Atlassian Adds Asset Management to ITSM Portfolio

Atlassian this week announced it has acquired Mindville, a provider of IT asset management software that the company plans to integrate with its Jira ServiceDesk platform.

Edwin Wong, head of product for IT at Atlassian, said Mindville will extend the reach of its IT service management (ITSM) portfolio, which includes Opsgenie for incident management, Jira for project management and the recently acquired Halp software for conversational ticketing.

Mindville, which already makes its software available on the Atlassian marketplace, has more than 1,000 customers including NASA, Spotify and Samsung. The acquisition of Mindville presents an opportunity for those IT teams to manage IT assets within the Jira ServiceDesk platform, which is widely employed as a help desk to manage interactions with end users, said Wong.

Atlassian has been steadily bolstering its ITSM portfolio at a time when competition across the sector is fierce. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many IT organizations are re-evaluating their IT help desk platforms now that it has become apparent many employees will be working from home much more regularly.

At the same time, IT organizations are looking to reduce the total cost of IT, which becomes easier to achieve if they acquire all their ITSM tools from a single vendor. Going forward, Wong said IT teams should expect Atlassian to continue to tighten integration across both its ITSM and DevOps tools portfolio. The goal is not so much to converge every offering into a single platform as much as it is to seamlessly share data between all the tools that make up that portfolio, he said.

Atlassian this week disclosed it generated $1.6 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, a 33% increase over the prior year. Total revenue was $430.5 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020, up 29% from $334.6 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019. Atlassian ended the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 with a total of 174,097 customers based on an active subscription or maintenance agreements. The company said it added 3,046 net new customers during the quarter. However, it recorded a net loss of $385.2 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020, which included a non-cash charge of $382.7 million.

Atlassian tools can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and the company has been offering discounts to IT organizations as an incentive to entice customers to shift to the cloud. In the wake of the economic downturn, it’s not clear to what degree organizations will prioritize spending on ITSM tools. However, with more employees and IT administrators now working from home, the need for cloud-based tools to manage a highly distributed IT environment has never been more apparent. One of the things that will differentiate Atlassian is the teams-centric approach the company takes toward ITSM and DevOps, said Wong.

In the meantime, as the Atlassian ITSM and DevOps portfolio expand, IT teams should expect the divide these two distinct approaches to managing IT to continue to narrow.