Atlassian’s flagship event (Team) was back again for another round under the bright lights of Las Vegas, and it did not disappoint!
AppFox and our parent company, Automation Consultants, were proud sponsors once again, and our team had an absolute blast during an action-packed week.
In this article, we’ll spill the tea and share our perspective of the event, covering all of Atlassian’s key announcements.
The future is exciting for Atlassian
Every Team event is usually packed with fanfare and a lot of hype around the Atlassian products, but this year felt different. Atlassian is truly pivoting to support teams across the entire organization, whereas historically, it was just the software and engineering teams that benefitted most from Atlassian products.
This was demonstrated best in the keynote with a picture of an office and how Atlassian products are powering every team from software teams to marketing, HR, and even Finance.
It feels like the Atlassian toolset is starting to make real waves and this is where the first announcement came in. Atlassian now have over 300,000 customers worldwide using their products to propel work forward. That’s an incredible feat and we certainly expect to see this number continue to grow at a healthy pace – there is still a huge opportunity out there!
Another key theme of the event was AI, to nobody’s surprise. Every keynote and a large portion of the sessions throughout Team had some underpinning of AI-related content and its clear this conversation is not slowing down. Atlassian did also make a big announcement in the AI space, but we’ll get to that shortly.
A bittersweet farewell to Scott Farquhar
Just before Team ’24, Scott Farquhar announced he would step down as Atlassian’s co-CEO in August 2024.
This announcement came completely out of the blue, and it’s definitely a bittersweet moment. Scott and Mike have been the figureheads of Atlassian since it was first formed and they have steered the company through a number of huge milestones together.
People always speak very highly of Scott and its clear he will be missed as co-CEO but as one of the many Marketplace Partners who have built a business in the Atlassian ecosystem, we’ll be eternally grateful for his contributions and wish him nothing but the best for the future. 🧡
Key announcements
The main keynote kicked off with Mike Cannon-Brookes sharing a number of key milestones and announcements relating to Atlassian’s products.
Accelerated speed of innovation
First up, the speed of innovation has been phenomenal in the past year and Mike shared that Atlassian released over 1,000 new features to its Cloud platform. That’s multiple features every single day!
In addition, the number of users the organizations can have in the cloud has significantly increased, as listed below:
- Confluence: up to 150,000 users (x3 growth compared to 2023)
- Jira: up to 50,000 users
- Jira Service Management: up to 20,000 agents
Jira updates
The biggest announcement for Jira was the unification of Jira Work Management (JWM) and Jira Software (JSM) into one product—Jira. This combination brings the best of both products to every team and helps simplify the product offering to technical and non-technical teams. From our perspective, this is a good move that reduces the friction or confusion caused by having different products that serve similar purposes.
Moving onto some other announcements, the highly requested List View is now coming to Jira customers. This has been a gap in Jira for a while, and at long last, it’s been announced!
In addition to the above announcements, the left-hand navigation in Jira is getting a complete rework to make it easier to find the information you are looking for. This is an important part of the unification of JWM and JS, so we’re glad to see it included.
Confluence updates
Confluence continues to be the one source of truth for thousands of organizations around the world and the keynote contained a ton of exciting updates for it.
First, Confluence Whiteboards are now easily accessible from Confluence and you can leverage the power of integrated AI features to brainstorm with more efficiency. Whiteboards also now have a built in voting feature adding more flexibility to collaboration on a virtual canvas.
Confluence Databases were acquired from K15t last year and its clear these are going to be an essential part of Confluence going forward. There was a little bit of noise about Databases but we’re just waiting for the General Availability announcement… hopefully that comes soon!
Next up, smart links can now be added to the content tree on the left-hand side of Confluence. These have been a popular feature across the Atlassian Cloud product suite and this update will allow people to better connect the tools they work in.
Atlassian announced a company hub that will help signpost employees to the different teams in their business and help connect people together. It felt like something that was missing in Confluence for a while, so we’re glad to see it being introduced!
And finally, semantic search. This allows people to search for information using natural language and AI will help find the information the person is looking for across Atlassian products. We’ll cover this in more detail further on in this article 😉
Jira Service Management updates
Jira Service Management continues to be a fantastic product in the Atlassian ecosystem and there were several exciting updates shared during Team 24.
First of all, Opsgenie is now fully integrated into Jira Service Management and gives customers a more holistic view of their IT infrastructure so they can better respond to incidents when they arise.
Atlassian also announced Instant Service Desks which help technical and non technical teams get started with Jira Service Management faster. In essence, you can use natural language to explain what you do and the objective for your team. AI will use this information to custom-build a ready made service desk for you that has preconfigured Request Types, Fields and Forms. We were blown away by this announcement and think it will add a ton of value for customers around the world!
Loom and Unified search
Loom was acquired by Atlassian during 2023 and it was great to see it become part of the product family. There were not that many announcements for Loom specifically but Loom AI was showcased and this looks really exciting.
Customers can easily create and share videos with their teammates and the AI will help tidy these up and ensure the best content is being put forward. The old “errs” and “umms” can be removed at the click of a button, leaving you with a crisp high quality video that your peers will enjoy watching.
We’re excited to see how Loom evolves over the coming years and feel there is a huge amount of potential in this space!
Finally, Unified Search was unveiled during the keynote and this has the potential to be a game changer. At last, the search capabilities in Cloud are truly cross-product and customers can search for the items they are looking for and an AI-powered search will seek the right information whether it lives in Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket and beyond. There is huge time saving potential with this product and we’re excited to see it roll out!
Continued commitment to data security and compliance
To no surprise, data security and compliance was a very hot topic during the keynote sessions. Atlassian extended the number of available data residency regions from 4 to 11 in the past year and continues to power full steam ahead on many Compliance initiatives.
The image above shows that compliance continues to be an important focal point for Atlassian and is an essential part of their cloud mission.
During this keynote, an interesting stat was shared…
did you know that 75% of Atlassian’s enterprise customers in regulated industries have some footprint in the cloud? We didn’t either, but that’s still an impressive statistic!
New products
Rovo: AI-powered agents
As mentioned earlier in the article, Artificial Intelligence took center stage again at Team ‘24, and this was topped off with the announcement of Atlassian’s new AI-powered tool, Rovo.
Designed by Atlassian to be ‘the product that helps you turn information into action in a heartbeat’, Rovo will sit at the heart of your organization’s search and knowledge discovery.
With Rovo, you’ll have the ability to search for and locate information across a real range of tools and channels, from third-party applications to in-house systems.
On top of this impressive search function, Rovo’s true USP comes from Atlassian’s teamwork-graph, its unique data model. Using the teamwork-graph, Rovo will deliver search results based on your organization’s own processes, structure, people and projects in order to provide invaluable, relevant insights.
It will also allow you to create highly bespoke AI-powered agents that can help with specific tasks across your Atlassian Cloud platform. For example, you might need an agent to help create and edit content for you (Content Curator), and you’ll be able to tag them into a document and let them do the heavy lifting. Atlassian announced there are 20 agents available out of the box but we expect this to increase as the product is made more extensible.
Following Rovo’s launch at Team’24, Atlassian shared a comprehensive run-down here, which is a great read. And if you can’t wait to get your hands on this new AI tool, you can sign up for the Atlassian Rovo waitlist.
Guard: data security and threat prevention
During the event, Atlassian also announced the launch of Guard, a data security and threat prevention product that unifies some existing offerings with new exciting features.
It’s clear that data security and compliance are going to remain a key topic as more organizations move to Atlassian Cloud and this product will play an important role for the enterprise-level customers.
Guard brings Atlassian Access, Beacon, and a number of data protection and threat detection capabilities together into one central product. It is still early days for Guard so we’d recommend keeping your eyes open for further announcements in this space!
Congratulations to our friends at Automation Consultants!
Our close friends and colleagues at Automation Consultants won the coveted Atlassian Partner Award for Services during the 2023 Financial Year.
This is an incredible achievement and is a testament to their expertise in the Atlassian ecosystem and unwavering focus on delivering long-term success for its global client base. You thoroughly deserved this award!
In summary
Whilst we’ve only covered the headline announcements during Team 24 it was absolutely jam packed with announcements, updates and excitement. As always the week went by in a flash but we’re so excited for the future of Atlassian’s platform and are proud to be a part of it.
Keep your eyes peeled for further exciting announcements from Atlassian over the coming months and years. It’s certainly an exciting time!
