Atlassian, the $32 billion Australian software giant, announced on Thursday its biggest set of updates yet to its cloud-based products.
Atlassian bills this as the biggest changes made to its cloud product lineup since it started building its software on Amazon Web Services about three years ago. Atlassian's original products were built to run on companies' private data centers, but since then, it's been steadily shifting to the cloud-based model that's become almost standard.
Specifically, Atlassian is introducing four new pricing plans for its flagship products — from the premium tier with features designed for large businesses, such as support and unlimited cloud storage, down to a free plan that includes basic versions of its most popular tools, including Jira and Confluence. There are also special plans for nonprofits and academic organizations.
It's also adding new features for businesses across the board, including new options around security and privacy, to give both users and IT departments greater control. That's also why Atlassian is beefing up Atlassian Access, the central-command interface for all of its products, with more features.
In addition, Atlassian is creating a new Cloud Migration Assistant, which helps companies migrate their existing Atlassian products to the cloud while making sure they stay in compliance with their existing licensing agreements.
"We've made a lot of investments in the cloud," Anu Bharadwaj, the head of cloud products at Atlassian, told Business Insider. "Now we are really at a turning point as a company. We strongly believe cloud is our future."
'A fundamentally better way of working'
Some of Atlassian's products, like Trello and Opsgenie, are cloud-only products that were born in a more modern era. Flagship products like Jira and Confluence, however, were originally designed for on-premise data centers, leading Atlassian to rebuild them to run in the cloud — and to come up with ways to help existing customers move there.
Over the past few years, Bharadwaj said, cloud has become an important focus at Atlassian. Now she sees over 90% of Atlassian's customers choosing cloud products. Those customers now want to see the Atlassian Cloud lineup get improved over time.
"In general for cloud, we believe cloud unleashes a fundamentally better way of working, especially in the teamwork area," Bharadwaj said. "Cloud basically allows you to focus on your core mission and not have to worry about managing infrastructure updates. We believe for effective teamwork, cloud is really the ideal platform."
