Atlassian Corporation, a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software and the maker of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello products, has announced a commitment to delivering on its advanced cloud offerings for the Indian market. Cloud has been the key driver of Atlassian’s growth and innovation, with overall subscription revenue, which is primarily cloud driven, growing at 50 per cent year-over-year. The company has plans to invest aggressively over the next 12 months to grow its cloud business in India. Archana Rao, CIO, Atlassian gives the investment plan and Robert Bannerman, General Manager – South Asia (Channel), Atlassian shares company’s channel roadmap and investment plans for the channel business
Can you talk about Atlassian’s journey in India?
Archana Rao: With India witnessing a huge uptake in cloud adoption, and with the cloud market expected to grow approximately three-fold to US$ 7.1 billion by 2022, according to Nasscom, we are building products to cater to this demand, while also providing our Indian customers access to its innovative new cloud offerings. Our customers in India include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs, and Flipkart, among others.
To achieve this goal, we are aiming to double number of Indian employees, working to add 300 more local employees to help support the growth of the our R&D centre which opened in Bengaluru in 2018. We have surpassed US$ 1 billion in lifetime revenue on the Atlassian Marketplace, and posted total revenue of approximately US$ 409 million for Q2’20, up 37 per cent year-over-year, achieving record profitability. With cloud security being a major focus for cloud customers, Atlassian has also announced enterprise-grade controls and security features, with data privacy upgrades to its underlying cloud platform.
How do you see the growth of your cloud services picking up in India? Can you share some of the key milestones achieved so far?
Robert Bannerman: Indian companies are at the forefront of cloud adoption and we are optimistic about our growth in this space in India. We expect migrations from our self-hosted products to our cloud offerings will continue to grow, and we expect new customers will also continue to think cloud-first. Currently, more than 90 per cent of new Atlassian customers start with one of our cloud-hosted products.
One of the key milestones driving growth in our cloud services include the introduction of our new cloud plans. These plans offer customers the level of service that suits their organisation. For example, our Premium plan provides enterprises with everything they need to confidently scale with advanced features, a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA, unlimited storage and access to premium security tools. We also launched Forge last year. Forge is our new cloud app development platform that helps developers in our ecosystem to build cloud apps more easily and securely. We will continue to build products to service the Indian market and we’re focused on giving customers here access to our innovative new cloud offerings as early adopters.
With respect to your cloud services, what sort of customer base does Atlassian have in India?
Bannerman: While I can’t share specific figures, Atlassian has more than 164,000 customers globally, across large and small organisations – including General Motors, Walmart Labs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lyft, Verizon, Spotify and NASA. In India, our customers include Ola Cabs, Reliance, Walmart Labs and Flipkart. Jira Software is Atlassian’s flagship product and it continues to be our most popular. Together with Confluence, our collaboration software, these two products drive two-thirds of Atlassian’s global revenue.
With cloud becoming an integral part of enterprise business, how do you see the momentum of your services gaining grounds? Please give a few examples.
Bannerman: We know from speaking with enterprises around the world that they see their future in the cloud. We already support 83 per cent of the Fortune 500 including Costco, Delta Airlines, Office Depot, and Visa and every one of those customers uses at least one of our cloud products. More than 90 per cent of new Atlassian customers start with one of our cloud-hosted products and we believe adoption of our cloud solutions will continue to grow.
In terms of your go-to-market strategy, can you share your direct and indirect model mix ?
Bannerman: Having a presence in India with our Bengaluru office means we are close to our customers here and can understand their particular pain points and deliver products to delight them. While we don’t disclose the mix between direct and indirect channels, we work directly with enterprise customers and solution partners in India. Solution partners are important to us as they also have the ability to resell Atlassian solutions and services.
What has been the growth in your channel business? Can you share your existing base of the channel in India?
Bannerman: We currently have 14 partners in India and we are growing fast, both in terms of our partners and the number of customers in the region. We are hiring aggressively in our Bengaluru office to keep up with the Indian market’s demand for our cloud Atlassian works with solution partners of all sizes across India. Some solution partners include Amrut Software, Addteq, CRG Solutions, CSS Corp, Nagarro, and Infosys.
Any expansion plans for strengthening your channel in 2020?Bannerman: We plan to grow our channel both in India and abroad in 2020. We are recruiting solution partners with Cloud, DevOps, Agile, and ITSM professional services capabilities, particularly in Delhi and Hyderabad. In addition to growing our channel, we are also working with solution partners to enhance their capabilities and certify consultants. We are investing in new online training courses, Mastery Camps for in-person training, joint sales and mentoring, internal use products, joint demand generation and market development activities, lead sharing and referrals.
