Along with the launch of Jira 5, I’m proud to announce Jira Enterprise – tailored to the needs of our largest, most successful Jira customers. But before I do – let me share how the software industry has evolved.
Every company is a software company
It’s an exciting time to be in the software industry.
We interact with technology companies like Twitter, Facebook, Apple, ebay and Skype on a daily basis, in a way that we couldn’t even conceive as recently as 10 years ago.
But there is a broader shift in software that is even more exciting, and fundamentally more disrupting than the hi-tech startups out of California. Every company is becoming a software company.
Take the automotive industry as an example. The discerning buyer makes their purchase decision on a wide range of factors – many of which are software. Satellite Navigation? Software. Fuel Economy? Engine Management Software. In-car entertainment for kids in the back seat? Software. Roadside support? Software. Parking assist? Software. Anti-lock brakes? Traction control? Airbags? All software.
Estimates range from 10 million to 100 million lines of code in a modern automobile – as much as you’d find in Windows (source) – all of which needs to be developed in a fundamentally different way.
Product development involves the entire company
Whereas software development in large companies 15 years ago was predominantly a back-office function, it has now become a ‘whole of company’ function – one of strategic importance to the long-term success of the company. This is true for almost every industry – from airlines to health care to entertainment. Forbes wrote a very interesting article on this, and Marc Andreeson had his own think piece.
These trends are supported by what we see here at Atlassian. We are supporting software and product teams in every industry – over 18,000 companies in 130 countries. But we’re also seeing incredible growth within our customer base. Here’s a sample set of some of the instance sizes we are seeing within our Jira customer base:
As you can see – our customers use Jira to collaborate with thousands of staff, with hundreds of thousands of issues, and with millions of comments!
This is incredibly exciting to us – as we are the only company that is able to facilitate this collaboration between these large, often distributed product development teams. Our view (from when we started Atlassian 10 years ago) was that every team should be able to use the best products, regardless of team size. And we scale from teams of 10, to teams of 10,000 and up!
Jira at scale
From the very beginning we’ve built features into Jira that allow it to scale. We have top-notch LDAP integration, timezone preferences for distributed teams, shared dashboards for common reporting, fine-grained permissions, the Jira Query Language (JQL) to allow seaching and sorting thousands of issues, as well as bulk editing of all those issues.
But we wanted to do more to help satisfy our very largest customers. So in 2011, Enterprise became my #1 priority and a personal project. We created a new position “Director of Enterprise”, and interviewed hundreds of partners, customers and our customer-facing staff.
Announcing Jira Enterprise!
We took all that feedback on board, and today I’m pleased to announce the launch of Jira Enterprise – specifically targeted at companies where Jira is a mission critical application.
I’m excited about the following features:
- 24×7 phone support: Atlassian support is ready and on-hand to help you through the weekend upgrade, or the late night change you want to make
- Atlassian University: turn every Jira newbie into a Jira expert with our always-available online training courses
- Admin certification: we want to invest in making you the best Jira administrator out there, with the certificate to prove it!
- Enterprise customer community: get the most out of Jira by connecting with similar organisations and Atlassian in a private forum setting
- Enterprise t-shirt: being an Enterprise customer is a badge of honour, and we deliver that badge in the form of a t-shirt.
In line with the release of Jira Enterprise, we have made significant changes to our licensing. The new licensing allows us to better serve our largest customers, and remains simple, fair and transparent.
Jira Enterprise is the first deliverable from our increased commitment to our Enterprise customers, and you will hear more from us over the coming year!
Cheers,
Scott