Atlassian boss Jay Simons not fazed by Slack’s offering

US team-chat outfit Slack launched an update this week but Atlassian president Jay Simons wasn’t fazed.

President Jay Simons says Atlassian spends big on research and development.

The battle to be the software of choice for the world’s workplaces heated up significantly this week when US team-chat outfit Slack fired its latest salvo — Slack Enterprise Grid — but Atlassian president Jay Simons isn’t fazed.

Slack’s update allows it to be used by large organisations but the Sydney-based Atlassian beat Slack to the punch when it paid $US425 million ($555m) to ­acquire project management app Trello last month, and Mr Simons told The Weekend Australian ­Atlassian was now unrivalled in its offering, even by the likes of Microsoft, which recently unveiled its own Microsoft Teams product.

“We’re broader than them,” Mr Simons said. “Every team needs a way to manage work, create content and communicate, and we’re the only company that provides tools across that three-legged stool.

“These tools were built with a singular focus on teamwork, and that isn’t true of Microsoft. The centre of Microsoft’s universe is still Office, an individual productivity tool. They say people use Teams so they can better share and create Office documents. Their true north is still around personal productivity, and then a company like Slack really just ­focuses on real-time messaging.

“Great teamwork is not just messaging.”

Atlassian, which has grown from its humble days as a two-man team in 2002 into a company even bigger than Qantas, isn’t leaving any gaps in its offering, selling companies a whole suite of products from HipChat — an ­instant messaging and group video app — to collaboration app Confluence and project-tracking software JIRA.

Mr Simons says as the way we work evolves, so will Atlassian’s products whether that be through in-house development or acquisition, as was the case with Trello. The company has made 16 acquisitions since 2006.

“We spend as a percentage of revenue a lot more than research and development than most of our peer group,” he said. “I think that the result of that is we’ve been at the forefront of team collaboration since our inception, over the past 14 years there’s been a long list of software fall away, the Yammers and others, Atlassian has continued to grow and innovate and five years from now we’ll still be doing that.”

The US-based executive, who has been at Atlassian for nine years, said Atlassian disagreed with US President Donald Trump’s immigration ban and sees it as antithetical to Atlassian’s — and the US’s — values.

“We just want from Trump, naturally, what most companies would want,” he said.

“And that’s the ability to attract the world’s best and brightest. And that’s not just true in the United States, but also in Australia. Every country we believe needs to invest more in technology education, in math and science, to celebrate that and give a foundational choice for young people wherever they are. We want the ability to hire the best and brightest and build the best company and best culture we can.”

Those comments were echoed by Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes who told The Australian this week the tech community needed to put pressure on Trump to change the ban.

“Swearing about things on ­social media to your small group of friends probably doesn’t too much and I do think sticking your head in the sand and avoiding talking about things isn’t a good way to ­resolve disputes and never has been. Trying to talk to him to talk through the issues is ­important; I think you can still publicly disagree with things and do that.

“Think about the Australian-American situation. We’re an ally, we share a lot of commonality ­between the people and the ­values, that doesn’t mean we can never not criticise them for something they disagree with.

“I think you can say this is totally not OK, and if you’re on the committee go and change it.”

Mr Cannon-Brookes said ­Atlassian was a proud global company that valued openness, inclusiveness and diversity and had strived to get the most talented people from around the globe.

“Diversity of thought is what we’re after and I fundamentally believe that has been critical to our success as a company, to have lots of different nationalities, backgrounds, genders involved is important in creating great products and building great companies.”