Digital teamwork is booming, so it’s no surprise that there’s a growing demand from businesses for help implementing collaboration and work management solutions. This in turn has attracted investment in consulting firms that serve this demand, such as Valiantys, one of Atlassian’s leading global consulting partners. Last month, the company closed an investment from Tercera, which specializes in growth equity for cloud professional services, along with a majority stake from private equity investor Keensight Capital. I spoke with Tercera and Lucas Dussurget, CEO at Valiantys, about the company’s plans to drive enterprise adoption of Atlassian. Dussurget said:
We are very excited about the growth of Atlassian travel, and we want to double … Up [a few] weeks ago, Valiantys was 100% bootstrapped, [We] need to learn to run a profitable, sustainable business in 15 years. But we thought the time was right to bring in external investment, given the scale of our ambitions.
Valiantys is exclusively focused on Atlassian and covers the full breadth of the vendor’s products. It was one of the first to expand beyond Atlassian’s core market of agile developer teams into broader IT service management use cases, and in 2013 Atlassian acquired one of its apps to become a cornerstone of its product in Jira Service Management. Along with its agile development and IT service management skills, Valiantys also has a cloud migration practice, and expects to use the investment to build skills to support enterprise work management and data and analytics.
Agile processes across the enterprise
Expanding the scope of Atlassian’s work management to bring digital workflows to enterprise functions such as facilities management, HR and compliance is a particular focus right now. As well as technology implementation, helping clients adopt new working practices is an important part of what Valiantys delivers, as Dussurget explains:
We are, if you will, the customer success arm of Atlassian. Atlassian makes amazing software. But to realize the value of software, customers really need to adopt not just a product, but new ways of working, new skills. In the software world, we talk a lot about agile, especially the narrowed-down agile practices. In IT, it’s a lot about the latest version of ITIL and having a more agile ITSM. And again, putting agile outside of IT on other teams.
The common theme is bringing agile practices across, and having the tools that allow those practices to grow and be successful. That’s where we come in.
An example of bringing this agile approach to more general purpose business processes is a large global insurance company that Valiantys recently helped digitize its handling of documents for underwriters’ assessment. These were previously managed through a shared email inbox accessed by a few hundred people. The process was moved to JIRA, which provides improved traceability and a full audit trail, including tracking of service level agreements, escalation paths and better reporting. As well as boosting productivity, it is now easier to coordinate globally and identify areas for further improvement.
Competition with ServiceNow
This type of project, along with IT service management, further puts Valiantys and its Atlassian solutions in competition with ServiceNow. Dussurget said:
The main reason why we are winning more and more against ServiceNow [is] the time at the cost of the platform. ServiceNow is a powerful product, but it is a product that takes a very long time to realize the value of. It’s a bit like deploying SAP — you need years of investment to have something that delivers value.
A solution based on JIRA can be implemented in just a few months, and is easier to adapt when processes change, he explained. Having a single solution available to development teams, IT and other functions is another advantage. The final factor is cost — one large customer reduced its cost of ownership by 60% after moving IT service management from ServiceNow to JIRA, he says. But he continues to acknowledge ServiceNow’s role in helping create the market:
In some ways, ServiceNow laid the groundwork for us, because they talked to a lot of IT departments about what they call enterprise service management, which is the same concept of applying workflow management platforms to non-IT workflow …
The obstacle is often that time to appreciate. Often the fact that you have hundreds of workflows, they are not common. Unlike IT workflows, which to a significant extent, are somewhat standardized by frameworks such as ITIL. Here, we talk about business operations workflows that are custom to every organization out there.
Having a solution that provides a fast enough time to value that justifies the launch and investment in having such a solution for a larger population of users, that is a challenge that [enterprises] is discussed with us.
Change management
Change management is an important part of the service offering when implementing this type of project. He explained:
When customers come to us, they usually have heard of Atlassian. They also knew they wanted to use Atlassian. The challenge they face is, ‘How do we manage that change? How can we empower our teams? How do we potentially re-engineer our processes? We understand our challenge, we understand how this tool will help us solve it. But we still need someone to manage that change, to manage that change.
That’s where we come in. We step in to manage those change programs. We advise customers on the entire management of change, or even run it for them, from training and enabling to potential re-engineering of processes or reviewing processes, to identify inefficiencies to arrive at us in our target state.
Another advantage of digitizing teamwork — which Valiantys is already exploring within its own virtual team processes — is the ability to collect performance data and then use that data to improve operation. He explains:
If all your processes are digitized, every single interaction, everything that happens, is a data point that you can mine, and where you can find a lot of inefficiencies in your organization. Why do these people do this? Why does this part of the process take so long? Why are these people not following the process? You can see all these inefficiencies, and you get actionable management information.
That’s something that for me — because we do the same thing for ourselves — as a CEO, I like because that continuous improvement idea is great in practice, but when you have data that you can get to measure where you have inefficiencies in your processes, and also measure the impact of any changes you make to your processes, it’s really powerful.
Entering the business market
For Tercera, the potential of this enterprise work management market means that the Atlassian ecosystem is always on its radar to invest. Bill Petty, Partner at Tercera, said:
When we launched Tercera 18 months ago, Atlassian was one of the ecosystems that we said, ‘We want investment and exposure in this space.’ What Atlassian is doing is going to be scaling to 10 billion in annual revenue, and there’s just a massive opportunity in the services associated with it – and they’re a really partner-friendly ecosystem.
Tercera believes its advice will help Valiantys penetrate the enterprise market, particularly in the US, where the company, originally founded in France, is growing rapidly. At the same time Atlassian itself is making moves to grow global business sales after last year hiring Kevin Egan, a Salesforce veteran who had similar roles at Dropbox and Slack. The enterprise-wide opportunity is one in which Valiantys is well-positioned, as Petty noted:
Every business is becoming a software business, it doesn’t matter if you are a manufacturing business, software is becoming mainstream. So one of the service offerings I’m most excited about, for both Atlassian and Valiantys, is JIRA agile at scale. In order to do that, and implement it across the enterprise, it really helps to have a service provider with a global presence. And there aren’t many Atlassian service providers with a global footprint, and more importantly, with the deep sophistication and understanding of the product set to help clients deliver the value they seek from Atlassian.
I take it
I’ve long argued that digital collaboration is one of the core application pillars of modern business, and – despite recent missteps – Atlassian is a major player in that market. I feel that the vendor should do more than potentially measure and evaluate teamwork and thus improve enterprise processes, so it’s good to see that this is something that the leadership at Valiantys is very aware of. This seems like a smart investment by Tercera and one that will also help Atlassian as it seeks to expand its business presence.
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