Dive Brief:
- With many businesses reevaluating vendor contracts amid economic pressures, Atlassian is the latest provider to offer discounts and expand features in a bid to retain and expand its enterprise client base.
- Alongside the launch of new features for IT service management, Atlassian is offering large organizations 30% off their first year if they switch to Jira’s management service.
- “As we sought out to move into the service management space and double down, we’ve noticed that the world has also changed,” Shihab Hamid, head of product at Atlassian, told CIO Dive. “As the economy turns, people are really questioning the tools and trying to figure out what they are actually paying for… we think that there’s incredible opportunity for us to go into organizations that are looking to figure that out.”
Dive Insight:
The needs of businesses and the roles of ITSM providers have shifted.
“IT operations management is no longer feasible by utilizing spreadsheets,” Mahmoud Ramin, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, said in an email. “Businesses that have spent so much time, energy and resources to develop in-house solutions would like to transition into a sophisticated solution that is not only helpful for fulfilling internal requirements as a help-desk solution, but also to efficiently fulfill the whole ITSM practice needs.”
ITSM providers understand that the landscape is changing, and in order to stay relevant, they’ve changed, too.
“Over the past two years, we've seen huge improvements in the ITSM market,” Ramin said.
Advancements in automation and self-service enablement have pushed the industry forward, according to Ramin.
Through acquisitions, Atlassian has continued to boost its capabilities. In 2019, Atlassian acquired enterprise agile planning software company AgileCraft for close to $166 million. Atlassian later acquired Chartio and ThinkTilt in 2021 and Percept.AI in 2022.
During Atlassian’s Q1 2023 earnings call in November, the company reported quarterly revenue of $807 million, up 31% from $614 million during the same period last year.
The latest additions to the company’s platform include incident response on-the-go, automated change approvals, analytics capabilities, pre-built and low-code templates, data residency support, advancements in employee portal, virtual agents and conversational ticketing.
While there are few signs tech spend will decrease in the enterprise sector, efforts to consolidate tools and cut inefficiencies are top of mind for many business leaders.
Many vendors have responded by widening their scope of coverage. Workday, the software company traditionally targeting HR and finance, has put an increased focus on the office of the CIO and in turn is expanding capabilities and tools to support the new client base.
Salesforce, a top competitor of Atlassian, said customers were more resistant to spend than in the past, scrutinizing inefficiencies and emphasizing high returns. The customer behavior trend extends to the security sector, where customers are looking to consolidate their spend to a few vendors, according to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
