In a digital-first market, businesses can no longer rely on ‘built-to-last’ strategy: Archana Rao, CIO, Atlassian

Bangalore: Leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software Atlassian Corporation Plc (NASDAQ:TEAM), had their CIO, Archana Rao in India recently, stressing on how every industry in every country is undergoing transformation, whether it’s agile, digital or a cultural transformation. She notices enterprises making massive investments in building capabilities around automation, with a lot of new trends around AI/ML at both the front-office and back-office level, whether it’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or others. She opines while digital transformation is impacting scale at unprecedented levels; automation and building business capabilities along with security is driving overall value for all their customers globally.

At the recent Atlassian Cloud Connect 2020 summit in India, where Atlassian, the maker of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello products, announced a commitment to delivering on its advanced cloud offerings for the India market, Archana stated that – “In a digital-first market, businesses can no longer rely on ‘built-to-last’ strategy to keep up with consumer demands”. Her advice to enterprises that have a lot of legacy and are looking to transition, would be to take advantage to ‘leapfrog’, as they don’t require to go through the same lifecycle of change that the industry has gone through in the past. These enterprises need to embrace cloud, agile and open ways of working to be future-ready.

She mentioned that the company’s top priority would be that Atlassian Cloud is the deployment of choice for all customers, while ensuring that those customers who are using their data centers and server products are operating at the right level of scale and agility.

From a channel perspective, the company’s top three priorities would be to firstly recruit new solution partners, essentially System Integrators (SI’s) who have ITSM, cloud, agile and DevOps capabilities. Secondly, with and through their solution partners help local customers adopt Atlassian’s cloud solutions, that includes migration from server to Atlassian Cloud, and finally enable their partners capabilities through online training, mentoring and other certification courses.

In the context of India, she said, “With India embracing digitisation across industries and enterprises accelerating cloud adoption, our solutions are uniquely placed to serve the Indian customers looking to leverage the immense benefits of cloud. We have announced new programs and tools that will aid existing customers in their transition from our self-managed, on-premise offering to the cloud, in turn giving them access to the latest security, reliability, privacy, and compliance roadmap for our products and services.”

Cloud has been the key driver of Atlassian’s growth and innovation, with overall subscription revenue, which is primarily cloud driven, growing at 50% year-over-year. The company has plans to invest aggressively over the next 12 months to grow its cloud business in India. With cloud security being a major focus for its cloud customers, Atlassian has also announced enterprise-grade controls and security features, with data privacy upgrades to its underlying cloud platform. It has introduced new cloud plans including a Premium offering, giving customers the highest level of service with advanced features, a 99.9% uptime SLA, unlimited storage and access to premium security tools, ensuring enterprises have everything they need to confidently scale. The company has also launched Forge, its new cloud app development platform, allowing their ecosystem developers to more easily and securely build cloud apps.

The company has also launched new integrations, allowing customers to integrate Atlassian Cloud products with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) for SSO, Google Cloud Identity for SSO and user provisioning, and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) providers for cloud security. Atlassian’s comprehensive cloud security offerings include data residency for customers who want greater control over where their data is located, and data encryption at rest and in transit to help guard against unauthorised access.

Its customers in India include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs, and Flipkart, among others. The company is also aiming to double its number of Indian employees, working to add 300 more local employees to help support the growth of the world-class Atlassian R&D centre which opened in Bengaluru in 2018.

Atlassian serves over 164,000 customers worldwide, and has been named a “Best Place to Work” by Great Place to Work Institute in every market where they have a staff presence.