How Atlassian is speeding up pizza deliveries and making better coffee machines

Companies are juggling more software-as-a-service licences than ever, creating inefficiencies and poor customer service. But Atlassian says it’s ending that pain.

Outgoing Atlassian co-chief executive Scott Farquhar says IT teams are dealing with disjointed tools which is making companies inefficient.

Enterprise software giant Atlas­sian says it is helping accelerate pizza deliveries for Domino’s and product development for Breville as it launches an irreverent advertising campaigning targeting one of its bigger rivals.

Atlassian co-chief executive Scott Farquhar – who will step down in late August, with co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes to run the company solo – said companies were getting bogged down in expensive legacy systems that “reinforced silos between teams”, generating inefficiencies and poor customer services.

At the same time, businesses are juggling more software as a service (SaaS) vendors than ever before, as IT teams come under pressure and different departments increasingly buy their own SaaS subscriptions to remedy the problem.

SaaS spending is surging 15-20 per cent annually, as organisations buckle under an average of more than 125 different SaaS applications each, totalling $US1040 ($1575) per employee per year, according to Gartner. “IT typically is aware of only a third of those due to decentralised ownership and sourcing,” Gartner says.

To this end, Atlassian is heavily promoting its Jira Service Management product, which Mr Farquhar said was the only service that brought a company’s development, information technology infrastructure library and business teams together on one platform, enhancing collaboration.

“IT teams are dealing with globally distributed employees, they have to operate 24/7 like never before and they’re doing it with disjointed tools, and this is a particularly difficult challenge,” he said.

“We are constantly innovating in this area because we understand the costs and the challenges that … teams need to overcome to deliver vital services.”

Such is Mr Farquhar’s confidence in the product that he has launched a cheeky advertising campaign, targeted at larger rival ServiceNow.

ServiceNow, which has a market cap of $US147.1bn compared with Atlassian’s $US48bn, is set to hold its customer showcase in Las Vegas this week, just days after Atlassian hosted its own event at The Venetian convention centre. Atlassian advertisements are featuring on electronic billboards across the city, emblazoned with the words “end bad service management now’’, with the ‘‘o’’ in “now” coloured green, taking a dig at ServiceNow’s logo.

“You’ll make bad decisions in Vegas. Don’t let your ITSM software be one of them,” says one of Atlassian’s advertisements at Las Vegas airport.

Jira Service Management has been steadily attracting customers since it launched four years ago, now boasting more than 50,000 on the platform.

Domino’s replaced seven different SaaS products with Atlassian’s product, which now supports 3800 of its pizza outlets and streamlines deliveries globally.

“Domino’s delivers eight pizzas a second around the globe and if you think about that each pizza meets our needs to be delivered with exceptional service. Every single pizza,” Mr Farquhar said.

“They were trying to do that with seven disjointed, expensive, outdated ITSM solutions. And they replaced all seven of those with JIRA Service Management to support their almost 4000 stores in 12 countries.”

Dominos chief technology officer Matthias Hansen said as the company continued to standardise processes on Jira, it allowed them to automate the back-end of these processes easily, further improving speed and quality and removing repetitive manual work.

Dominos is standardising its processes on Jira in order to improve automation,

“My advice would be to standardise on one platform. One thing I’ve noticed since the pandemic is that there are lots of good SaaS platforms but the challenge is you end up with the legal team using one set of tools, another team in another country using another tool, and (previously) I never had the critical mass to actually support the business properly,” Mr Hansen said.

Breville was also struggling with myriad SaaS subscriptions that the company’s global service delivery manager Roni Nestorovski said were costly and in­efficient.

“A common way these tools spread … is a new person joins an organisation and they used a tool in a previous job that solves all their issues. They obtain a few free licence,” Mr Nestorovski said.

“They can be somebody with a corporate credit card to buy a few more licences. They then invite some more people, who invite more people, who invite more people. All of a sudden the Service Delivery Manager is contacted by the salesperson and says ‘you are now an enterprise customer, we need to do an upgrade for you’.

“To cut a long story very short, we did a very quick price comparison with JWM (Jira Work Management) plus Confluence (another Atlassian product) was less than half the price of (Atlassian rival) Monday.com.”

But challenges remain, particularly in convincing teams to switch to products they are not familiar with. Mr Nestorovski said the key was to showcase successful examples.

“The beginning part was to gain confidence from the business. So then once we gained that confidence, when they came to us with requirements, we were able to push them down a certain path and then when we found the Mondays in the Asanas and Microsoft projects were able to steer them back to Jira.”

Atlassian advertisements are appearing all over Las Vegas.

Breville’s product development team and its test kitchen in Sydney is using the software, which helps them track projects.

“The Sydney test kitchen was using Microsoft Project at the time.

“They wanted to migrate to the JWM because they knew they had some limitations with projects. But they just couldn’t visualise it,” Mr Nestorovski said.

“A few days later we reach out to the stakeholder who is actually managing the test kitchen. He’s already completed the migration on his own without our help. He’s trained his team on how to use JWM and has given us feedback on how to make improvements.”

US electric vehicle maker Rivian is also another company that has struggled with app sprawl, but staff product manager Emily Novak said it had saved $US2.5m since switching to Atlassian.

“That $US2.5m was just our initial one year savings. Going forward, we’re seeing 36 per cent savings annually just by having people streamlined and working in the same way.”

The author travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Atlassian.