Atlassian Team '21 Event Showcases Tools That Aid DevOps Efforts

Development tools vendor Atlassian is continuing to grow its portfolio of DevOps tools and services as the company itself is growing on the back of strong demand.

At the Atlassian Team '21 virtual conference on April 28 and 29, the company announced a series of new services. Atlassian also announced its fiscal third-quarter 2021 financial earnings on April 29, showing just how strong revenue growth is for its DevOps business, which includes Jira project management, Bitbucket code management and Confluence collaboration software, among other tools. Atlassian reported that revenue for the quarter was $569 million for a 38% year-over-year gain.

While Atlassian has its own suite of DevOps services, DevOps teams also use tools from other vendors. That realization led Atlassian to announce its Open DevOps initiative during the Atlassian Team '21 event. The goal with Open DevOps is to enable heterogeneous, multivendor DevOps stacks to integrate well with each other. For example, a typical Atlassian DevOps project might include Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Opsgenie. With the Open DevOps approach, developers can swap in a different tool—for example, GitHub for code management rather than Bitbucket—while still benefiting from tight integration with Jira and other tools in the Atlassian stack.

Point A Is the Future of Atlassian

Atlassian also used its event to outline a set of new services it referred to as Point A that will help define the next generation of its DevOps efforts.

"Point A is Atlassian's new program to build the next generation of products to power the future of teamwork," Mike Cannon-Brookes (pictured), co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, said during a keynote address.

Atlassian's Point A program includes five new products. One is a messaging-first help desk tool called Halp, which is a conversational ticketing and request management tool for Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Also gaining a new service is Atlassian's Jira project management tool, the foundation of the Open DevOps effort. At Atlassian Team '21, the company announced the Jira Work Management service, which extends Jira beyond its traditional DevOps roots to also be useful for project and business teams. Jira Work Management brings the power of the Jira platform to business teams—allowing marketing, HR, finance and legal teams to work seamlessly across the organization, Cannon-Brookes said.

The third new service in Point A is Jira Product Discovery, which is intended to enable product managers to prioritize project efforts based on impact.

The fourth new service, Compass, is intended to help engineering teams manage the complexity of working across distributed architectures.

"Compass connects the human to the digital, and provides insights, policies and best practices in one place," Cannon-Brookes said. "This helps software teams learn and iteratively improve their processes, their culture and adopt better ways of working together."

Rounding out Atlassian's Point A efforts is the new Team Central service, a place for teams to organize goals and overall status updates.

"We are working on making Team Central a place for both service and project teams to work across functions, by being the connective tissue for both service and project-oriented work," Cannon-Brookes said. "With a simple search, you’ll connect with any team regardless of how or where that team chooses to track the details of their work."