This Monday Atlassian acquired ThinkTilt, the maker of ProForma the widely popular form builder app.
ProForma is the only Jira Forms app on the Atlassian Marketplace with its 3775 instances making up 45% of the category’s total. As demonstrated by Figure 1, we can see that ThinkTilt is the largest app vendor in the Forms space while ProForma (both its free and paid versions) have both seen remarkable growth of 14% and 18% respectively this year. ProForma’s growth this year reflects the growing importance of efficient and quality service management, particularly as employees continue to work from home.
With 326 best practice template forms and an easy to use no/low code editor, ProForma enables greater scalability in JSM. ProForma’s templates primarily cover HR, IT, facilities, marketing, and finance but also include legal, procurement, project management, and risk management templates (among others). Therefore, for instance, as stated by Edwin Wong (Atlassian’s head of product, IT), “an HR team could capture all the information they need to capture for a given workflow, with Jira Service Management becoming the backend for those operations. Or they can easily create forms based on existing workflows, too, and enhance the user experience that way”.
We have captured just some of the forms available below with some examples (click to zoom-in the image below).
Atlassian’s move to take over ThinkTilt could signal a change in how Atlassian handles the portal in JSM. With ProForma, JSM will eventually be packaged with extra functionality, out of the box by providing dynamic forms on the portal and allowing clients to edit their own forms.
A workflow model
Basically forms can be employed wherever needed and then data entry is carried from them to Jira issue types. Not all fields on the form have to be mapped to custom fields. That’s a discretionary consideration, which is also good for Jira performance
The last word
All in all, Atlassian’s takeover of ThinkTilt and ProForma further demonstrates JSM’s continued development into an Enterprise Service Management solution. It further emphasizes the fact that when it comes to enterprise workflows – Atlassian is by far the market leader consolidating strategically.
We noted with interest that a certain company called Service Now seems to think it’s in the workflows business… well perhaps this is so and in fact we would like to thank them for making the case that this is a legitimate market segment. So we thought that just for some fun we would launch our own campaign…
