A Great Year for Atlassian
2021 was Atlassian’s best year yet as soaring customer numbers and revenues sent its stock price through the roof. Atlassian stock started off 2021 at $243 and finished up at $383, an incredible 63% increase. This is compared to competitors like ServiceNow and Workday who saw less impressive increases of 14% and 15% respectively.
In September, following strong quarterly results, we detailed why Atlassian was seeing such spectacular results. Essentially, Atlassian’s customer base (in particular its Cloud base) has expanded hugely as more and more organizations recognize the potential that Atlassian products can have across their businesses. Furthermore, existing customers are also increasing their Atlassian footprints as they see the gains to be made by integrating teams across their enterprises with Atlassian’s flexible and unique product range.
Since Atlassian’s customer base is continuing to grow (now well over 200,000), users can rest assured that these revenue gains are being driven by the ever-increasing popularity of Atlassian’s products. This is in contrast to competitors like ServiceNow who, with customer growth far below that of Atlassian, are more inclined to squeeze existing customers. Atlassian’s Q4 customer growth was a whopping 23,311 (11%) compared to ServiceNow’s 175 (2%).
Team ’21 (Jira Work Management)
The newest and perhaps most exciting of Atlassian’s products is Jira Work Management (JWM), announced at Team ’21 in April 2021.
JWM runs on Atlassian’s Cloud platform and is essentially Jira but built and designed for non-technical teams.
Although a lot of business teams do thrive using Jira Software, since it was designed for developers, many find it overwhelming with unrequired features.
If non-technical teams opt for an alternative solution (something like monday.com) this creates a major issue when technical and non-technical teams need to interact. When running on different tools there is a high chance that interactions will be inefficient, messy, and aggravating.
With the launch of JWM Atlassian has essentially overcome this problem. Atlassian is unique in offering a single collaboration platform that connects workers across every department, yet offers individual teams the flexibility to choose the right tools to support the unique ways in which they work.
In December we put together an in-depth review of JWM covering its features, Atlassian’s approach behind the product, and how it fits into Blended’s Synthesis Blueprints. You can read the article in full here.
End of Life Products
Following Atlassian’s announcement in October 2020 that they were phasing out support for their Cloud products, a number of important end-of-life phases were reached in 2021.
In February Atlassian ended the sale of new Server licenses. This meant that beyond this date customers could no longer purchase or request quotes for new Server products. While in May Atlassian stopped accepting new Server app submissions for the Atlassian Marketplace.
Meanwhile another important deadline is coming up soon as on February 15th, 2022, Server customers will no longer be able to upgrade or downgrade their user tiers. Customers who want to do so will have to migrate to the Cloud or Data Center first.
For any Atlassian customers still on the Cloud, February’s deadline should represent a real turning point for migrating off of Server. The end of Server is coming quickly and customers still on it should ensure they give themselves enough time to ensure they make a smooth transition.
At Blended Perspectives, we are uniquely situated to help you in your migration. You can find out more about what we can offer here and feel free to contact us with any queries/concerns you may have around Server end of life/migrating.
A Thriving Marketplace
At Blended Perspectives, we consider ourselves the leading experts on the Atlassian Marketplace thanks to our Marketplace Analytics Research Service (MARS). While many partners out there focus on making their own apps, we believe that we can bring greater value to the Atlassian ecosystem by creating a quantitative and objective database covering every facet of the Atlassian Marketplace. You can learn more about MARS here.
2021 was a huge year for the Atlassian Marketplace. In December the Marketplace reached the milestone of $2 billion in lifetime sales. The fact that it took the Marketplace 7 years to reach it’s first billion and only 2 to reach its second demonstrates just how much growth there is on the Marketplace and how much value is being created by app vendors for customers.
However, perhaps the biggest story in the Marketplace was the shifting landscape caused by Appfire’s spree of takeovers. Appfire acquired 8 other Marketplace vendors over 2021: Bolo Software, Mohami, Lizard Brain, Anova, SoftwarePlant (BigPicture), Spartez, Snapbytes, and RoninPixels as well as a host of other apps like Project Configurator from Adaptavist.
This is clearly changing the way other vendors operate in the Marketplace with Tempo acquiring ALM Works in late 2021.
This increased Marketplace consolidation should have major benefits to customers as knowledge is shared across products and natural synergies between complementary categories (like Time Management and Planning) are realized.
We look forward to seeing how these trends develop into 2022.
3 Years of MARS
November 2021 marked the 3rd year of Blended Perspectives collecting Atlassian Marketplace data.
MARS is one of our unique features at Blended Perspectives and provides great value to our customers and the wider Atlassian community.
As an Atlassian Platinum Partner who is not in the app-making game, we pride ourselves on our ability to independently analyze the Marketplace. Way back in 2018 we realized that we could bring incredible value to our customers and the Atlassian community as a whole by creating MARS for two reasons:
Firstly, there is the vast size of the Marketplace: with 1,500 vendors, 4,000 apps, and 1.5M active installs it can be difficult to see through the noise of the Marketplace and find apps that will add value to your instance.
Secondly, there is a problem with vendors self categorizing on the Marketplace. While this is certainly democratic practically, when you’re searching for an app in a category, for example, reporting, it can be a challenge. With so many entries how do you compare true, dedicated reporting apps? Charts and diagramming for instance has 200+ apps in it, few of which have anything to do with diagramming.
MARS overcomes these problems in two ways:
To overcome the size of the Marketplace we focus our attention on the 544 apps in the 500 Club. This means we are able to have more valuable insights into the Marketplace without seriously sacrificing our breadth since the 500 Club apps make up over 82% of Marketplace instances.
And to overcome vendor self-selection, we have carefully assigned “Meaningful Categories” to all 500 Club apps based on the primary functionality. This means that when you search for a reporting app in MARS, you will only see true reporting apps.
If you want to see what the major Marketplace trends have been over the past 3 years then you can find out here.
A Cloud Future
Atlassian’s move towards a Cloud future is absolutely on track since they announced the end of Server in October 2020. When looking at both new customers and existing customers, the news is solid when it comes to Cloud.
- Over 99% of Atlassian’s 11,746 new customers in Q1 2022 opted for Cloud.
- With improvements in data residency (including the ability to host in Australia with many more countries to come) and the release of the consolidated Migration Center, increasing numbers of larger Atlassian customers are opting to migrate. For instance, Commonwealth Bank (Australia’s largest bank) migrated its 20,000 Jira and 25,000 Confluence users to the Cloud during Q1.
- Customers already on Cloud are upgrading to Premium at record rates. Not wanting to miss out on features like global and multi-project Jira Automation, more and more Cloud customers are seeing an incredible time and cost-effectiveness of Automation for Jira.
These three factors: new customers opting for Cloud, existing larger users increasingly migrating to the Cloud, and existing Cloud customers upgrading have all contributed to an increase in Cloud revenue of 53% year-over-year.
If you want to learn more about Atlassian’s Cloud journey you can find that here and to learn more about migrating to the Cloud then click here.
App of the Month
In order to highlight some of the great work that Atlassian Marketplace vendors are doing, in 2021 we launched our “MARS App of the Month” series. Every month we choose one app that we believe has had a very impressive month or so and highlight this fact.
Since starting the blog series in August 2021 we have highlighted 5 spectacular apps that all provide great value to any Atlassian instance: Aura, Whiteboards for Jira, Microsoft 365 for Jira, Excellentable, and Planning Poker.
These are some of the fastest-growing apps on the Marketplace and when you see the unique ways in which they provide value to users you will no doubt see why.
Feel free to reach out to us at hello@blendedperspectives.com.
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