Transforming Business Workflows with Dimitri Spyridopoulos at Atlassian Team ’24

This is Techron tv. Hey everyone. Mitch Ashley here at, uh, Atlassian, team 24 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Talking with more great folks. We're gonna talk about some of the changes that are happening in the marketplace and kind of applications and needs that people are bringing, uh, Atlassian products into part of that ecosystem, part of that solution space. So I'm joined by Dimitri Spirit, spirit Populous.

I'm, I'm sorry, that's not right. Spirit Dous. Spirit DOIs.

Thank you very much. I knew I'd mess it up. Um, who's CEO with Val Valis?

Yeah, so Valis Valis. Um, I, I Got all my accents in the wrong space here. Um, originally Glin tech, recent acquisition into the Valis family as well.

And, uh, CEO now of AsiaPac. Fantastic. So, Wow, thank you.

So, so you've been in this space. We were chatting a little bit before you got involved early. Early, Very early before I did.

Yeah. I thought I was pretty early. But you got back in like 2001.

You were in the, I knew of people joining the company in 2001 and getting to have to get to know this product called Jira way back when. It was just something that was sold online and nobody really knew about it, but it was just coming into to fruition and, you know, decades later. It's amazing where it's gone as well.

I remember the days, where is it? Is Atlassian, are they Jira or are they Confluence? Correct.

Which is it, It Was sort of It, confluence or Jira were the, was the name people knew. Not Atlassian, right? It exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. And boy might, how about things have changed very Much so through A whole kind of ecosystem of products and community.

So tell us what, uh, VALIS does. So Valis is one of, it is the largest, um, solution partner. The solution partners are part of the ecosystem for Atlassian, implementing the products, helping customers with the licensing side of things, basically allowing customers to go from a beginning start of the journey all the way through to enterprise wide de deployment of the platforms.

Um, GLIN Tech, which has joined the family, has been involved in that side of things for, for from 2004, which was our first project. Valis has also got a very long history as well, and in the end, we've come together as a, as a global entity to be able to get full coverage for these very large entity corporations that exist around the planet. Mm-Hmm.

So, Yeah. So how recent was the acquisition? Well, we just completed two months ago.

Okay. It sounded like it was pretty recent, so, yeah. Very good.

Well, congratulations on that. Thank you. I wish you all the best in that evolution of your former company now part of this, uh, new organization for you.

Thank you. So let's talk about what, what's happened in the marketplace. I mean, I remember lasting confluence, JIRA, really where IT tools, ITSM, sort of, which are all great things, but that's changed a lot Yeah.

In terms of how we think about this tech. I mean the whole digital business, digital experiences, so many more things that we're doing across the organization, not just in the IT organization. Yeah.

From talk about that, how's the market changed? Sure. From the original tooling, which was really around the developer toolkit.

So what's, what's my requirements? Let's put that in there. How am I doing my tickets?

How am I developing? Obviously then goes into automation and how we deploy code and how we manage the, the source code on that side of things as well. That over time has gone and started to shift more towards it and helping it fulfill their duties.

So you're going to the service management and asset management side of things, as you've said, but once you start proliferating the platform, it actually starts to encroach into different areas. So you might be talking about hr, you might be talking about marketing, legal. It kind of then starts to break out and become a business tool more so than it does actually a technology tool.

And at that level then you're talking about, you know, people and new ways of work and how they engage with the systems. Uh, from that perspective, that is a phase that's been going through for the last five, 10 years, you might say. Um, the latest phase where it's heading towards is more of an industry vertical, uh, application as well.

So being in a position where you can see it being deployed to specific line of business type of opportunities, but also enterprise wide opportunities. So you might be saying within hr, but done within a pharmaceutical, um, enterprise manufacturing company or a automotive bill manufacturing company as well. This is the potential that it can actually start to go into those specializations to be able to deploy, to solve specific business problems as well.

What Do you, what do you think it is that kind of pushes atlass in over the transom into kind of the, the full business scope? Is there a capability or is a specific problem that it's really good at solving or, yeah, I mean, it starts with the fact that it adopts it themselves. They eat their own adult food, drink their own champagne, whatever you wanna refer to.

But the reality is it likes, it uses the tools and then from there, business users might approach it and see what there is being done and request it. Or it might be, it sees the opportunity and deploys the software to solve that. So I've seen, you know, people in large, in a, one example that comes to mind is in, uh, risk management inside a banking institution.

The head of risk basically had a, an email box full of different requests flowing in and out all day. The Atlassian toolkit just cleaned it right up and solved his particular problem of having a hundred individuals across the country, basically being able to manage the requests and requirements of where they are in that life cycle. It just eases the process of work when it comes to that sort of area.

You know, everyone has challenges with workflow no matter what department you're in, whether it's onboarding new employees in HR or launching a new product in the product organization or manufacturing or healthcare. Is that kind of the common denominator is we're all trying to make our organizations work more effectively, flows easier? Oh, yeah.

Is that, is that what drives it, do You think? In a lot of ways it's actually, we all wanna make it easier, but the reality is also if we go back in, in it, in the history of things, we look at things like ERP CRMs and we look at all those sort of systems they probably touch upon at a guess 20% of the process flows, what happens to everything else. Yeah.

And that is just an enormous amount of human capital being spent trying to just follow up and understand and remind themselves of what activity needs to be done, approved by, made people aware of even just that level of collaboration, you can see just a increase of another 20% is enormous. Um, and those vendors themselves create an entire industry verticals just within those spaces. Mm-Hmm.

So, in a lot of ways, this technology is used to help streamline what gets dropped in between all the different silos of the large corporations. But even just getting started, it's a great place and a great way to just get kicked off on a simple, I need to run and track 20 different types of, uh, engagements with different people. Mm-Hmm.

This platform is easy to use, quick to get started as well Ing. Sometimes when those large enterprise systems, you know, branch out, take on more functionality across the organization, it can help be helpful. It, it, it works.

But they have a view of the world that kind of started that product. 'cause the CRM or it's an ERP, so every, every nail looks like, you know, you should hit it with this hammer. Right.

Whereas it seems coming at it with Jira and Confluence and Trello and, you know, all the other tools, you're not starting from scratch 'cause you've been using them for all these years in it. Yeah. Now you know how effectively to either fill in those gaps, connect the, the, the gaps that are, uh, insisting maybe build new things Yeah.

That aren't gonna have an ERP centric and maybe take as long as an ERTI Mean Implementation. It's very insightful the way you've spotted that, which is everyone would've done, I mean, globally organizations have done the ERP will solve everything. No, we'll move it into A CRM that'll solve everything and we'll put our flows in there.

No, we'll put it into, and over time they realize those are not the right platforms for doing those sort of solving those problems. They're good at solving specific problems, but trying to make it a generic platform, they're not that good at doing that. Lifting that up came the new set of tools that came into those areas that do workflow management messaging.

And at that level then you can start talking about process orchestration. But a lot of those top-down implementations meant that people would have to be sitting there waiting for an entire IT division to make lots of decisions before they can actually act on it. And even then they were very inflexible and incapable of meeting and adapting to the needs.

Mm. If you're starting with a much more flexible agile approach to it, a process can be solved then and there, and it may even be completed and done. You don't need it.

Again, this is the beauty of what the tooling, because it came from the development mindset and evolved into something that is very flexible and can adapt to those different business needs extremely quickly. It's interesting. Um, I did a study for Textron research during covid and, uh, measuring, looking at how organizations were adapting to the work at home and the distributed and online, uh, workspaces and how many things from Agile and DevOps and ways that it were working, um, whether they knew it or not, consciously or not actually, were the businesses adopting more of those kind of approaches?

Just they were, they had to just in that scenario. And I think that's carried through Yeah. To the world Accelerated faster than ever.

Yes. Yeah. You kind of don't wanna give that up.

Once you've got some New, you've got more autonomy and freedom to be able to choose how and when and where you work as well. Obviously, Atlassian, uh, with the ability to work from any part of the planet without the offices as well makes a difference. And we're in the same sort of philosophical mindset, but pre covid as an example, we already had flexible work environment.

People could adapt and decide where they wanted to work. Um, when we went into the lockdowns, we were in a great position because we could just switch on exactly the same systems process and continue on. Um, so in some ways it's actually even a, a fail safe to be able to at least continue operating in the event that there is something that actually causes a problem.

So, yeah, it's also, I mean, even from a a, a, a more healthier way of looking at work and being able to interact on a personal level, it does make a difference to, to people. So hence the resistance to go back to the what it used to be. Mm-Hmm.

Interesting. So I gotta ask the AI question. Where are you kind of putting your, your mental capacity, your efforts around how AI is gonna impact kind of applications, your creating, uh, the tools or technology you might be using?

Where do you see it's most applicable in your world? Generat and generative IB and of course the new shiny object in the market. Right.

Yeah. I'm waiting for the, um, yeah, I, I know that it's coming. The question is when it will become at general level, there's views around, you know, if you look at singularity and rate code swollen and basically try to understand where they're positioning.

And he's pretty good at making predictions since that 2035 type of timeframe. Maybe earlier, maybe a bit later. But the reality is it's coming.

We can see it's already in play. It's already making a major impact. Uh, there's obviously going to be a time where we are gonna be using that as the tool.

You may not have to do it today, but if you do start using it today, it creates your own personal competitive advantage. Mm-Hmm. So at that point in time, and even corporates recognize this, you start to see just a natural pull for absorbing the actual technology and using it to automate and accelerate the processes over time.

That activity, which probably becomes then the mundane activity for people as well, I'm approving and become automatically approved. You're lifting up the actual ability to start thinking at a more strategic level without having to just go, I'm just doing the paperwork or the final or the low level side of things. And at that point in time, it's quite interesting where it goes beyond that.

I'm just gonna leave that to the futurists because Yeah, Yeah. The future is, uh, isn't here until we create it. I mean, I, I went to an AI presentation today on AWS and I was wondering at what stage will all those seats be filled by, by some sort of remote robot?

That's not us anymore and we're not involved and we're not here at the physical conference. And I'm not sure of that answer yet. Yeah.

I think there's a lot of movies about that, but No, yeah, that's right. No, not not living it quite yet. Yeah.

It, it, it's interesting. So I, I would describe the approach to take as now, unless you're, you know, really in, in depth and immersed in the AI world, which most people aren't, is this is the time to not just solve tactical problems, but use opportunities to learn about how you can apply AI to software applications, whatever your part of the business is, marketing, et cetera. 'cause that, because when you can do more things with it, you've got a base to work from.

I think you, you've also, once again, it's, it's great insight because AI is probably the, the way it's been presented to us now, AI has probably been adopted for the first time since I've ever seen it faster by business people than by technologists. Oh, interesting. Why do, why do you say that?

I mean, if you go back and see all the leaps and changes that have occurred with, uh, integration, process management, technology tools, spreadsheets and all that, it was the technologist leading that charge Today, the whisperer, the AI whisperer doesn't need to be a technology. In fact, it's probably better that they're not because they're sitting there and being insightful trying to understand how to interact with the system and how to operate it. And outsider probably gets a better chance of looking at it with a new fresh set of eyes as opposed to an IT person going, why can't you do this?

Mm-Hmm. And you can see that there's a lot more people who just jumped onto it. I mean, by the uptake, obviously with chat, GP t and the other technologies, it's been astronomical once again.

So yeah, I've always thought of the first low code, no code tool as the spreadsheet. I remember business people building their own application. Right now, we don't think twice about it.

It seems like generative AI is the next, maybe the next on the scene evolution of something like enabling business people, all of us really, but being able to create the world we wanna work in. Yeah. I mean that's, you can see people are interfacing today and popping their questions in getting responses.

Obviously even developers have taken it on board to automate and development, creative creation of code. But, um, the reality is even if you're not adopting it, you're still gonna be using it in some way, shape, or form. That's also quite interesting because in the end, even if you think you're resisted to it, the way you interact on your phone is already engaging the way you might switch on your TV and watch different types of programming.

It's already engaging ai. Even if you go down to your banking platform and what you're using, it's already engaging AI And you don't know it other times. That's Right.

So what, what did you look forward, what's the future look like for valante? What kind of thing, where do you see the company going over the next couple of years? Definitely because it's a global entity.

It's the, it is the largest and the global structure makes a big difference for actually engaging this top end of town. But we see the ability to go and start transforming companies as the priority of where we wanna be. Um, today, the services, well, not today, but historically used to be very technical services.

We evolved into more about consulting type of engagements to help customers and organizations get involved at a align of business. But in the end, this is now starting to grow into that next level, which is potentially overarching across an entire company. Helping 'em go through a transformation process, not just from getting onto the cloud, but also being able to engage all the different platforms.

And then from there, integrating that into the all the other providers that are in the ecosystem. There is no one vendor to rule them all. It's an ecosystem.

And all our customers always, especially at that top end of town, are looking at different answers based on their shape of what they wanna do within their business. And from there, that's our strength to bring that solution into the entire ecosystem, solve their integration issues and be able to adapt and modify the processes to be able to lift the information up to the executives as well. It's, it is interesting to hear you say that because I was talking with a gentleman who is in the, uh, Austin Parker, who was one of the books in Open Telemetry, very involved in that open source project.

And he was describing to me in an interview about his book that came out on Open Telemetry about how it, that's he sees that crossing over the, into the business world because the fact that you instrument applications and code to be able to support it, think about how many things we need to instrument. Yeah. You know, get telemetry information, whether it's information, customer experience, I mean, you can go, you know, think about your KPIs some someday being built around something we thought of as an IT tool today.

I think that's happening in a lot of areas. Oh yeah. I, I, I almost, if I'm gonna draw a parallel, I'll call it search and destroy, but in the end, the ability to find the information should be something that is automated and fall through from a system AI driving that search capability and bringing that to you, the ability to take that data and turn that into something usable and relevant.

That's actually, again, AI playing that. And that's the, that's the value add on top of that. The ability to ask those questions that they wanna see and deliver.

It's not an IT person that's engaging those questions. It's a, you know, it could be a person who's actually a specific area trying to solve a particular problem all the way through to the executive trying to tell 'em, well tell me how we are going across this particular area by asking a what if type of question, which could have taken you months, years, or maybe they can never even get those, que those answers to that from within their own systems. And then matching that up with within market data as well.

This is the future that I can see happening and it's fantastic. It's just time. Fantastic.

Yeah. Interesting that you live in interesting times. We sure are Aren, We definitely Are.

Dmitri, say your name properly so I don't, Dmitri Spirit Oli, thank you with Valis and, uh, fascinating chatting. Thank you very much. And, uh, sharing your, what you're seeing in market and all the great things that you've learned.

Thanks for your time. Thanks for the questions. Absolutely.

You bet. As I said, you know, everyone that sits in that chair delivers and Dimitri is another that, that, uh, shares some great information with us and perspective and you know, be sure and check out Valante. It sounds like they can help a lot of organizations as they search for their path into the world of business in this digital age.

So we'll be back with another great interview.