Atlassian redoubles efforts on ITSM

After a series of recent acquisitions in this area, Atlassian, a developer and teamwork tool provider, today announced the launch of a new ITSM product suite-Jira Service Management. This move not only marks the company’s ambitions, not only in IT service management, but also in enterprise service management more extensive​​.

Atlassian seems to be closely following the development of ServiceNow, the service began its journey in the ITSM market, but has since expanded its scope to all organizational workflows. Similar to ServiceNow, Atlassian believes that it also has certain advantages in the field of service management, because its products are bundled together by an underlying platform Jira.

Not only that, but the company adopts agile work practices and is driven internally by high-level software development. Atlassian believes that given its stronghold in the development team, it has a strong advantage. It hopes that by using a service management platform (starting from IT operations) to more closely link the internal development team with other departments, it can expand its scope and growth.

We talked to Edwin Wong, Atlassian’s IT product leader, about starting Jira Service Management. He said the company hopes that its expansion in this market will bring its revenue to $5 billion. Huang said:

The core and soul of our mission is actually considering releasing the potential of all teams. In the software field, we began to think about how to help create software teams become more successful, more agile, and more efficient in this era. However, as we continue to develop this journey, we have seen a huge opportunity to extend our horizons beyond the software team.

Atlassian began to follow this path when it launched Jira Service Desk in 2013, and the service now has 25,000 customers. Since then, it has acquired Opsgenie for incident service management, Mindville for its configuration management database (CMDB), and Halp for its internal service desk solution, which sits on top of Slack.

What’s in the version?

The newly released Jira Service Management Suite is the culmination of all these efforts, including:

• Modern event management -Include call scheduling, alerts, event groups, and deeper integration with Jira Software, Bitbucket and Fusion. Atlassian claims that this feature allows the company to seamlessly coordinate incident resolution processes across development and IT operations teams.

• Change management built for DevOps -The kit aims to provide the team with better insights and contextual information about service changes. It includes automatic change risk assessment, advanced approval workflow, and integration with popular CI/CD tools.

• New user interface -Atlassian redesigned the agent experience to better classify service requests, incidents, issues, and changes. New features include batch ticket operations and the use of machine learning to classify similar tickets.

Commenting on this release, Wong stated that the move was driven by customer needs:

This really goes back to our beliefs and the way to tie Dev and Ops together. What we see is that many of our customers today see Atlassian as the actual way to actually manage agile work, especially in development. Then they came to us with their needs and said, “Hey, how do I tie them together?”. I think it really resonates.

We have more than 180,000 customers rely on us to become more agile in many ways. Therefore, work around these concepts in small batches, quickly create value for customers, break silos, and achieve automation where possible-we think these are the principles that we can expand and integrate into more IT and ITSM worlds. We think this is a huge opportunity, indeed it can be said to be the idea of ​​integrating Dev and IT teams.

I think the advantage of all these functions is that we can implement all these functions through one platform (ie JIRA), which does provide you with a concept of a true end-to-end approach that allows you to integrate Dev and Ops Together.

What the future looks like

As mentioned above, Atlassian is following a similar path to ServiceNow because it recognizes opportunities outside of ITSM and in other areas of enterprise service management. ServiceNow has seen success in the term “rethinking workflow” and has benefited from a basic platform for the company to expand its use. Atlassian also recognizes Jira’s potential in this area, and Wong pointed out that customers have begun to rely on themselves to identify broader use cases. He said:

We have seen many customers paying attention to the service management function and saying “Hey, we can apply it to many other use cases.” One thing we have seen is that with the use of JIRA Service Desk today and the continuous development of JIRA Service Management, it is adopting the same practices and functions and applying them to different use cases. As a result, we have seen many customers scattered hundreds of these service desks throughout the enterprise-from facilities, human resources, marketing, and finance. For us, this is a huge opportunity, and we will continue to study it very carefully.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Atlassian believes that its stake in the development team and the convenience of agile work provide it with a good opportunity to expand the Jira platform more broadly throughout the enterprise. However, Wong also believes that Atlassian can also compete on price compared to ServiceNow and similar products in other markets. He said:

We have also heard that many customers are seriously considering their investment in ITSM. We hear some customers talking about high cost sensitivity. There is an urgent need to truly understand what the value we are delivering and how quickly we can deliver it? This has always been one of Atlassian’s strengths and practical manuals-the ability to provide cost-effective solutions to truly and quickly gain value.

I take

This is Atlassian’s stated intention and is being promoted by the current COVID-19 pandemic, in which dispersed teams and organizations are considering how to promote teamwork more effectively and are rethinking how they operate. This is not to say that Atlassian’s path to great success in this market does not pose a challenge. It needs to keep up with other established vendors in this market, and now needs to consider those use cases outside of ITSM. Although there is no doubt that these use cases are there, they are not always the easiest to communicate given the wide scope of the “impossible art” of service management and workflow redesign. Atlassian needs to be a leader and center in leading customers to showcase platform functions, highlight customer success, and work closely with partners to expand scale.