Atlassian ‘Doubling Down’ on Cloud Means More Margin for Partners

Approximately 500 systems integrators do one-third of the business Atlassian, the maker of Jira team collaboration and productivity software, brings in, and the company hopes the new margin incentives it introduced on Thursday will add to that activity.

The changes come as Atlassian unveiled updates to its cloud platform; the company aims to shift more revenue to that computing model.

Atlassian competes against the likes of Microsoft Project and wants to capture more market share. Indeed, Grand View Research forecast late last year that the global team collaboration software sector would exceed a compound annual growth rate of 9% between 2018 and 2025.

Capitalizing on all that opportunity means getting the attention of even more enterprises and other organizations adopting cloud technologies. Atlassian already serves 83% of the Fortune 500 and says each uses at least one of its cloud platforms.

Atlassian’s Martin Musierowicz

Still, the company wants to ramp up those numbers and is looking to untapped opportunity.

“We shared in a recent investor newsletter that 50 percent moved from self-hosted to cloud in the last year,” said Martin Musierowicz, head of global channels for Atlassian. “To make that seamless, we have new tools and programs.”

Those additions are important for channel partners to understand because they are tied to compensation changes.

1. New Cloud Plans

The updates start with new pricing and packaging plans for Atlassian Cloud products:

• Premium: Cloud Premium lets users scale Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud beyond the functionality included in the standard plan. Atlassian will put Jira Service Desk into the Cloud Premium plan soon. Premium has new features at the product level, as well as a 99.9% uptime SLA, unlimited storage and around-the-clock Premium Support with guaranteed one-hour response times for critical issues.
• Free: Teams looking for collaboration platforms have access to free versions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. Some of these are not yet available but will be in the coming months. Atlassian already offers free editions of Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie.
• Academic & Community: Atlassian has crafted discounted cloud pricing for eligible academic and nonprofit organizations — up to 50% and 75% off, respectively.

2. Cloud Controls, Visibility

As governments around the world tighten data and security compliance requirements, vendors must respond. To that end, Atlassian soon will allow customers to choose where in its global data center footprint they want to store their content. This is important for adhering to laws including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The company also now provides data encryption at rest and in transit. This means only authorized users may gain audited access to encryption keys.

Atlassian recently released its Trust Center, as well, which lays out the latest security, reliability, privacy and compliance road map for its products and services.

Finally, Atlassian users may customize their Jira and Confluence Cloud sites with tailored URLs. Access to this capability starts early next year with Jira customers.

3. Security, Administration Features

Atlassian further has beefed up the Atlassian Access administrator console. Highlights of new capabilities include:

• Ability to integrate Atlassian Cloud products to Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, for SSO, and Google Cloud Identity for SSO and user provisioning.
• More security with cloud access security brokers including McAfee and Bitglass before the end of the year.
• Greater audit log transparency for simplified processes tied to investigation, accountability and compliance.
• Organizational insights that will further training, enablement and bill management.

4. Programs for Moving to the Cloud

Atlassian wants to get more users off its servers and …