Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
DON DODGE: Hi.
I'm Don Dodge, and this is Google Root Access.
Today my guest is Jay Simons, president
of Atlassian Software.
Welcome, Jay.
JAY SIMONS: Yeah.
Thanks, Don.
DON DODGE: Jay, developers know what that Atlassian is,
but maybe some of our audience doesn't.
What is Atlassian?
What kinds of products?
What do you do?
JAY SIMONS: Atlassian is an enterprise software company.
We make collaboration software used
by software teams and other companies
to help them build software better.
So whether you're an automotive company building
the next electric car or you're an investment bank building
a new trading algorithm or you're a shoe company building
digital devices to track fitness, all of those things
involve software.
And software is an important key ingredient
to how products, markets, industries, the world
will innovate.
DON DODGE: JIRA is a product that I know about,
but there are others.
What is JIRA?
And what do your other products do?
JAY SIMONS: Think about our product portfolio
as kind of the three-legged stool.
Any team that's building software
needs to do three things.
They need to track projects and activity and work.
That's what JIRA does.
They need to kind of share and iterate
on unstructured content ideas, specifications, roadmaps,
product requirements, the things that actually define
what you're going to build and what
that work is going to be involved in.
And Confluence is the product that handles that.
And then, because we're talking about software,
developers need to share and iterate and collaborate on code
and do a number of different things around that code,
things like code reviews or code insight, continuous integration
and deployment.
That kind of product family is anchored
by a product called Stash, which is a management
application for the distributed source control system Git.
DON DODGE: Great.
So developers, then, are your users.
JAY SIMONS: Developers are a very important group of users.
But actually, if you think about the modern software team,
the developer is actually a very important minority.
The group of people that are building software
include project managers, key stakeholders
that are going to define what developers need
to build to begin with, people in support and marketing,
documentation writers, designers.
There's a whole bevy of people that
are involved in actually designing, specifying, building
supporting software.
And so our products help bring all of those people
together, technical and non-technical alike.
DON DODGE: And how are your Atlassian products sold?
JAY SIMONS: Our products are sold over the web.
We use the internet, basically, to reach customers.
They're available to customers to deploy
both in the cloud as a service or to install and run
on their own servers behind the firewall.
DON DODGE: And is it a subscription-based things
or license?
Or how does it work?
JAY SIMONS: The licensing model for the cloud deployment
is subscription, either monthly or annual,
which is fairly typical.
The deployment model behind the firewall
is sold as a perpetual license with an annual maintenance
and support agreement.
DON DODGE: You compete with some open source kinds of products
or free freemium kinds of products.
But you're an enterprise software company.
So how does that work?
JAY SIMONS: Well, I would say we're
an alternative to both open source at the bottom end,
or at one end, and very expensive
traditional enterprise software from IBM and Microsoft
and HP at the top end, so things like Rational or even
Team Foundation Server or HP Quality Center
at the very, very top end.
Those are products that are millions and millions
of dollars a year that typically are sold on a per developer
seat basis.
Then at the other end, you've got open source products
like Bugzilla and Trac and Mantis and Redmine.
And then there's a bevy of companies
in the middle that do various things.
I think Atlassian is, I think, actually
the only company that's combined just excellence in discipline,
initial project tracking, content
collaboration, and source collaboration.
And that's what sets us apart, one thing.
The other thing is that we've intentionally
priced, in part because of our business model,
to be affordable and provide great value.
And in exchange for providing that great value to customers,
we don't have the traditional expensive enterprise sales
organization to justify or support the expense of products
at that other end.
DON DODGE: So you compete at both ends of the market,
and you've priced it so that you can compete effectively
with the free or freemium-type models.
But then you compete with big software companies.
Those big software companies typically
have technical support and pre-sales
and all kinds of consulting and all that sort of thing.
So I understand how you can compete at the open source
level or freemium by pricing well,
but how do you compete at the high end
against these big companies?
JAY SIMONS: By building better products.
By investing in R&D. Where those companies have
to invest in all the things you'd mentioned,
sales and more support and pre-sales,
to help explain how their products should work or help
compensate for maybe where the product doesn't work like it
is, we invest a very significant amount in R&D
to make sure that the product kind of sells itself.
We believe that we sell largely to a technical audience
and a technical constituent who, I think,
believes inherently that they have the capacity
to understand whether this product will support what they
need or what their team needs.
And we invest a lot in making sure
that the product does that.
So they can spin it up online, or they
can download and install it.
And ultimately, it's going to say, hey, welcome, evaluator.
Let's show you around and help you understand whether or not
this is going to do the job.
DON DODGE: Developers and product managers and project
managers are the same kinds of people
and do the same kinds of job, whether they're
in a tiny startup up or in a Fortune 500 company.
So I guess, in some sense, supporting them, it's the same.
You're supporting the users, and you
don't do anything different for Fortune 500
developers versus small startup developers.
JAY SIMONS: We don't.
Very, very large companies have different scale and performance
requirements.
And so there is a difference between a company that
has 100 people using our software in a company that
has 10,000 or 20,000.
We built a product to support both ends of that spectrum,
which was hard, requires a lot of R&D and specialization
and people that understand how to make it scale.
And you have to think where sometimes if you build
a software with only 10 users, the user picker that you design
is different than the one for 10,000.
I think we're a unique company that
needs to think about solving problems
for a very large and varied customer base.
When you're supporting teams of 10 and teams of 10,000,
designing a product that supports
both ends of the spectrum is, I think,
a difficult R&D challenging and one
I think we do well, probably better than any other software
company I can think of.
DON DODGE: And do you handle developer support
through discussion forums and FAQs?
How do you do that?
JAY SIMONS: Big emphasis on documentation.
Again, our whole philosophy is around customer empowerment
and customer self-service.
We believe in that, and we invest
a lot to make that-- That doesn't happen organically.
You have to consciously invest in making sure
that that works by building great product,
by building great documentation, by thinking
about empowering your end user or your customer.
We do have a technical support organization.
We also complement that with community-based support.
And so again, we invest a lot in creating an opportunity for it.
We've got 30,000 companies as active companies using
our software and, in that group of active companies,
millions of end users.
So there's a treasure trove of people
who actually know how to solve problems, either for themselves
and might be willing to share that solution
with other customers.
Creating an opportunity, I think,
for customers to help each other is a really important part
of a scalable support model.
And we complement that with our own technical support
organization to dig deep where we're needed.
DON DODGE: Wow.
Awesome.
Well, thank you very much.
This is an interesting topic, and I'd
like to have you back to discuss this more in the future.
But this is all we have time for today.
So thank you for joining us.
I'd like to remind you that if you're a cloud developer,
we have a special $2,000 credit for Google Cloud.
You can see the details of where to sign up
for that credit on the screen now.
Thank you very much, and we'll see you next time.