Atlassian Corporation is an Australian enterprise software that develops products and tool that support business support individuals with software development, project management, and content management. Perhaps the best know product they currently employ is the Jira platform, which is an innovative issue tracking tool used by corporations across the world.
In an effort to push the innovation of their Jira platform, purchased OpsGenie Inc. on Tuesday. Ops Genie Inc. is primarily known for its modern incident management platform that helps to bring problems to light in real-time. Atlassian Corporation will be paying $295 million for Ops Genie Inc. Thereafter, Atlassian will be able to work closely with the team at OpsGenie to further the develop the newest Jira product, known as Jira Ops. In addition, they will inherit the 3,000 customers for OpsGenie, including big corporation such as 7-Eleven and Expedia.
In addition to the announcement of the purchase, Atlassian also announced the first beta of their new Jira project and issue tracking tool. They hope the new tool will help the operations team more effectively and efficiently track and handle incidents. The tool is the Jira Ops tool, which integrates tools including OpsGenie, PagerDuty, xMatters, StatusPage, and many others. A statement by Jens Schumacher, Head of Software Teams for Atlassian, shed a bit more light on the tool: “The [purpose of the tool] is that when an incident happens you have a central place where you can go, where you can find out everything about the incident. You can see who has been paged and alerted; you can alert more people if you need to right from there; you know what Slack channel the incident is being discussed in.” The tool already exists in some formats, but will more formally be applied through Jira Ops and will serve as the glue that keeps employees, teams, and companies together in spite of ongoing issues.
Atlassian’s move to occupy OpsGenie is not their first move to continue to develop and expand the platform beyond the core audience. In addition to the new Jira Ops, Atlassian also worked to create Jira Service Desk and Jira Core to reach a larger audience. In the words of Jens Schumacher, “Service Desk was the first step. And we were looking at what are the other verticals that we can attack with Jira.” In Schumacher’s view, Jira Ops is just another piece of the puzzle.
One key difference to the new Jira Ops tool is that it will not be self-hosted, as it still needs to be available if a company’s internal infrastructure goes down. Currently, Jira Ops is now available for free for beta users and the company expects to launch the first official version of the product in early 2019.
