Atlassian Corporation Plc (TEAM) Presents at Citi’s 2022 Global Technology Brokers Conference (Transcript)

Atlassian Corporation Plc (NASDAQ:TEAM) Citi’s 2022 Global Technology Conference September 8, 2022 12:15 PM ET

Company Representatives

Anu Bharadwaj – Chief Operating Officer

Conference Call Participants

Fatima Boolani – Citi

Fatima Boolani

My name is Fatima Boolani. I jointly head up the U.S. Software Research Effort here at Citi, and I have the privilege of sharing the keynote session and the stage here today with Atlassian and Atlassian COO, Anu Bharadwaj. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Anu Bharadwaj

Thanks so much Fatima. It’s wonderful to be here.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Fatima Boolani

So just a quick and dirty, and then I’m going to turn the floor over to you. Anu runs all transformational projects and transformative projects across the business, and is quarter backing the Cloud Platform teams and then the operation to run the platform team.

So with that setting the stage, Anu you were appointed COO of Atlassian in the fall of 2021. So just about a year ago, after having led the flagship Jira Product at Atlassian for the seven years prior to that. So maybe the best place to start is, what have been the key milestones that you’ve hit and achieved over the course of the last 12 months in your tenure as COO? And really, what’s on the priority sequence and on the operational agenda for the next 12 months.

Anu Bharadwaj

Sure. Hi everyone! Can you hear me? Yes, awesome. It’s great to be here with all of you. Some context on the COO role. I joined Atlassian as the Head of Product for Jira back in 2014 and like you said, took on the COO role just over a year ago. My dad asked me, what does a COO do? When I took on the role. And as you know, COO roles are unique to every company, my dad and I play a lot of scrabble, so I told him, a COO is like a blank tile in scrabble. You deploy the tile in the most strategic and impactful place, it doesn’t matter what the word is.

And in that sense, the COO role in Atlassian, because we are Product Company, our most strategic and impactful places to invest tend to be a lot in R&D. So as a consequence, more than half of my agreement continues to be running a large part of a product team and businesses, in addition to what you would normally find in an operations org.

So on the business side, over the last 12 months, as you – for those of you that have tracked us, as you can see our migrations have continued to progress very nicely, very pleased with the execution there. Our enterprise adoption has gone well. We have picked up market, selling to more and more larger customers and we’ve done really well in terms of growing our overall ecosystems. The ecosystem in and off itself is a substantial investment as well as source of revenue for us, and that has continued to grow at a rate faster than our parent products themselves.

And underlying all of this really is our strategic investment in the Cloud platform, which really helps us generate a lot of these common tides that lift all of our products, by building enterprise capabilities, by allowing a platform on which we can rapidly build new products through point A, so it gives us more compounding advantages. And over the last year I think we’ve done really well in terms of showing those through points, through point A products and new products that we’ve released in market, so that’s one half of my job as COO.

And on the other half, on the operations side, really we created the COO role to help set up an operating system across Atlassian. To make sure that we can scale as a company and that we have rigor and discipline across our investment, strategic planning and how we evaluate progress, goals and deliverables across the company at scale, while continuing to progress at high velocity.

I think we’ve done really well there as well. As you can see, we’ve really optimized our hiring engine to get better and better. We’ve hired about 2,300 people in the last year. We are at a total of 8,800, so well over a quarter that we’ve added over last year, while shifting to a fully distributed set up.

So Atlassian has a policy called Team Anywhere that we introduced about a couple of years ago, where there is no mandatory attendance required in office, and we have done really well in terms of hiring remotely, onboarding remotely and making people productive and effective remotely, because fundamentally our belief as a company and historically this has proven to be true, where we’ve built products for ourselves and then productize those and sold it to customers; that’s how Jira started, that’s how Confluence started.

And we believe that by shipping to a fully distributed company, working in a hybrid world, we will get better at building products for ourselves to be successful in that world and then taking the same collaboration products to market as well. So in effect, we are clearing the future of work by living in it.

Fatima Boolani

Anu, I’m going to put a pin in you know some of your hiring and talent acquisition strategy objectives and aspirations, but before we do that, I did want to take a step back and again before we jump very deep into the cloud migration and cloud transition that you all have been on a journey on, which I think is a very high entry for investors.

I do want to take a step back and get your perspectives on the product roadmap and the product delivery and maybe just starting at the high level, you know what’s really influencing your product strategy, product roadmap decisions against the marketplace that has absolutely evolved in certainly the last seven years or longer that you’ve been at the company, but even more broadly and kind of the broader space around asynchronous collaboration and developers, and technical staff in the organization becoming sort of the budgetary decision makers that they certainly weren’t a decade ago.

So maybe just start there from a product perspective and then we can dive into the cloud migration that you’ve been on.

Anu Bharadwaj

Sure. So a few trends over the last few years that have remained persistent over my time at Atlassian, as well as at the industry at large I would say, so listing a few of those that are crucial for our product strategy that’s worth paying attention to. One, our philosophy as a company is very different. I have built products for developers who are for the last 20 years or 10 years at Microsoft before joining Atlassian and if there’s one thing I can tell with certainty, it’s that developers don’t like to be told what tool to be use.

Fatima Boolani

That’s what my husband says about me.

Anu Bharadwaj

And so at Atlassian that philosophy is very much not to mandate a sweep on development teams or technical teams. Its instead to enable tries [ph] and cleared an open-to chain as we call it, where the Cambrian SaaS explosion that we see happening across the industrial over the last few years, we want to be at the center of it and enable more and more players to actually come on to market. We think that’s an end outcome that’s helpful to customers.

So we’ve really ridden the Cambrian SaaS wave to ensure that we build an open toolchain that connects harmoniously with all of the other third party players in the market, while remaining the single source of truth in terms of work that happens in an organization.

So Jira continues to really be the single source of truth for work, but connects really well, integrates really well with any other toolchain, with any other toolset in your DevOps toolchain and enables a bidirectional data flow.

We want to continue to be that way. That’s a contrarian approach in a world where everyone wants to throw all products into a single suite and sell the entire suite to tech teams. We want to keep the element of choice alive for technical teams, because that’s our fundamental belief as to how we thrive.

Second, as you’ve all noticed, the whole shift to remote work and distributed teams has taken off even further after the pandemic. As a company we strongly believe that hybrid work is the way to go. That we are never going to go back into a world where everyone has to get going to office five days a week and work a specific set of hours. We believe that productivity, software, technology at broad, all of these industries will thrive in a more hybrid work setting and will drive more and more benefits for companies that adapt to this trend.

So as I said before, we are living this trend ourselves and our products across Work Management, Confluence, Trello, these really cater to different aspects of hybrid work, not just productivity and collaboration as we’ve traditionally always served the market, but also in terms of building connections, in terms of building culture. We believe that these are important aspects of succeeding in hybrid work, so you’ll see our work management products across Confluence, Trello, Atlas which helps companies kind of connect the top level strategy all the way down to leap nodes, help drive more sharped purpose and goals across an entire company.

So those are two trends that I would say have been enduring and you can expect to see us continue to do more.

Fatima Boolani

Anu, you made a reference to Cambrian and SaaS explosion and I really love that sort of characterization of what sort of happened in the enterprise IT landscape as it relates to the absolute growth and explosion really in the number of applications that live outside of the confines of your walled data centers, right, and so a big sort of response to that trend certainly has been Atlassian sort of moving towards cloud delivered products, right. So that is in entirety the thesis behind your cloud migration and transition, and you indeed have been quarterbacking that entire process and project.

And so leading the charge on architecting the Atlassian Cloud architecture and the engineering efforts behind it, where do you think you are today in the maturation of your cloud form factors.

Anu Bharadwaj

Yeah, that’s a great question. So Atlassian has been on this journey for a few years, and we’ve consistently and uniformly continued to communicate that the shift to cloud is a multi-year journey, both for our customers and for us as a company. At this point if I had a sum it up, I would say, we are where we expected to be at this point in our multi-year journey.

So we started out initially by bringing in the first set of customers from server over to cloud. We’ve built more and more capabilities in cloud, bridged the parity across on-prem and cloud across some of our fundamental categories, what we call very creatively as Cloud Blockers. I was just telling somebody at our conference meetings.

The Cloud Blockers is a category. For instance it talks about things like scale, how many users, concurrent users can you support on cloud. We’ve gone there from supporting 5,000 users to 10,000 users to 35,000 users, which was an EAP, Early Access Program last year and is now generally available, and now we have 50,000 users in the Early Access.

We’ve continued to push numbers around availability, reliability, all of those, and a big category around enterprise readiness of cloud, because that’s typically a lot of what our customers ask us around, the size and scale and have these regulated industry requirements, data management requirements, and we’ve been really diligent and produced consistent results around building those capabilities in cloud with all of our compliance certifications, HIPAA, SaaS compliance, working on FedRAMP.

And to help customers make an informed decision what we do is, we put out a public roadmap of here is how we are working on our Cloud Blockers plan. So a customer at a later point in the journey may be able to look at it and say, okay, great! I’m going to be ready for it in nine months, so here’s how I can plan for my migration.

So overall I would say, I’m really pleased with how our migration deliverables have progressed, how customers have reacted, and I expect to see this momentum continue over the next few years.

Fatima Boolani

I’m going to pull on that thread that you brought up around bridging the feature, parity gap between your cloud form factors and Atlassian cloud, versus your on-premise form factor solution, which is largely data centered today. So you have the unenviable challenge of managing engineering resources across your traditional form factors like the data center side, and now you’re you know skating to where the puck is going on the cloud side. So what does that investment philosophy, algorithm, engineering resource prioritization look like between cloud and on-premise, because by the way, you still want to keep your existing customers happy, but the vast majority of whom are actually still running you on their premise.

Anu Bharadwaj

Yeah, that’s a good question, and I happen to run both parts of the business like you said. But to start with, at a very broad level, we’ve been super clear as a company that cloud is the future. Cloud is the eventual destination that we want our customers on.

Having said that, data center continues to be an important business in the medium term, and is seen by many of our customers as a stepping stone to get to cloud. So we see a bunch of customers move from server to data center and then do the switch from data center to cloud. In fact, a third of our migrations in cloud comes from data center and the remaining two-thirds from server.

So we will continue to strike that balance of making sure that data center customers continue to be happy in their interim state of data center, while rapidly bridging the gap on Cloud and making sure Cloud is ready for all sorts of customers across different industries, across different regulation requirements, all of those. But ultimately we want to make sure that Cloud is the ultimate destination for our customers, and that they have an option to either go directly to Cloud or go via data center.

Fatima Boolani

Are there any commonalities or themes that you see as you know potential, common trigger points if you will for a data center customer to finally make the decision and make the jump over. And I suspect that might – that answer might change depending on the industry, kind of given some of the allusions you made to the regulatory environment and you know compliance regulations. But I’m curious if you had to sort of peal out some common threads on the trigger points of conversions between data center and cloud, what would those be?

Anu Bharadwaj

So I would categorize that as two kinds of triggers to think about. One set of triggers is around readiness of cloud. So for federal customers or regulated customers, some healthcare customers for instance, we landed a bunch of them this year, after we delivered on HIPAA a compliance requirement. So there is a category of things that we requite to do on the Cloud in terms of readiness for regulated customers or customers of a certain scale and size. Those are what I referred to as Cloud Blockers and as we make continuous progress on them, we see customers from data center and server jump over as soon as that capability comes online.

A second category is really the pull from Cloud. Because we’ve been very open that Cloud is the ultimate destination we want our customers to be on, our investment also matches. The lion’s share of our R&D investment goes to Cloud and therefore most of the innovation you see gets delivered on cloud. So there is a bunch of things you can do on cloud that you just cannot do on-prem.

So those are – common threads there would be things like automation, connecting multiple Atlassian products, as well as third party products to automate and remove road work from your daily workflow. Our data and analytics capabilities which recently announced a beta of earlier this year at our user conference, where you can pull data from Jira software, Jira Service Management, potentially a third party, a snowflake or something, and create a common data link which will unlock insides that were never possible to do in on-prem.

So you can see for example, things like the relationship between your engineering deliverables and your revenue performance. These are capabilities that are only available on Cloud. Other things like mobile abilities, just the mobile app works a lot better on Cloud, and in terms of integration and common Cloud experiences, like an integrated search, how do you do more third party integration with other non-Atlassian products you are using, Cloud is just better.

In general, Cloud is the best possible experience of Atlassian you can get. So a lot of customers tend to move over from data center. The triggers tend to be more, ‘oh! I want that capability within cloud that I cannot get on on-prem, so I’m going to make that move.’

Fatima Boolani

I think generally and operationally, and certainly from the go-to-market standpoint, as we sit here, you know the inferences that there has been a more of a carrot approach versus a stick approach to get customers over to you know the most modern version of your solutions which is of course the cloud, but you know part and parcel to that is you know the deliberate decision you made.

Now, a couple of years ago with the end of lifing, the server form factor of the solution and then we are slated to see an end of life of the maintenance support of the server products in 2024, I believe in February. And so, is there sort of a road map here where you could take the same approach to data center to really energize that migration engine, and how do you kind of think about the positives and the drawbacks of maybe taking the same approach to the data center footprint that you did with server, to kind of ultimately drive towards – drive the whole installed base towards Cloud.

Anu Bharadwaj

Like I said, data center continues to be important for us in the medium term. So it’s really not a decision point in the immediate future for us to think about what approach should we take to do more there. In fact, we are really pleased with the pull that the Cloud product has on both server and datacenter customers, that we don’t see a need to do anything different at the moment. Like I said, we are at the point in our migration journey where we expected we would be at this time. So I wouldn’t think of as a company, us needing to do anything drastically different there. But we will continue to invest in Cloud and make sure that Cloud continues to get compounding gains from all of the R&D investment we do around innovation there.

Fatima Boolani

I think one of the things that hopefully you’d agree with me on is an Atlassian Cloud footprint, as a from a product delivery standpoint, perhaps gives you so much more visibility into the way customers are engaging with your products. So I’m curious, in terms of metrics and user behavior, perhaps telemetry that you have access to in the Cloud, how does that differ from data center; and secondarily, how does that intelligence and that level of analytics guide and/or influence what you’re going to be doing on your Cloud road map.

Anu Bharadwaj

That’s a good question. So on the cloud side, of course obviously we have more access to telemetry and usage patterns of how users consume our products. Because we are a multiproduct company, cross-sell is an important go-to-market motion for us. In Cloud cross sell becomes a lot more organic and smooth, so we are able to look and usage patterns and tell that, oh okay! So this first person is using Jira Software for this particular use case, where we think Confluence is going to be more helpful or Trello is going to be an interesting add-on. So cross sell on the Cloud is a lot easier because of user journey awareness.

Now, of course this is – I am explaining this in an over simplified manner. It’s not like we track the date for every user, but it’s a lot easier on cloud to be able to predict how cross-sell and cross flow patterns might occur. So that’s one where that, it really helps us on the cloud side, to be more responsive to customer needs and predict what they are going to do next.

The second way that we do differently in cloud compared to data center is around using AI and ML that have predictive recommendations and predictive next steps. For example, in automation we’re able to say, Hey! We notice that you’re using the following products together. Here’s a work flow through which you can connect all of those products and automate away some of this work. We use this in our common search, we use this in embedded insights where we’re able to look at productivity of developer teams, productivity of IT teams, all of those.

And our fastest growing product, Jira Service Management, that’s a great example of how we can really bring together developer workflows and IT workflows in the Cloud and build deeper integrations, a lot easier than we could do on-prems. So in a number of ways Cloud really accelerates our ability to serve customers on a deep and broader look.

Q – Fatima Boolani

I think it’s a great jumping off point to my – for my next question. Just around the contribution to the franchise from newer solutions is that you really built the breadth and the depth of solutions outside of the confines of Jira and Confluence, and you brought up JSM, so we’ll stick to that one.

You know, as you sort of think about adding incremental functionalities to these solutions that cater to a different audience and a different part of the organization, I mean where do you think these products can potentially go in terms of contribution. I understand Jira and Confluence are probably still you know driving the bus, and in terms of being close to you or over 60% of your business. So really what’s going to put the gas on the fire to get JWN and JSM really to be as big and large and deep a franchise as Jira and Confluence?

A – Anu Bharadwaj

It’s a good one. I’ll answer this in two parts. One, when we say we have line of sight to $10 billion in revenue, a lot of that $10 billion is driven through our core businesses. So we don’t make any assumptions in terms of new products have to get to superlative rates in order to hit the $10 billion in revenue.

Having said that, as a company we’ve always been very long term in our orientation. So as you know, a lot of our investments go into R&D compared to other parts of the company, which is quite unusual in a setting like this, and when you invest heavily in R&D, the returns that you think about and when those investments bear fruit also tend to be on a timeline that’s different.

A great example of this is our Cloud platform. So we’ve invested in this with strategic patience over multiple years and now you can see clear proof point of that where we can build products like JWM, like Atlas, Compass, Jira product discovery, a lot faster than we ever could before. So we don’t have to redo things like infrastructure, identity, common experiences, the NAV. So everything right from the back end to the front end, we have reusable components that we’ve built up through the common Atlassian cloud platform. So newer products have the opportunity to go further faster, by virtue of us investing in a Cloud platform.

The second advantage that newer products will have to increase their breadth and depth is just the distribution network that we already enjoy, because we don’t just serve the Fortune 500, we serve the Fortune 500,000 so to speak. Across 250,000 customers there’s an immense distribution network that new products already start-off from. So products like Atlas or Jira product discovery, customers can just start trying that out with actual data and meaningful work flows with zero friction, because they after that already a customer of either a Trello or a Confluence or Jira software. So this gives new products and immediately leg up, both in terms of a build capability and in terms of a distribution capability.

And lastly, we have a third party marketplace, which is a significant differentiator for us, which is really hard to find in any other company that serves that broader spectrum of customers, where the more marketplace apps that customers use, the stickier they get, and therefore for new products it’s a lot easier to lodge themselves into the work flow with second and third party marketplace apps attached to them. So we have a chance to not only attract more users, distribute to more customers, but also stay there and retain usage for longer.

Q – Fatima Boolani

You brought up marketplace and that got me thinking, that’s been sort of a sneaky cool business that you have kind of underneath the covers, where you’ve basically, essentially got an app store concepts under your umbrella, and so I think what’s been sort of interesting to watch is you know with the Cloud migration sort of trending in accordance with plans, you know the – there’s a little bit of catch to a chicken and egg if you will with respect to the critical mass of applications that are Cloud ready, that can be tagged on to Cloud environments versus what you have had historically on-prem.

So, can you give us a sense of where we are in that lifecycles for marketplace applications that are you know ready for prime time for cloud, because I imagine that universe of applications is lower than it was on-prem today, and so any sort of perspectives on timing as to when you expect Cloud marketplace apps to reach parity with the body of on-premise marketplace apps.

A – Anu Bharadwaj

Sure. Marketplace is actually a sneaky cool business, I like that description for us, because the scale at which we run the market place and we automate commercial transactions on the marketplace is a real differentiator compared to any other company out there that’s serving as broader basis to 50,000 customers.

The thing to understand about the cloud shift in marketplace though is that it truly unlocks an opportunity that we are very, very bullish about. So what happens in the case of marketplace apps in cloud, is that typically customers that end up doing the migration tend to evaluate, okay, how many apps do I have right now on-prem? What’s the equivalent on cloud? How do I get there, and we’ve done work around app unblocking just like we’ve done work around cloud unblocking and that execution has gone really well, and we have progressed to a point where there’s more cloud marketplace apps, far more cloud marketplace apps than we started with, and it doesn’t really show up as a reason for customers to not get the cloud anymore.

But in addition to just parity, I think the opportunity really is in terms of leapfrogging, because as we go further up and more and more enterprise customers come onto Cloud, a big question they have is, ‘Well, I trust Atlassian, but how do I trust this third party that’s building this marketplace app?’ And the way we saw that is by again relying on our long term, strategic patient investment in the cloud platform.

What we’ve done is we’ve gone through that intense proposition of building things like infrastructure at scale. Supporting 50,000 users on a Jira instance is not a joke. So the years of investment that went into scale, performance, compliance, security, administrative capabilities, all of that is baked into the Cloud platform that we now externalize and say, ‘Hey! External developers get access to the same platform capabilities that internal Atlassian developers get access to.’

So when customers ask us, how do we trust this third party marketplace, we as Atlassian have taken on the burden of hosting even third party marketplace apps. Therefore it becomes a lot more attractive for external developers to build on our platform, and for customers and consumers to be able to buy and use these marketplace apps a lot easier.

So Forge, which is really a hosted development platform in the marketplace space, we are very bullish about the kind of opportunities it unlocks, which was never possible long term.

Q – Fatima Boolani

I want to move the lens over to the monetization opportunity and to monetization engine. A couple of different facets here, so you know. You know we’re aware that you’ve taken your pricing levels up over the last several years. Just the sort of the philosophy and the decision making calculus on what the right pricing is, how much pricing or the magnitude of the increases, how palatable those are, and then certainly contextualizing a lot of that against the competitive backdrop. So just maybe at a higher level, sort of what the decision making calculus is around your pricing strategy, certainly for you know migratory products, but also some of your new products that live in the Cloud?

A – Anu Bharadwaj

Sure. Overall it’s really simple. Our pricing philosophy hasn’t changed in the last seven years as a public company as you’ve probably tracked us, and honestly the origin of the philosophy as well throughout the entire company’s history has remained that we want to be a company that focuses on value pricing. And across all three of our markets; Agile, DevOps, ITSM and Work Management, our products continue to be at a spot where I think we are very, very, competitively priced for the value that we provide. We intend to keep that philosophy in-tact, nothing changes on that front.

An interesting way for us to monetize that has taken flight more in the recent years has been our addition strategy. So in the Cloud we have now built up the entire stack of additions. Most companies look at it as a ladder. So we go from like free to standard to premium to enterprise based on higher price points and take users on an upgrade journey.

But in the case of Atlassian, it’s not just a linear ladder. It’s actually a lateral net so to speak, because you can have Jira software at a standard version, but buy Confluence Premium wall-to-wall for the rest of your customers, and perhaps Trello enterprise for a subset of your customers. So you can kind of choose your point at different altitudes across our additions, which makes up-sell and the dollar per user opportunity bigger for us, with more options in terms of what we can deliver in each addition.

Fatima Boolani

And you know again, framing this back to the competitive landscape and you said something earlier that I want to revisit. The core thesis and the ethos of the company is, you are not – the Atlassian platform is not going to be all things to all people, right. You’ve picked your specific points in the DevOps toolchain where do you want to be prominent, and so that certainly is a contrast to some of your competitors, your peers strategy, and I’m wondering if you can sort of expound on that a little bit as to why you believe your thesis is the right one.

A – Anu Bharadwaj

Sure. I think it’s worthwhile to look at it in the context of different markets. We talk a lot about DevOps in particular, but ITSM and Work Management also have the same underlying foundational philosophy, but manifests in a couple of different ways.

For instance, one of our foundational beliefs is what I call Cambrian SaaS earlier or open toolchain. We don’t think we are in a situation where we should be telling our customers, this is how you will work. We will prescribe a way and you will not deviate from it. That just simply is not practical. Though it may be convenient to the company selling all of that toolchain – toolset, it’s just not practical from a consumer standpoint.

So what we want to do in DevOps, as well as ITSM and Work Management is provide that common plane of work with as many slots as possible, such that integrations to other products, both Atlassian and third party can plug-in. So you see this manifest with open toolchain and DevOps, where our integrations in Jira Software with GitHub and Bitbucket are nearly the same really, irrespective of whether you are using our products for source control or GitHub. We strive to give you the best possible experience in DevOps, because we believe that our fundamental value proposition is in being as open as possible.

With ITSM, we believe that our fundamental value proposition is in connecting that open DevOps toolchain with your IT workflows, such that information flows seamlessly and that we are not tracking you in a different universe for IT and a different universe for Dev. That’s fundamentally the DevOps way that is getting adopted by different companies.

And in Work Management you see this even more so. If you look at the happenings in the market over the last few years, more and more products come up with different approaches to how you do work. And the way we think about it at Atlassian is, we offer products to do structured work. Like JWM for example, which helps you with work flows for instance for recruiting. You have a clear workflow if a candidate goes from round one to round two, to decision making round and whether it’s a yes/no decision or not, all the way to unstructured work, where it’s just a page on Confluence or a board on Trello.

What we want to do with Work Management is create that, again central nervous system that connects structured and unstructured work. It may happen to be in Trello, it may happen to be in the Google Drive or some other competitive tool, but we believe that offering that connection and the path from structured to unstructured and back is really what differentiates us as a company and enables customers the maximum choice in terms of productivity.

Q – Fatima Boolani

From an R&D standpoint and an investment standpoint, and frankly ultimately from a competitive standpoint, how do you cooperate, compete with, cooptate with the Open Source usage, and that’s certainly more pervasive in the channels that you, and the decision makers that you sell into, right. Developers love to have their skunk works projects and use tools of their choice and software of their choice. So how does your platform and the level of investment in proprietary R&D and things sort of counteract or cooperate with the prevalence of Open Source in this realm?

Anu Bharadwaj

So open source is just one particular category of multiple third party integrations that we do, like the DevOps examples that I talk about, and in Bitbucket another example that’s interesting is we have a code, we have a code tab in Jira software with issues and in Bitbucket we introduced a new security tab where DevSecOps is really a workflow that’s gaining more and more popularity. So we want our users to be able to plug-in in either Open Source security tools or commercial security tools, right in the work flow of the coding.

So what we’ve done is, we’ve introduced a security tab right inside of Bitbucket and users can go put in their Open Source integrations in their workflow or we actually have partnered with Snyk one of around security partners to say if you want to actually sign up for Snyk and connect your Snyk work to Bitbucket work, you can do it right there in place.

In general, you’ll see us doing more and more of that, whether it’s Open Source or commercial products it doesn’t matter, simply because we believe that having those integrations in place will unlock most productivity for customers.

Fatima Boolani

And I had promised you we would come back to the hiring topic. I know you’ve been one of the champions at Atlassian with respect to this ‘Team Anywhere’ mandate for talent acquisition and talent retention. So you frankly would have very interesting perspectives on what the talent and labor backdrop and market has done and how its evolved in the last six months. So can you give us some sense of how you’re contacting wage inflation, again labor competition, by way of Team Anywhere?

Anu Bharadwaj

So Team Anywhere for those of you without context is really a policy of being able to hire from multiple regions without any mandate, mandated requirement of in office attendance. This has really dramatically increased our access to talent and access to different kinds of talent that we couldn’t before. And as you know, just in office centric locations there’s different problems associated with cost of living, wage cost, all of the issues that you mention. We see Team Anywhere really as our way of asymmetrically building an advantage that helps us get past a number of those problems to expand our hiring pool and expand the overall talent at Atlassian.

To quote Buffet [ph] we like to be greedy when others are fearful. So in the climate of hiring freezes and layoffs, we are actually being contrarian and we are investing more. We are hiring more. Like I said, we’ve hired about 3,800 people over the last two years, most of who have never seen an Atlassian physical office and we believe that we have more access to talent now than ever.

In fact back in 2008 we did something similar through the recession when we paused hiring for a bit and then actually leading in and hired more people and that talent has really given us an up-draft in terms of productivity years later too. So I think that in a similar pattern now. We remain very bullish about our ability to hire talent, better talent, more talent, thanks to Team Anywhere and the contrarian approach we have of hiring when other companies are really instituting hiring freezes.

Fatima Boolani

I think with the last 30 seconds we have, you had Joe Binz, your new CFO start I think this week. And so what’s – what are the top three items of your asks for the new CFO with respect to budget. Where are those budgetary allocations and priorities for you going?

Anu Bharadwaj

Well, Joe started just two days ago. So I think I will give him some time before giving him my top three asks. He starts from Seattle and I see that he’s already really met a bunch of local Atlassian’s and he’s had a great start. So I’m sure Joe’s going to come in and understand our business and come up with his own style of how he wants to run the business.

Fatima Boolani

Fair enough. I think that’s a great way to cap our discussion. Thank you so much. It was a delightful conversation. Anu, thank you!

Anu Bharadwaj

Thank you so much for having me. It was great.

Fatima Boolani

Thank you.

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