AI Collaboration and Atlassian’s Cloud Solutions – Atlassian Team ’25 NA

This is Textron tv And we are back at Atlassian, team 25. I'm here now with Ray Wang, who's head of product enterprise at Atlassian. Welcome to our, our series of interviews.

We've done a few. Um, hope you're having a good show. It's being a wonderful show.

Yes, It is. Been, you know, I was gonna say, uh, it's been very practical and and pragmatic show for me, given all these AI agent announcements and how they seem overwhelming like kitchen sink strategy, and this one, you get an idea of how you're gonna use the product and what it means to you, and it's not gonna replace, AI's not gonna replace you. I think that's like a message that's, that's kind of resonated at this show, but Right.

AI and human working together is the future. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, speaking of which I'm, I'm wondering, um, we're gonna talk a little bit about cloud and I wanted to ask you about some of the key differences between Atlassian government cloud and Atlassian's isolated cloud.

Cool. So these are, uh, both kind of new flavors of clouds that we've announced this week. Uh, the key difference is in that Atlassian government cloud is a, uh, instance of multi-tenancy cloud.

So we created a separate instance for government workloads, but multiple government customers can share the same cloud resources. They're isolated from the rest of the commercial cloud. And that cloud, uh, analyzing government cloud is authorized for fair and moderate, right by multiple government customers can coexist in that cloud.

Whereas, uh, analyzing isolated cloud is one where every customer gets a single instance. So this is for where customers not only want the higher rate of like security and boundary, but they wanna make sure their stuff stays within a single instance, and they have their own dedicated compute and networking and storage and databases and so on. So data cannot leave, cannot egress over the boundaries.

And then it, when you get to working with these government customers or highly regulated customers, their needs are little different, right? It's very nuanced, depending on which type of IP they're trying to protect or what kind of regulation they're trying to qualify For. Just does when you talk about the government side.

Yeah. And given, uh, the influx of proliferation of ai, is there now even more particularly focused attention to governance and regulation and compliance? Definitely.

That's a hot topic. We've been talking with some of our, uh, largest customers about this, this week. Everybody's seeing AI is coming, right?

For your business to thrive, there's no way not to adopt AI to make your workforce more efficient. But with the ai, the trust becomes even more important. You have to counterbalance each other.

So we've been hearing about, kind of along with ai, what kind of transparency and control they need to guarantee that AI is only for the good, but you, you know, it doesn't cause any risk to the enterprises. Yeah, That's true. So how does, uh, we're gonna talk about isolated cloud.

Yeah. How does, how does isolated cloud enhance security control for enterprise customers? Yeah.

With isolated, so you can imagine with a normal commercial cloud, you get a benefit of, like cloud, um, allows many people to share resources. That's where it gets cheaper, gets more scalable, right? But with I Cloud, you get the best of both worlds.

You get the, the benefits of cloud, the scalability and all that, but you also get your own instance, your own dedicated instance, your own dedicated resources, your own network boundary to make sure your data never leaves. You have your own computer, your own storage and everything. So it's kind of like, uh, having a very highly secure apartment in, in a nice kind of large, you know, highriser building.

So you get the best of both worlds that way. Okay. Um, what, so what, what, what industries are the primary targets for Atlassian isolated cloud, and why are they, Yeah, so our, we have actually a program of initial design partners.

We've been working with a number of customers in designing this, this offering. And they tend to be from industries that put really high values on their ips. So we have, uh, folks that are making software devices as well as a lot of banks, right?

So for them, really it's about, like the IP is the business. So it is worthwhile investing the extra infrastructure to, in the protection to guard the ip. That's where the trade off makes sense for them.

Okay. Um, how does Atlassian plan support migrations to the isolated cloud? That's a great question.

So we have customers migrating from different places. Their customers migrating from, you know, from data center, right? The customers migrating from, um, currently using a, you know, homegrown tools or a, a fragment of different tools trying to consolidate and migrate to our isolated cloud.

Uh, so there are a number of things. First of all, it is a kind of, you know, it's gonna be a GA product offering without a documentation, without APIs, folks who won't need to can, can, can play with it, understand how to use it. But we also now have, uh, both partners who work closely with us, who experienced in migrating to these specialized clouds with us, as well as our own fast shift team, uh, which is our engineering team, uh, who is able to work closely with customers, do the initial assessment, and then help them to actually migrate that data and make sure the new environment works for them.

Can you mention some, some of the, you mentioned some of the partners who help 'em. Can you mention who, who they are and kind of what markets or how they, how they fit into the equation? So there was one I spent a lot of time with yesterday, uh, VALIS Federal.

Okay. So they're specialized in helping the federal customers to get into some of these special environments, and they're very familiar with the regulation needs, the security needs, right? So we've been, as part of releasing these products, and not just about getting products ready, but also getting the partners, getting our own migration team, getting our support team, getting our accountant ready.

So this is all part of the, the kind of go to market enablement that comes with the product launch. So we're now in the process of prepping our partners, not only so when is the migration partners, but also our, uh, ecosystem partners, right? To make sure the apps are ready for folks to get into these specialized environments.

Um, the, yeah, interestingly on the federal, the federal side, in, in terms of just the un I'm not gonna get, I'm not gonna go down into the like, antitrust type of dis discussion, but I'm thinking it's, it's, things are just a little bit more complicated. There's the one are the, one of the sticking points not, I don't know, in general, is just this concern about when jumping headlong into ai, what the consequences could be if you don't do it correctly. Not just from a security point of view, but from a regulatory point of view.

Especially since there's, it's, it's kind of difficult to figure out what's going on in, in terms of the regulatory climate. Now, there's a bit of a confusion, I think, among a lot of companies. Is that, has that hindered or, or has that slowed down, uh, the movement by federal agencies?

Or are they just really, uh, accelerating because they don't wanna be left out of the AI picture? Uh, so we're actually seeing a number of forces pushing together. Okay.

So one is, as you said, uh, it's a combination of, uh, everybody has a bit of a fear of missing out with ai, right? Because everybody else is using ai. If you don't use it, gonna be left behind.

So there's a lot of drive. In fact, some of our customers telling us in general, they're taking more risks than usual just because how much AI can benefit the business. That's one.

Mm. There's definitely the concern of, with ai, we need to heighten our security compliance, right? And visibility have these controls.

That's another. Uh, and then on the government side, the other interesting thing is there's a lot of push for efficiency. So we've actually got a lot more government customers talking to us recently because in terms of consolidating a tool chain, even in terms of the, the cost of, of running, you know, the, the, the services on cloud, the, the cost of purchasing these services allows you, is actually one of the more efficient vendors in their ecosystem.

So as they're trying to consolidate and get more efficient, more of them come to us. So we're seeing kind of the market, you know, the federal customer being pushed in these three different ways. So what we're responding to is certainly helping them to, uh, get to their regulation needs, right?

Give them the AI power and helping them to consolidate their tool chain. The, the fewer things you manage, the, the more efficient you get and also the easier security and compliance becomes. How, How have you seen in terms like the, the go, just one last question about the government.

Are they, are they, um, pretty savvy to the use of, of AI and, and kind of the pros and cons and, and I I'm wondering how they, you compare them with a non-government type of customer? I, I have been, I have been happily surprised. Okay.

I initially thought, you know, government folks, um, they might be a little lag behind in the technology, but, uh, the kind of questions they've been asking, right? The kind of, you know, brainstorming we've been doing together, I've actually been really impressed. I'm like, wow, actually good tech happens on the east coast as well.

Uh, so they've actually been pretty good partners. We've been talk, being able to talk on the same page, like can, it's always important if we can have shared goals, right? And then we can bring the technology, they can bring kind of their use cases together.

We can work towards making the government more tech ready, right. More efficient and then so on. But I've been very impressed they are up to date.

Good. One other, I I, I, you know, I've, I've kind of asked a few people, I haven't asked everybody, but about this whole idea of AI agents is that we keep hearing about the year of AI agents. Um, first do you, do you buy into that, into that buzz or the, the hype, because I, I remember every time I turn around, simul says new, a new announcement every week, right?

From a major company. This week it was in addition to Atlassian, it was Google. It will be ServiceNow in a couple of weeks, right?

It was, it'll be Microsoft. I mean, it is hard to keep track. Do, do you see this gaining traction within corporations?

Um, and is it kind of gaining traction more from the bottom up? Or is it being kind of forced from the top down? Hmm.

I, it seems like every time a new technology comes out, right? We initially we get everybody rushes to it and tries to experiment. And then over time you can see the, the ones that create solid value, the ones that persist.

So you're probably gonna get a bit of divergence and then there's a bit of convergence. Um, we are seeing a few real use cases where it is probably gonna stick, like our developers are finding writing code a lot easier. Yeah.

Right. Our program managers are finding getting summaries or meetings a lot easier. Those are concrete time saving things.

And I, I expect them to be, to be here to stay. Uh, and of course there will, there will are a lot of experiments, right? Not all of these things are gonna stick some experiments when we triangle, just not as good an idea.

So eventually, I think you're gonna get to, you know, a year from now to get a solid list of these, these things, Right? I mean, the silos seem to be breaking down to, which is always an issue, right? With exploration.

That's the other other thing. It's like with ai, you lose the value if you only sitting silo like a small set of data, right? More and more customers want these data to be linked, yes.

To bring multiple data sources. Because the more, the more brands you give to ai, the better insights you get out of it. Alright.

Hey Ray, it was great talking to you. It was great meeting you. Thank you so much about the, the cloud strategy because this is one of the big essential parts of what's going on around us.

So, um, um, thanks again. Um, we're gonna have more from Atlassian, team 25. So stay tuned to Techstrong tv.