Dive Brief:

• To help customers resolve outages more efficiently, Atlassian acquired OpsGenie, an incident alert platform, according to a company announcement on Tuesday. Atlassian bought OpsGenie for $295 million.

• Incident resolution requires coordination between operations and software development teams, and OpsGenie provides tools for scheduling, escalation paths and notifications that are sensitive to time zone differences, according to the announcement.

• Jira will act as the platform to form a more coordinated approach to point solutions, including real-time communication on Slack, incident communication on Atlassian Statuspage and Confluence, and Jira Software for documenting postmortem and tracking post-incident assignments.

Dive Insight:

In recent months, Atlassian said it has worked to improve its enterprise software suite. It shook up the communication platform market in July when it announced it sold its chat platform intellectual property to Slack.

After announcing Slack would absorb HipChat and Stride, it became clear Atlassian was focusing on software tools dedicated to collaboration and management. The OpsGenie acquisition is a response to customers wanting to better manage incident response.

"We've been needing an upgrade for quite a while," said Kenneth Gonzalez, research director at Gartner, in an interview with CIO Dive. Customers are looking for solutions that go beyond the traditional processes like mean time to remediation and want to ensure they have a consistent set of practices.

Because the role of a chaos engineer is not as widespread, especially in "lower maturity" businesses, Atlassian's OpsGenie acquisition could help alleviate the pressures of handling an IT incident.

The integration of the OpsGenie​ platform is not enough to make up for a well-formed plan and no one tool can service every need. The combination in platforms makes sense for customers who want to upgrade their methods and communication means and shift from a reactive protocol or a proactive one, according to Gonzalez.  

Enterprises struggle most with the recovery and reset phase of incident response because after they put out the fire, they fall into the trap of waiting for the next incident to occur. "Rather than kind of roll[ing] on with the momentum that got established" and queuing up an after-action plan, companies tend to sit still, Gonzalez said.