Atlassian announced several key portfolio updates at its Team ’24 Europe event, highlighted by the general availability of its AI assistant, Rovo. Atlassian also launched Focus, a new enterprise strategy and planning tool that complements Jira Align, providing business leaders with a central hub to track goals, work, teams, and funds, offering real-time visibility into strategic priorities.
Focus: Enterprise Strategy and Planning
Alongside Rovo, Atlassian introduced Focus, a strategic planning tool designed to help leadership teams manage and track goals, work, teams, and financial resources. Focus provides a centralized hub for enterprise leaders to visualize how strategic priorities align with operational activities.
The platform integrates directly with Atlassian products like Jira and Jira Align, allowing real-time visibility into the progress of strategic initiatives. Focus organizes this information into “focus areas” where leaders can map workstreams, track team performance, and allocate resources according to business priorities.
Focus provides a holistic view of enterprise strategy, covering both operational and financial dimensions, with its support for the OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, framework. This helps organizations set, track, and evaluate goals across the organization. Real-time updates, AI-powered summaries, and Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications also inform leaders when goals are at risk or off-track.
The tool is designed to integrate with third-party financial and workforce management systems, such as Workday and SuccessFactors. This allows leaders to see how budgets and personnel are aligned with strategic goals. Focus offers complete project and financial data visibility, helping leadership make informed decisions quickly.
From a competitive standpoint, Focus positions Atlassian against Strategic Portfolio Management vendors like Planview and ServiceNow, as well as ERP systems like SAP and Oracle. However, Atlassian’s advantage lies in its real-time data processing and integration capabilities, which offer a more dynamic and adaptable solution compared to the typically rigid structures of traditional SPM and ERP tools.
Rovo Goes GA
Rovo AI was first previewed six months ago at Atlassian’s U.S. edition of Team ’24 and is now being made widely available. The AI assistant aims to reduce the friction of everyday tasks in Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence. Rovo has 20 pre-built agents capable of automating tasks, including organizing Jira issues, generating release notes, and preparing communication drafts.
The platform also introduces specialized agents for developers, including one that automatically generates code and another focused on reviewing pull requests. Customization is a core element, with users able to create their own agents through a low-code or no-code interface and the Forge serverless developer platform.
Atlassian president Anu Bharadwaj said that Atlassian has been running Rovo internally for quite a while, and its internal users have built over 500 agents. The surprising part is, as she told me, “These agents were mostly built by non-developers.”
Rovo’s focus on non-coding tasks differentiates it from competitors like GitHub Copilot, which concentrates on code generation. This focus on the broader collaboration and productivity challenges developers face may help Atlassian gain traction in markets where knowledge management and collaboration are key.
Analyst’s Take
There’s a common theme between these announcements: Atlassian’s focus on removing barriers to productivity, whether through automating repetitive work or aligning strategic goals with real-time execution. This isn’t an accident. Atlassian has been steadily moving beyond its task and project management roots into higher-level enterprise strategy and operational alignment.
Ahead of the Team ’24 Europe event, I spoke with Atlassian CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, who reminded me that Atlassian’s mission is “to unleash the potential of every team.”
Mr. Cannon-Brookes said that while Atlassian’s customer base is overwhelmingly technology-driven companies regardless of industry, the new business-oriented Focus tool doesn’t change that. He told me that one of the primary challenges facing Atlassian’s customers is overcoming the gap between technology and business teams. Atlassian built Focus to bridge that gap.
He also highlighted the value of Atlassian’s “early access” program, where pre-released versions of Focus and Rovo are made available to a selected group of customers. Atlassian’s program isn’t a typical tech industry beta program; instead, it is what Mr. Cannon-Brookes calls “co-engineering with our customers.” He said that Atlassian recognizes that “all the innovation doesn’t live within our organization, so we have to rely on our customers, and we have to be humble enough to listen to them.”
Atlassian’s approach clearly works, reflected by the company beating consensus estimates for earnings in four out of the past five quarters. During its most recent fiscal year, Atlassian grew its total revenue by about 23% year-over-year and serviced an estimated 300,000 customers worldwide.
Overall, the new offerings strengthen Atlassian’s position in the enterprise market by catering to technical users and business leadership. They also underscore the company’s strategy of leveraging AI to enhance its product suite, offering a more comprehensive, connected approach to enterprise software. Atlassian continues to provide differentiated solutions that truly does, as its mission states, unleash the potential of every team.
