Confluence is a very free-form more demand for training.” way to have content put . “There are two classes of problems that [customers] tend to have [with together in one spot. Atlassian’s products]. One area is organizational, how to organize the entire company’s information into the tool. Another area we work on quite a bit is Confluence is a plug-in point. It when you get outside the technical teams. Because Confluence, like any becomes a central first stop. software, is a tool; there can be some cultural resistance to adopting it out The Atlassian stack gives you of the gate. That’s true whether it’s SharePoint or Confluence or anything the solutions for all the ways else.” people collaborate. If you’re Competition . “At the enterprise level, we’re most frequently going up against Jive and looking at Jive or SharePoint, SharePoint. From a technology perspective, obviously the Microsoft you’re only looking at one slice technology set underlies SharePoint. Jive and Confluence both use the Java of that collaboration. stack, but that doesn’t really matter much because that’s not really visible to the users or even the administrators.” Darryl Duke, founder of Brikit, a designer of collaboration hubs based . “Where the big differences are, based on the feedback we get from our on Atlassian’s Confluence customers—mostly it’s a usability issue and a flexibility issue. SharePoint is very structured around file management. They have a wiki built into it, but it’s not very feature-full. The adoption level seems to be the problem with SharePoint.” . “Jive is an interesting one because it tries to go middle ground—trying to be more user-friendly, have more graphic design capabilities and be more of an intranet-type functional [product]. They talk a lot about social business. That’s not a bad product, but it’s a lot more expensive than Confluence and it’s not as configurable when you talk about graphic design and the interface.” . “One of our customers had talked to the Jive sales guys and was quoted something far more expensive [than Confluence]—maybe $300,000 or $400,000—whereas the most you can pay for unlimited Confluence licenses is $24,000. If you go to the enterprise level, you can spend a few hundred thousand dollars [on Atlassian tools], but you have to work really hard to spend that much money on this platform.” . “SharePoint tends to be in the same [cost] range [as Jive], so those are really easy [products] for us to compete against.” . “The main thing about the Atlassian that’s different from other products is that it’s an open platform. You have access to source code if you need it, and then there’s an ecosystem of add-on vendors and expert partners that do services around it. You have this whole external body of hundreds of companies that you can go to. And because it’s open, those guys can do tons of configuration and customization.” . “In terms of stickiness and how easy it is to switch [from an Atlassian tool to something else], it depends a little at what level [a company] is using it. Obviously if it’s a single team, then only that team is impacted. When we’re rolling this out to companies and they’re using it as an intranet that is reaching across the whole company, it’s quite sticky because it becomes sublimated into people’s daily work.” . “Confluence is just one way people collaborate during the day. You’re consuming web pages, constructing stuff, file sharing, and at the same time you might be doing a Q&A that you want to crowdsource answers to or chatting or doing more heavy collaborations with service desk or JIRA tracking. The Atlassian stack gives you the solutions for all the ways people collaborate. If you’re looking at Jive or SharePoint, you’re only looking at one slice of that collaboration. That’s why we get really excited about the platform.” Growth Potential . “Most of their customers are still in software teams, IT teams, doing a lot of work with service desk teams. But they are definitely branching out into business teams. I think they’ve only just begun to tap into that potential. The tech guys are only maybe 10% of the potential user base out there. Atlassian is certainly in that space, but beyond that they’re just starting to get going. That’s exciting for us because that’s where we’ve always been pulling.” . “One of the things they’ve started doing is giving their products more of a use-case focus. Early on, you bought JIRA or Confluence and then bought plug-ins to help you do specific things. Last year, with JIRA, they redid that whole

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product portfolio to split the focus between software development teams, business teams or service desk teams. I know they’re looking at how to do the same thing with the Confluence stack.” . “[Atlassian’s approach of not having a large, direct sales force] is a fairly uncommon model. Because they’re not sinking 60% or 80% of their revenues back into sales operations, they just plow their money back into R&D, and their products are quite a bit cheaper. They’re priced in a way so that you can have tiny teams getting onboard for $10 and then the same product—not a different version—scales all the way up to unlimited users in very large corporations.” . “The real value in this company is going to be realized in 12 to 24 months out when they can hit a market that’s 10 times larger than what it is today.” . “Last year their revenue growth was about 47%, and that’s just focusing on pure IT and software development teams. I think there’s a lot of room for further growth. I see acceleration not leveling off, at least for the next few years. … Our revenue was up about 50% year over year [in 2015], and we doubled our staff.” . “There are also a lot of companies using one or two of their products that could be using the whole stack.”

3) Dan Hardiker, CTO for Adaptavist Atlassian is well placed to continue its track record of growth. Plenty of examples already exist of Atlassian tools moving beyond development teams and into wider enterprise. IBM and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) offer real competition in larger enterprises, but Atlassian’s software and price point make it a compelling option for businesses not tied to a legacy software system. Atlassian ultimately should benefit from the trend toward “micropurchasing” in governments and enterprises. Mr. Hardiker, whose company is one of Atlassian’s oldest and largest channel partners, sees the possibility of explosive growth should the undercurrent of DevOps take hold the same way Agile development did. Atlassian . “The Atlassian market space is an interesting one, mainly because they’ve taken a very strong stance around creating software that audiences lust after. They’ve focused on the end users and the grassroots, which means they’ve not really targeted a particular [industry or market] segment at all. They’ve never gone after a given vertical instead solving generically applicable problems.” . “If we look at Agile [development] and the Agile transformation movement that’s happened, arguably over a similar lifespan [to Atlassian], you don’t really go on an ‘Agile course’ like you would any other project management course. It doesn’t feel like a procedure you’re learning. Rather, it feels like a different way of approaching the job that you do. I think Atlassian has ridden alongside that, and taken it to heart alongside with the software they deliver.” . “You do your work with Atlassian software in a better way, in a way that fits you and what you’re trying to achieve. And when you translate that from software into business practices, I think it gives you an opportunity to, for example, stop asking the same three questions that a CFO always asks: What do I get? When do I get it? And how much is it going to cost me? But perhaps there’s a different way to do business.” . “If you look at other tooling, there’s often a very prescriptive way in which you apply it. You do things their way, describing how the processes should work best. Atlassian does the opposite: When you’re automating the tasks they do, rather than the people themselves, I think people are able to deliver better. Teams are able to deliver better.” . “I get to work in all kinds of organizations as I deliver Atlassian solutions, and I also get to see how [Atlassian as a company] operates in their own market spaces. Customers and the support of them have always been key to Atlassian—from their early pledge to legendary support … to their open and transparent product management systems.” Competition . “If you look at some of Atlassian’s competitors in the collaboration space that line up against some of their tools—like Confluence, for example—there’s been a concerted effort by the likes of Jive or Microsoft SharePoint to carve out a niche in order to be able to address particular business needs.”

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. “Atlassian has gone more in a task-focused manner, creating generic platforms that solve generic issues across the board. As such, it’s allowed them to create a broader reach. But also it’s garnered the trust and, frankly, the adoption, of the masses at the lower level. And as that’s grown inside of If you look at other tooling, enterprises, other parts of the organization—the nontechnical areas there’s often a very prescriptive usually—have looked to adopt it too.” way in which you apply it. You . “It’s led to Atlassian having a more diverse set of customers than most of do things their way, describing their competitors. If you look at the likes of ServiceNow, for example, inside of the service desk space they have a very defined set of competitors that how the processes should work have a defined set of competing factors. JIRA and JIRA Service Desk—which best. Atlassian does the goes back to the ServiceNow market—has a much broader reach.” opposite: When you’re . “We have very large client [companies]. In fact, half of the FTSE 200 are our automating the tasks they do, customers. Every time we sit down and do a product selection piece, rather than the people Atlassian comes out on top. We try to be as impartial as possible. We’re very transparent in our matrix and how we go about considering these things, themselves, I think people are and ultimately it’s the client’s choice. But every time so far, Atlassian able to deliver better. We try to software has matched if not beaten the competitors they have.” be as impartial as possible. . “Sometimes the cost of switching and changing [from another tool] … We’re very transparent in our exceeds the value in terms of switching [to Atlassian]. But in all cases, given matrix and how we go about a greenfield or compelling event, Atlassian software exceeds their expectations and fits it best. I’ve been impressed to see how that’s kept considering these things, and true year on year, even though Atlassian has gone after bigger and bigger ultimately it’s the client’s markets.” choice. But every time so far, . “You have Zendesk and ServiceNow, which fit in the [JIRA] Service Desk Atlassian software has market space. [Other competitors] depend on what you’re using JIRA for. If matched if not beaten the you’re using it as a business process management tool, then you have the whole IBM suite, and quite often if you’ve bought IBM, your blood runs deep competitors they have. [E]very blue as an organization. Same as if you’ve bought into Oracle. Switching sector can benefit from better onto another database provider is unlikely for no other reason than, at least collaboration. They all need to contractually and procurement-wise, you’re so far down that hole.” communicate and collaborate, . “If we look at the development tools, then Bamboo has some strong competition against things like Jenkins. But in a greenfield environment and the flexibility of the [Atlassian’s Bamboo] still wipes the floor.” Atlassian platform is what’s . “It’s when organizations have lived within the open-source tooling world, remained constant. with PHP [programming language] and the multitude of different open systems that have been inherited … then the move to Bamboo is less Dan Hardiker, CTO for Adaptavist compelling, given the cost of redoing all of those things. However, had they started from scratch or need to make major changes such as a configuration-breaking upgrade, then Bamboo would give Jenkins a run for its money, especially if you’re integrating that with the rest of the [Atlassian] suite.” . “Atlassian stands apart from their competitors—not because they’re competing but because they’re not trying to.” Growth Potential . “We’ve been working with Atlassian for the past 10 years, and they’ve had this trend of consistent growth. … And the growth line hasn’t been a curve; it’s been a strong, straight line. The company has been extremely consistent in ensuring whatever they deliver is predictable. I’d expect this to continue.” . “They have engaged with us to make sure the right shape of deals, the right source of messaging [happens], and they’ve been very clear with their partners, especially their core partners, to ensure what they’re building is not just growable but is also sustainable.” . “An example that I can highlight is a well-known law firm that we worked with recently. [We implemented] a wiki-style collaboration software that reduced the need for the Word documents, emailing, forwarding approach.” . “There, the HR team had been publishing an HR manual that was 300 pages thick, with revisions each year. They’d seen how the software engineering team had been doing their release notes on a monthly basis and how they’d

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been pushing desktop/Word software out and had cut their paper consumption down by 90%. But what really inspired the HR team to get involved was the collaborative and integrative nature.” . “We were enlisted by the HR team to help migrate this 300-page document into a series of pages on their wiki. What they were aiming at was the ability to [provide different permissions within] the system, so that people [throughout the company] only saw what was relevant to them—maternity leave, for example, or sexual harassment duties as it relates to managers.” . “HR was able to cut down what the average employee saw, from 300 pages down to about 100. They found there was a higher uptake of readership. They were also able to monitor readership and see how often it was being read and by who. That wasn’t so much for an oversight point of view but rather a knowledge point of view—to see how useful the information was and how regularly they should keep it up to date.” . “If you were to take HR as a general principle, you’d struggle to think of any industry that doesn’t have an HR department of a similar nature or size. I think it’s more about [a company’s] business practices and the challenges that they’re facing [as to whether a business will be suited to Atlassian products], rather than it is about any particular [industry] sector. I think that every sector can benefit from better collaboration.” . “I struggle to comprehend how many times I’ve walked into varying organizations and have seen commonalities between pharmaceuticals, lawyers, between engineering organizations or car manufacturing … these companies do so many different things, and yet they’re all so similar. They all need to communicate and collaborate, and the flexibility of the Atlassian platform is what’s remained constant.” . “The undercurrent of DevOps has the potential to explode in the way Agile did, unexpectedly. I don’t know where that’s going to lead, but [it is based around] the idea of automating tasks rather than people. Most of the solutions out there are aimed at automating a role. Something as generic as the Atlassian platform has the potential to grow in a direction that could be something Atlassian is planning on.” . “It’s certainly a rising tide, and whether that’s something that explodes over the coming years, I can’t forecast, but if I was to highlight something as having the potential, it would be that.”

4) Consultant at an IT and business process consulting firm This company uses JIRA in numerous internal departments and encourages its clients to do so too. JIRA provides a high level of customization and is easy to adapt as a client adopts new business processes. The split into three versions makes JIRA more attractive to nontechnical teams. Atlassian has a strong marketplace of third-party vendors and is trying to integrate with other services instead of walling them off. Customer service is strong, and Atlassian has been getting more attention from enterprise-level companies. Atlassian . “Back in 2008, we started using Atlassian as our primary solution as we were doing our IT engineering. We started ‘dogfooding’ [using our own product as a means of testing it] just so we could understand the product We’ve worked with many better. We run entirely on JIRA—everything from accounting to marketing to nontech clients using JIRA. One human resources.” thing that has enabled this for . “We’ve worked with many nontech clients using JIRA. One thing that has our clients is JIRA 7.0 and the enabled this for our clients is JIRA 7.0 and the split into three versions.” split into three versions. . “Bringing in any new system, you always have your hiccups. But JIRA helps bring an agile mentality too. We can use JIRA to accommodate waterfall Consultant at an IT and business development, but it’s oriented more for an agile mentality and approach.” process consulting firm . “They do provide a lot of customer service and are very reactive to end users. They have a very open mentality interacting with their clients. They’re always looking for feedback. That’s why they have a customer-facing JIRA [product], so they can have traceability. We’ve heard that feedback from our customers as well. Seeing the status of actual requests and comments is important to [the customers].” Competition . “We were able to customize JIRA to the point where it was similar to competitive software. One good example was on the sales side. Typically companies use Salesforce. We decided to use JIRA because of the level of customization in the tool.”

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. “That’s why we recommend it to clients. We can get JIRA to the point where we can customize it and upkeep it internally as we develop new workflow. You can also integrate it extremely well with other areas of the organization.” . “Atlassian has a strong marketplace. It’s not like they’re trying to lock down their stuff and have a monopoly. They’re really trying to integrate out as much as possible. HipChat Connect has been doing a lot of this; they’ve got connections with Uber, MailChimp, GoToMeeting and more.” Growth Potential . “Agile development is spreading outside of software. I’ve noticed it across several business teams, and have encountered it as part of a Kanban approach.” . “With the IPO, there’s been a lot of attention to Atlassian. We’ve noticed that they grow organically, but since the IPO, they’ve been getting a lot of attention at the enterprise level.” . “We’ve had a lot of success with scaling up and working at that larger level. New add-ons like Portfolio for JIRA helps [enterprise clients] do high-level road mapping and planning.” . “I think that the product is so strong and useful, and the customers and clients are pinpointed so well, I don’t anticipate any issues.”

5) CEO of a developer of software and web services Atlassian has a stranglehold on software development teams. Although its products eventually could expand beyond IT, the company faces stiffer competition with business divisions. Confluence is the best document management tool on the market, though Google could match its feature set if it chose to. For third-party developers like this firm, building products to integrate with Atlassian software has been more lucrative than developing Google-based products. Atlassian . “Atlassian has switched their goals and their approaches to target groups in the last two to three years from ‘We’re the guys who are here for the software people’ to ‘We’re here for every team.’” . “It sells better on Wall Street or NASDAQ to say we build software for every team, but I think it doesn’t match the situation properly.” If you look at [document . “Atlassian has seen that there are reports out there that show them as nice management platforms] today, players or challengers for ALM [application lifecycle management]. They are Confluence beats them all in [Gartner Inc.’s/IT] leader quadrant, but Gartner is a checklist company. hands down. What Atlassian It’s very systematic. I don’t think they do a bad job, but the Gartner does have is that they are quadrants are not the best reflection of reality either.” . “Look at the creation of content. In 1990, you could pull up Word and put a reigning in the software text file there. Word was just the one thing to do. Today things have shifted. industry. If you develop People understand that proprietary documents have a lot of weaknesses. software, you have to work with You come to the web browser as a device to view and alter text.” them. For business stuff, there . “If you look at [document management platforms] today, Confluence beats are competitors. them all hands down.” . “It was a very bold move when Atlassian invested probably 24 months with CEO of a developer of software and 50 engineers to completely rewrite the Confluence editor. The community web services hated it—’Let’s stay with Wiki Markup!’—and everyone thought it was a bad idea, but for Confluence, it was the best idea they ever had.” . “It’s been a pain to integrate [our company’s products] with Google apps. It’s been a pain to integrate with Confluence and JIRA too, but it’s been worth it.” Competition . “What Atlassian does have is that they are reigning in the software industry. If you develop software, you have to work with them. For business stuff, there are competitors.” . “The only thing that can rival Confluence is Google Docs.” . “Google Docs is a big pain … for Microsoft. It’s the killer of Microsoft Word.” . “Confluence is more of a network of pages that can link automatically when tagged. Google Docs isn’t competing directly with Confluence, but Google could do that with a snap.” . “Atlassian is a place where developers can earn money, more so than Google.”

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Atlassian Corp. Plc

Growth Potential . “Will Atlassian be able to break out of the software development world? I think the answer is ‘yes,’ but the answer is also ‘not now.’” . “Atlassian is growing, but Google is growing too. The guys who lose out are people like Microsoft.”

6) Senior product manager for an IT firm specializing in cloud-based web applications Atlassian’s tools are making headway beyond software development teams, with deployment in customer support, HR and finance teams. Its software is easy to learn and configure and generally is less expensive than competitors’. Atlassian’s model of relying on third-party firms to support and implement its software is unusual, but it allows the company to focus on its strength: product development. Atlassian . “[Atlassian’s tools] are loved by end users. Their strengths are [that they are] self-adoption software, easy to learn and use, have lots of learning materials on the web, and the pricing.” . “The weakness is a relatively small marketplace of independent developers.” . “It’s the most intuitive software I’ve ever worked with. Easy to learn and configure. Doesn’t require any hard technical skills to operate it.” Atlassian products are heavily Competition used beyond software . “The key competitors are Zendesk, IBM’s [Rational] ClearCase, HP Quality development by a variety of Center.” business teams like HR, . “[Atlassian’s technology differentiation is that its products are] completely web-based and available both on-premise and in the cloud.” customer support, finance, . “They are cheaper than most of the competitors and extremely cheap for asset management, sales. starter companies.” Senior product manager for an IT firm . “[These types of tools are] very much integrated [in companies that deploy specializing in cloud-based web them], but use cases like ease of use and price makes a compelling case applications for switching.” Growth Potential . “Atlassian products are heavily used beyond software development by a variety of business teams like HR, customer support, finance, asset management, sales.” . “[Atlassian’s reliance on third-party experts for support and implementation] is a fairly unusual model. Several Fortune 100 companies are customers of Atlassian, and they engage partners like [our company] to do complex customization projects on Atlassian products, because Atlassian wants to focus on product development and not on professional services. They know what they are best at—making software that users love—and they believe in partnerships for growth and adoption.”

4) Industry Specialists Atlassian’s prospects for continued growth look bright. The company is well suited for wider enterprise use, as evidenced by JIRA’s popularity with project leaders, engineering teams and product managers. These users often act as evangelists of other Atlassian products, like Confluence, for other teams throughout the enterprise, such as HR or marketing. Although time and expertise are needed to configure Atlassian’s tools initially—especially JIRA and Confluence—the rewards are such that experienced users become big fans. Atlassian has plenty of room to raise prices for its large enterprise clients. Migrating tools to the cloud presents a massive opportunity for Atlassian, with the prospect of much higher volumes outweighing the lower margins compared with on-premise deployments. HipChat has been losing share to Slack but still has strong potential among teams using other Atlassian tools.

Key Silo Findings

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Atlassian - 1 of 1 said JIRA makes planning and other tasks easier for project managers, engineers and product managers. - JIRA can be difficult to set up and requires a dedicated team member to take on that task. - Confluence is a flexible tool that can replace email and Microsoft documents to improve collaboration. - HipChat is losing share to Slack, but its easy integration with other Atlassian tools makes it an option for companies using JIRA and/or Confluence. Competition - IBM and Microsoft as Atlassian’s key enterprise competitors, but both are more complicated. - GitHub is a threat with developer customers. - JIRA Service Desk competes against ServiceNow. Growth Potential - Atlassian products already are being used outside of IT and software development. - Atlassian has a lot of room to increase its prices. - Atlassian will continue to grow as it has during the past five years, led by JIRA and then Confluence.

1) Senior marketing executive at an enterprise social software company Atlassian . “JIRA is typically the first product [of the suite of Atlassian tools] that’s used in a company, and if you have JIRA, it’s kind of a no-brainer to use Confluence.” . “If it’s been set up correctly, JIRA gets tremendous praise from people who say just how much easier it makes their jobs. It’s typically project managers, engineering leads or product managers, rather than the actual developers themselves. It just makes planning and process much smoother. JIRA’s applicable to just about any business when set up and used correctly.” . “Confluence is an interesting one because it’s a very flexible tool. There was a time when it could have positioned itself as a competitor to [Microsoft] Yammer, back when Yammer was a thing, or Jive, which is a public company now. But the decision was made that Confluence could probably be very successful by just positioning the product as a collaboration tool for development teams and then just sell into the JIRA base. The focus historically has been to just sell to people that already have JIRA, [based on] the strength of the integration between the tools.” . “Having said that, the many people who have set up Confluence correctly and have taken the time to teach people how it should be used—in place of email and Microsoft documents, etc.—it can really change collaboration within a business.” . “What you need for Atlassian to be successful within a company is a champion, especially for JIRA—someone who sets it up correctly from the start. It’s definitely not a tool for small teams. … It’s definitely something that requires someone dedicated full time to set it up properly, so they can make sure it matches … your business processes.” . “The last two years the company has worked hard on improving the ‘first user’ experience, making it simpler to set up. Not in terms of getting it installed, because you can get it up on their cloud service within a couple of minutes. It’s more the kind of setup that you need before you’d want to invite a team to come and start using it with you. The [setup] can be complicated, but I know they’ve made a lot of improvements in that area.” . “Really embracing the cloud [is] going to be a bit of a challenge for them, working out how to develop just for the cloud, because they’ve had such a focus on on-premise customers.” . “Another challenge is the fact that, historically, Atlassian hasn’t had sales reps. The closest thing they have to sales is their enterprise teams, people who are focused on selling into large businesses, more of an account manager type role. I think now that they’re a public company, it will be interesting to see whether they do get more pressure externally to create a bigger sales force, because there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there for them.” Competition . “If you’re looking at [competition at] the enterprise level, IBM and Microsoft are the threats. For purely development people, GitHub. And then for HipChat, it’s Slack.”

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. “At the very top end, when you think of Atlassian as a collection of products and the customers who use them all together, then Microsoft and IBM would probably be competitors at the high end—just because they have their own development suites as well. [Microsoft and IBM] are a lot more complicated than Atlassian’s products.” . “When you think about individual products, the competition for JIRA, for JIRA gets tremendous praise development teams, would be GitHub. GitHub has always been a threat, but as a business has had a bit of trouble getting their act together. They did a from people who say just how lot of things wrong [in their business strategy], but seem to be getting their much easier it makes their act together more now.” jobs. It just makes planning . “The biggest stream of [Atlassian’s] business is JIRA, and that got split into and process much smoother. … the JIRA services business and the JIRA software business. JIRA Service Desk competes against the likes of ServiceNow, and JIRA software JIRA’s applicable to just about competes against other issue trackers and general project management any business when set up and tools.” used correctly. There’s a huge . “HipChat, which was acquired in 2012, was really seen, strategy-wise, as a opportunity to increase the new ‘land product’ [i.e., one that pulls new customers into the Atlassian price even more of their ecosystem]. So while JIRA did the job of landing with the development teams, [Atlassian management] saw HipChat as a product that any team products at the top end, and could really adopt and get started with. And it was very successful for extract more value from their them—up until Slack came out.” bigger customers. The fact that . “Slack has been taking market share from HipChat. But again, Atlassian’s they don’t have a sales team is strategy is around integration; the more they can solidify the integration another big area of opportunity between HipChat, JIRA, Confluence and the other tools, it becomes a no- brainer that if you’ve got a wide use of JIRA within your business, then you for them. If they decide to should be using HipChat.” invest in sales and do it Growth Potential correctly, I think there’s even . “I’m very bullish on the company. I think they will continue to grow at the bigger opportunity for growth. rate that they have for the past five years and perhaps even faster. JIRA has the most potential for growth, and then Confluence.” Senior marketing executive at an . “I still don’t think they’ve milked, for want of a better word, their larger enterprise social software company enterprise customers. Eight years ago, the most expensive version of JIRA that you could buy was $4,800, and that was no matter how big you were. Six years later, the most expensive version of JIRA was $24,000. Now there are versions of JIRA for on-premise installations for half a million dollars— and that’s not even with any of the services surrounding it.” . “There’s a huge opportunity to increase the price even more of their products at the top end, and extract more value from their bigger customers.” . “There are also a lot of benefits to be had from the recurring subscription model in the move to the cloud. It’s not traditional to spend as much money with a cloud-based product, so the margins are possibly lower—but there’s potential for greater volume.” . There are always going to be businesses, due to local privacy laws, where they just cannot run products in the cloud and they have to run them on-premise. So in the short term at least, Atlassian will still have a very healthy on- premise business. But they are investing more in their cloud technology to make sure they can be competitive on that front as well.” . “The fact that they don’t have a sales team is another big area of opportunity for them. If they decide to invest in sales and do it correctly, I think there’s even bigger opportunity for growth.” . “What [Atlassian] has tried to do more recently with the JIRA business is they’ve created different streams with their product—one focused on development teams, and the other, JIRA Core, is their attempt to try to make JIRA simpler and easy to use for different business teams.” . “[As to whether] Atlassian can spread beyond software development teams and to other areas of a business, I’d point out that this already happens today—probably not as much as is publicly acknowledged. What’s made JIRA so successful to date is that it when it gets sold to a [development] team, it is used by the engineers and the product teams, and then those teams work with marketing and other teams in the business.”

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. “The tool naturally gets adopted by other teams within a business, without a concerted effort on Atlassian’s part. And then Confluence gets installed and that spreads across the entire business. I believe that on average, a lot of customers have more than three products. The products really are prevalent within business teams, once they’ve landed within a development team.” . “The other important part of [Atlassian’s] business [is its] Marketplace. You have two different types of partners, or experts. Some build add-ons to Atlassian’s products and then sell them on the Atlassian Marketplace—and that’s a $100 million business for them right there. And just like the Apple app store model, Atlassian takes a cut of every sale—at least 25% or 30%. There are at least 10 add-on businesses that sell add-ons in the Marketplace that turn over more than $1 million a year.” . “And then there’s experts who provide services, whether that be implementation, training, best practices or customization.” . “It’s a really broad spread of businesses that [are suited to Atlassian tools]. Of course, any business that builds software—like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn—are a good fit. But then you also have traditional industries like banking that have a bunch of internal software that they use to run their business, and again they use JIRA to license products for developing their internal tools.”

Secondary Sources The following seven secondary sources discussed uses for Atlassian’s tools outside of software development, including help desk, marketing and inventory management; reviews of JIRA Service Desk; and Atlassian’s HipChat vs. Slack, with Slack emerging as the clear winner.

Atlassian Uses Outside of IT Atlassian’s JIRA Service Desk and JIRA Core are intended for use outside of software development. One firm discussed using several Atlassian tools within its marketing department, and another used JIRA to track company inventory.

Oct. 6, 2015, PCWorld article Atlassian extended its reach outside software development with tools launched or relaunched last October. JIRA Service Desk essentially is a help desk while JIRA Core targets HR, finance and marketing teams. . “While JIRA Software retains the developer focus, promising Agile best practices as defaults and deep integration with development tools, the other two extend beyond that original reach, which to date has placed the tool at about 35,000 companies, according to Atlassian.” . “JIRA Service Desk aims to provide a user-focused service desk for IT and other service teams.” . “Going further afield, JIRA Core targets nontechnical business teams such as human resources, finance and marketing. An HR team could use JIRA Core to track the onboarding of employees, for instance, while a marketing team could use it to track its advertising campaigns.” . “‘JIRA started as a way for tech teams to manage collaboration around products and the things that needed to get done,’ said Jay Simons, Atlassian’s president. ‘Over time it has been pulled in other directions by many parts of the business. The big thing it’s displacing is the chaos of using email and documents as ways to get people on the same page.’” . “JIRA Software and JIRA Core are now available starting at $10 per month. JIRA Service Desk is now available starting at $10 for up to three agents.”

Jan. 12 Clearvision blog This software solutions company has used Atlassian tools, including HipChat, JIRA and Confluence, in its marketing department. It also has employed Confluence as a wiki and JIRA for time-tracking marketing projects. JIRA Core was defined as a simplified version of JIRA for marketing, finance or HR teams. . “Even in a small team, where the quickest way to communicate is often simply to move one desk over for a chat, HipChat is an important tool. It’s a quick way of sending links, attachments, JIRA tickets, tasks and much more. After

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all, even if you prefer to have a discussion offline, it’s important to know the other person has seen the subject of your conversation!” . “Most importantly, HipChat offers a place for teams to come together. Here in the marketing team, we spend most of our time in the ‘Marketing Team’ and ‘Web Marketing’ rooms. By having two rooms, it’s easy to bring up marketing issues that need web development input in the Web Marketing room without it getting lost in other, more general marketing discussion.” . “As HipChat continues to grow, it increasingly acts as a central hub for teams—it’s becoming much more than instant messaging. With the integrations between HipChat and JIRA, for example, we’re able to keep track of updates to relevant tickets without needing to leave the marketing rooms.” . “‘It’s on the wiki’ is a stock phrase at Clearvision. This is because everything is on the wiki: our Confluence is an invaluable, business-wide knowledge base. As long as you’re logged in, you can access Confluence anywhere, any time. And it’s not just current versions of a page you can access.” . “Of course, recording everything can become unwieldy. Our marketing Confluence space covers everything from event research and retrospectives to editorial calendars and branding guidelines, and that barely scratches the surface. It’s important to think about your information architecture—take it from us! Thanks to the rapid growth of the marketing team, we began adding content faster than we could organize it, and for a while our Confluence space was tricky to navigate.” . “We’re now taking advantage of the ability to create custom templates within Confluence to make sure the space is structured and follows a set hierarchical process. Child pages sit under the relevant project or event page, and span from requirements capture to retrospectives.” . “The truth is, as a marketing team we really only brush the surface of Confluence’s customization possibilities. Our consultants frequently work with plugins like Brikit, which allows you to completely change the look of your Confluence to align it with your brand.” . “JIRA is the number 1 software development tool for Agile teams. In marketing, we’re not developing software, but we are working to the same Agile principles.” . “JIRA’s time tracking, project tracking and reporting capabilities are ideal for retrospective meetings at the end of project iterations. Being able to see where the bulk of our time is spent, and the effects of this, enables us to improve with each new project we take on.” . “We’re also able to streamline our processes further thanks to ticket automation. When a new project ticket is created, it will trigger a series of tickets for individual members of the marketing team, allocating them tasks that sit beneath that particular project. We use JIRA Software, but in its JIRA 7 release Atlassian also introduced JIRA Core, which is a simplified JIRA purpose-built for business teams like marketing, HR, finance and others.”

Dec. 22, 2015, CarstenWolfram.de blog This company began using JIRA for inventory management by assigning an issue to each inventory item. It then utilized custom fields for inventory, serial numbers and warranty information, and was able to track to which user an item was assigned. The company also used dashboards to graphically track inventory workflow. . “Luckily, in Mid2015, we discovered this great multipart article from Atlassian on how to use JIRA for inventory management. That article goes into much more details than this one, like setup and reporting. I highly recommend reading it.” . “The idea is that you create a special JIRA project for inventory. Every inventory item is an individual issue. You can create custom fields for inventory numbers, serial numbers, warranty information etc. You can assign those issues to users to see who’s got the device at the moment. You can define workflows that represent your company’s work structure.” . “This is perfect for companies that already use JIRA—one less system to take care of, and the integration possibilities are endless.” . “Like with every Jira project, you can create Dashboards to show an awful amount of data. We did the same to graph all of our inventory assets, and it looks quite great.” . “Now, somehow there wasn’t a dashboard gadget that can search issues, so we had to find one. We’re using Jira Custom Search to search in specific fields. For example, if we want to get the issue with the inventory number 0602, we just type it into the inventory number search field.”

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. “Thanks to Jira extensive preservation of the ticket history, we can now see EVERYTHING that has been done to the asset. Every bit of information that concerns a computer (if it behaves funny, if it was reimaged at some point) gets written in the comments, so the next guy who works on it sees the complete picture.” . “We have been using this for about half a year now and we’re pretty happy about it. I recommend this to every other company that already uses Jira for something else.”

JIRA Service Desk The following sources offered mixed reviews on JIRA Service Desk, but both claimed it was easy to use. One reviewer cited integration issues with MS Outlook, and another disliked its restricted functions on the cloud and in permission settings.

June 17, 2015, IT Central Station review JIRA Service Desk was relatively straightforward to configure but did not integrate smoothly with email systems. Maintaining formatting in paste functions and using the email CC option were not compatible with JIRA Service Desk. After running tests, the user planned to implement Vivantio Service Desk instead of JIRA. . “The system is relatively straightforward to configure. The ability to add custom fields is useful as is the ability to customise the individual queues for the service desk requests to sit in.” . “It does not integrate very well with our email system (MS Outlook). When users log issues they sometimes include a paragraph of text, or a report, with some of the content highlighted in order to draw attention to a problem. The email integration seems to read only the ascii text and throws away all of the formatting. Also if a user emails an issue in and CC’s their colleagues in, the system seems incapable of also CC’ing them in on any reply and subsequent dialogue.” . “Atlassian Customer service is some of the best I have experienced. We have a 500 user Jira system (Without the Service Desk add-on) and I have raised a number of issues with Atlassian support. They have all been dealt with quickly and effectively.” . “Licensing has been much improved recently. In their previous version of Service Desk Atlassian were insisting that the customers (people who raised tickets) were all licensed Jira users. They have dropped that now and the product came back onto the radar for a lot of organizations who had previously dismissed it, purely on the shortcomings of the license model.” . “We also looked at Vivantio Service Desk and will probably implement this instead of Atlassian Service desk.”

Sept. 18, 2015, TrustRadius review JIRA Service Desk was considered easy to use and proficient at facilitating communication with the team and client; however, some functions were restricted or not fully developed. The tool required its clients to purchase multiple licenses separate from other JIRA tools, which created a high upfront cost for companies unsure about its effectiveness. Also, permission levels were separate from other tools and sometimes too prohibitive. . “JIRA Service Desk is intended to be used in my organization as the main Help Desk Ticketing tool. During the process of implementation we faced some issues mainly because some specific functionalities were not developed yet or because in JIRA Cloud they are restricted.” . “Not Developed yet: When doing a query with the ‘contain ~ operator’, you cannot filter by ‘email address’ (e.g. I need to know how many tickets have been received from users with specific email address). I had to find a workaround to this issue.” . “Restricted in JIRA Cloud: When in the Requests Types, you are not allowed to create two fields of the same type.” . “JIRA Service Desk Pros” o “The main strength of JIRA Service Desk is that it is really straightforward for the customers to use it to create and review the status of the tickets they raise.” o “It also facilitates the communication between client and the support team.” o “JIRA Workflows allows the IT Staff to easily check the and control the status of the business process.” o “Although JQL is a JIRA specific query language tool it is really easy to work with it.” . “JIRA Service Desk Cons” o “JQL doesn’t allow some types of queries related to specific operators (contain operator (~) doesn’t allow to query an email address)”

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o “Service Desk licensing is separate from the rest of JIRA’s licensing so multiple licenses are required. Our company had purchased a large [license] for JIRA and had to explore and figure out how much we could do with Service Desk before purchasing the next tier of Service Desk licenses.” o “A service desk customer can accidentally create a ticket in the wrong Service Desk and cannot move the ticket to the proper location based off the permissions available to customers, collaborators, and sometimes agents depending on the JIRA project permissions.” o “JIRA permissions and Service Desk permissions are separate permissions that must be managed separately. This makes administering JIRA and Service Desk permissions more complicated.” . “ROI on JIRA Service Desk purchase” o “Better customer service, as the clients see their needs reflected in the tool implemented.” o “Decreased issue-resolution times dramatically. Better times to resolved achieved.” o “Keeps the Support Team constantly on top of the status of every ticket resolved or in process. . “JIRA Service Desk Alternatives Considered” o “JIRA over GLPI service desk tools have the ease in implementation, ease of managing and ease for the user to work on the application. “

Source: TrustRadius.com

HipChat vs. Slack A web design firm that had been using HipChat tested Slack for one week and found it to be a much better solution. Several readers discussed why they too favored Slack over HipChat.

May 2015 slackvshipchat.com review A web design firm that had been running HipChat tested Slack for one week. As the week progressed, the team found Slack to be the best communication tool. Slack’s only significant downfall was its user interface, but it excelled in all other areas over HipChat. HipChat’s major issue was its lack of reliability. . “I thought it might be a good idea to try HipChat competitor, Slack for a week to see how we like it.” . “Initial likes include Slack’s star feature, speed of load times, room notification settings, and themes. Initial dislikes include user interface and able to see other user’s current time.” . “After the first day using Slack, we polled the team to see how Slack stacked up to HipChat. Here were the results:”

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. Source: Slackvshipchat.com

. “We used HipChat for over a year before giving Slack a shot for a week. According to our polls, Slack proved to be a better fit for us since the first day we tried it.” . “Slack may look like the runaway winner but there was one part of Slack where most of our team felt it fell short compared to HipChat, even on the 7th day. Its design. Slack’s design was the top dislike from our team on Day 1 and Day 7 (although, there was a substantial decrease in the number of dislikes on Day 7).” . “Top Slack Dislikes: Day 1 vs Day 7:”

Source: Slackvshipchat.com

. “Out of 15 responses, 10 people said HipChat’s reliability was the biggest issue. Reliability meaning: inconsistent/unreliable messages/notifications, slow server, frequent connection issues and bugs.”

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Source: Slackvshipchat.com

. “On Day 7, notifications remained the most liked quality by our team followed by Slack’s mobile app and integration.”

Source: Slackvshipchat.com

. “On the 7th day we polled our team asking the same questions we did on Day 1. Here were the results:”

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Source: Slackvshipchat.com

Dec. 23, 2015, TechCrunch.com article Slack and HipChat will compete, but Slack and Atlassian believe the marketplace is big enough for both to exist. Readers commented on the benefits of Slack and why they liked it better than HipChat. . “Slack and Atlassian, the two leaders in the enterprise software market, are on a collision course, whether they like it or not. Slack has been the clear leader in media hype so far, as the company soaked up most of the positive PR throughout 2015.” . “In a recent interview, HipChat general manager Steve Goldmsith [sic] claimed there was enough space for both companies. ‘It’s not a finite pie that Slack and HipChat are going to carve up,’ Goldsmith said. ‘The space that we’re both pursuing is corporate email, team communication . . . [It] is a huge space. There’s plenty of room for both of us.’” . “So far, this notion has held true. While direct user numbers for HipChat aren’t publicly available, its parent company claims that the number of messages sent through the platform grew by 70% within a year. Meanwhile, Slack’s daily active users grew tenfold over the same period. Clearly, neither company has had trouble growing.” . “The more users there are on one platform, the more likely a developer is going to decide to develop on that platform. While there may be room for many siloed messaging platforms, there’s typically room for only one, or at most two, top development platforms in any market.” . “In either case, the rivalry is bound to become intensely competitive in the years ahead. (Think iOS vs. Android.) While it’s still far too early to declare a winner, the battle to be the monopoly in enterprise messaging has clearly begun.” . Reader Marcus Diddle: “I used Slack for six months before my company switched to Hipchat. And I miss Slack every single day. Comparitively [sic], Hipchat is lacking in so many areas... The basic functionality of their notification system is just horrible. Over the last few months, it seems they have made some improvements through a number of releases, but they’re still playing catchup with Slack in just about every single area.” . Reader Mike McNeil: “Slack exudes love and attention to detail from every pore. The spirited iOS app release notes that read like Food Network recipe reviews, the thorough customization options and custom emojis; the fact that after using it non-stop for the last several months, it has never once crashed... Did you know you can paste entire keynote slides directly into a conversation? And how, when you do, it takes the already-typed text and makes that the title of the uploaded image? Unless there are too many characters, in which case Slack makes it the caption instead? I’m inclined to think that the reason we all like Slack so much has less to do with secret sauce and more to do with it being a well-executed and usable product.” . Reader Roger V: “Most chat-based communication is internal, therefore I reject the underlying premise this is a winner-take-all field. If chat is to be external client facing, it’s going to have to interconnect to whatever platforms the clients want to use - including FB, Google, et al.”

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. Reader Terry S: “In an analysis of both companies’ developer friendliness, I’d say Slack is the clear leader at this point, they have attracted more innovative developers first and there seems to be less friction than with Hipchat. Also seems to be more linkage and alliance to Github with Slack. In addition to these, look out for Teamchat in Asia as well. Bots are key to these platforms and more bots coming, particularly to consumer messaging apps.”

Additional research by Emily Carr and Chris Aylott.

The Author(s) of this research report certify that all of the views expressed in the report accurately reflect their personal views about any and all of the subject securities and that no part of the Author(s) compensation was, is or will be, directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations or views in this report. The Author does not own securities in any of the aforementioned companies. OTA Financial Group LP has a membership interest in Blueshift Research LLC. OTA LLC, an SEC registered broker dealer subsidiary of OTA Financial Group LP, has both market making and proprietary trading operations on several exchanges and alternative trading systems. The affiliated companies of the OTA Financial Group LP, including OTA LLC, its principals, employees or clients may have an interest in the securities discussed herein, in securities of other issuers in other industries, may provide bids and offers of the subject companies and may act as principal in connection with such transactions. Craig Gordon, the founder of Blueshift, has an investment in OTA Financial Group LP. © 2016 Blueshift Research LLC. All rights reserved. This transmission was produced for the exclusive use of Blueshift Research LLC, and may not be reproduced or relied upon, in whole or in part, without Blueshift’s written consent. The information herein is not intended to be a complete analysis of every material fact in respect to any company or industry discussed. Blueshift Research is a trademark owned by Blueshift Research LLC.

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