Credit: Dreamstime
Doubling down on its IT Service Management (ITSM) push, workplace management company Atlassian has launched Jira Service Management — software the company says can bring “IT operations and development teams together to collaborate at high velocity and power digital enterprises.”
According to Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch, one of the biggest challenges facing tech teams is how to balance growth with distributed teams using entrenched, legacy technologies that don’t allow people to work together cohesively.
With some teams running agile, rapid delivery and others tasked with meticulous risk mitigation and line-by-line code checking, Deatsch said Atlassian wants to address the culture and systems that separate disparate teams.
He called Jira Service Management the company’s new core offering in the ITSM space.
“You have these development teams, largely sitting in different parts of the building, working with the business and rapidly responding and building new technologies, new experiences for customers, and then trying to throw that new tech over the wall to these IT teams to run the test," he said.
"But unfortunately, the people who build this stuff and the people who run the tests are usually on different teams, running on different technology.”
Atlassian envisions an ITSM model that allows for knowledge sharing in a way that helps unify development, IT operations, and business teams. Jira Service Management includes a variety of new capabilities that have either been built internally or came from recent acquisitions.
“[The first new capability] is the integration of modern incident management natively into Jira Service Management; this is technology that we acquired from a company called Opsgenie...," said Deatsch.
"When there's an incident or an issue — say your mobile app goes down — you're rallying the right teams and providing them with the right information to respond quickly to those customer needs, and get that app back up and running."
Another new feature focuses on integrating change management into the process of building, managing and running code. Users can track all the changes that have happened in recent days, weeks or months to quickly identify challenges facing customers.
Atlassian has also redesigned the agent experience. The company currently offers users more than 900 different third-party integrations. Through its partnership with Slack, for example, Atlassian plans to bring “conversational ticketing” to the platform — effectively turning Slack into a help desk interface and improving the connection between users and tech teams.
“The idea is that the end user never has to leave Slack to respond to or to submit tickets to the technical team. All of that gets powered with workflow control, change management and machine learning on the back end...,” Deatsch said.
Credit: Atlassian Rethinking ITSM
Atlassian stressed that this week’s announcement builds on recent acquisitions, including Mindville Insight for asset and configuration management, Opsgenie for incident management, Automation for Jira for code-free automation, and Halp for conversational ticketing.
Deatsch argued that Atlassian's platform allows IT, software development, project management and DevOps teams to all use the same platform.
“You no longer have a ticketing system over here getting requests from customers, going through to an IT team that then has to go into to a different system and explain what the developers need to do. It's all right there on a single platform and it all comes back to delivering a better customer experience,” he said.
Charles Betz, principal analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals At Forrester Research, said Atlassian's strength among developers gives it a leg up on competitors. “We talk to clients who find benefits in the integration of development and service management workflows and capabilities," Betz said. "No other ITSM competitors have similar developer-side relevance.”
He praised Atlassian's comprehensive coverage of the IT pipeline of any company, from portfolio (Jira Align) through development (core Jira) through DevOps (Bitbucket) and actual operations (Opsgenie, StatusPage). “They also have an emphasis on picking up customers very early in their lifecycle, as start-ups needing basic services — acquiring Trello was reflective of this — and then enabling them to scale,” Betz said.
Deatsch said one of the key reasons for developing Jira Service Management was the understanding that a platform that supports the entire IT experience is the best way to ensure customer satisfaction and help businesses to grow.
The move provides a broader platform where Atlassian can address a wider range of IT capabilities beyond just core software development: “As business teams are interfacing more and more with these technical teams, as they become more like one organisation in the overall business, we believe we can drive more productivity and innovation through our tools to every user in the organisation,” Deatsch said.
