At the beautiful Venetian Resort in the heart of Las Vegas, this year’s Atlassian Team ’24 event buzzed with the energy of an enthusiastic, welcoming community eager to hear what was up next for some of the most important tools they use every day.
I had the privilege of representing Rewind at the three-day event (along with an entourage of SaaS backup experts), brimming with insightful presentations, engaging discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities. Read on to discover what I learned about Atlassian products, AI, teamwork and more—all while logging over 30,000 steps daily.
Atlassian hits some major product milestones
Picture this: a broad stage flanked by immense projection screens, enveloped in a wash of smoke and blue stage lighting. That’s where Atlassian CEO and Co-Founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and his team began by sharing some impressive statistics. Atlassian has reached over 300,000 customers, many of which are moving to the cloud. Confluence has seen 100,000 customers move to cloud services this year alone, while Jira has doubled its cloud customers. They also shared that 75% of Atlassian customers in regulated industries have moved at least one product to the cloud.
The team has worked hard on the back-end architecture to support this migration, improving its responsiveness by over 30 percent. They have also added data residency support for 11 regions and over 1000 new features. That’s an improvement every 5 to 6 minutes in the last year! It was clear that the future Atlassian wants is in the cloud, and they were working hard to ensure the experience was strong for everyone ready to make the move. That was great to hear, especially for us at Rewind because we aim to support your cloud migration and the inevitable retooling of your backup and disaster recovery strategy.
Jira: not just for development teams anymore
One of the main themes of this event was a focus on enhanced collaboration across your organization. The Atlassian product team described their plans to merge all of the facets of the Jira universe (Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Work Management) under the banner of “Jira,” a single solution to simplify project management throughout your business. There was also a heavy focus on adopting Jira and Confluence outside of the development space and several highlighted use cases for Marketing, Sales, and Support, which we at Rewind have seen reflected in new streams of customers coming to us for a backup solution.
A buffet of new features and products
The product teams presented a laundry list of fantastic new product additions. There are frankly too many to mention, but I will share some of the more interesting ones:
- Loom: Atlassian purchased Loom, a video messaging platform for asynchronous communication, in October 2023 for almost $1B, and now we are getting some insight into how they plan to leverage it. Several features were highlighted, including the ability to effortlessly capture and share messages on the fly, produce transcripts, and generate documents from a video, as well as variables that allow automatic and personalized Sales outreach, not to mention a direct tie-in to Salesforce. These features combined make Loom a compelling tool for eliminating meetings and sharing ideas. The team touted that, internally, Atlassian eliminated an estimated 478,000 meetings using Loom video messaging. The icing on the cake was a demonstration of how to create a bug report from a Loom video in Jira with just one click and the help of AI.
- Atlassian University: The one-stop-shop for education about all things Atlassian, previously $39 per course, is now FREE.
- Jira Service Management: ITSM will see huge benefits from AI with the introduction of virtual AI-powered agents. These agents will automatically triage and assign tickets based on priority and agent experience. The AI Agents will also recommend building new queues based on things like geographic location. A great example was Fanduel, which automated 85% of its workflows and achieved a CSAT score of 4.5 out of 5!
- Cloud security: The team showed off an early preview of Guard, a combination of the beta product Beacon and Atlassian Access. Guard is set to aggregate security across your platform, including identity and access management, data classification, exfiltration controls, and SSO enforcement. It also introduces threat detection, investigation, and audit logging features to a Premium package.
Judgment Day for mundane tasks
Artificial intelligence was a huge theme across many of this year’s events. A highlight for me was a spirited fireside chat between renowned AI researcher Dr. Fei-Fei Li and Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, on how AI can be used effectively and responsibly. The conversation ranged from how AI makes decisions when it isn’t sure what you want (and the inevitability of the “Crocoduck”) to a theoretical discussion on the need to radically adapt our aging education system in the face of a technology that can already pass the Bar exam. The implications of AI for society, governments, and businesses are truly mind-blowing, and the opportunity to hear a 20-year veteran speak on the subject was genuinely enthralling.
We also saw quite a bit of AI magic in the product. We were introduced to Atlassian’s “Rovo,” a large knowledge model for your entire company to use. It will provide a unified search experience across your Atlassian products AND integrate third-party systems like Slack to bring you the right information without the painful effort of digging manually through documents, chats, and dashboards.
Finally, we were shown the concept of AI “Agents” that can be configured with goals and given access to specific knowledge so they can perform time-consuming tasks, allowing you to automate thousands of activities across your enterprise easily. They can do impressive things, such as cross-referencing your brand guidelines and correcting your text in real-time, automatically writing up your release notes, or cleaning up old feature flags on a schedule. They can even send you a notification when they have completed a task. An Agent created in Atlassian automatically identified and cleaned up over 460 stale feature flags in a four-month period.
If you weren’t a Ted Lasso fan, you are now!
To cap off the series of wonderful presentations, we were treated to an hour with Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) and Brendan Lunt (Coach Beard). It didn’t have much to do with software, but it was a fantastic hour with two truly talented actors. We heard about how they started in comedy, learned about soccer from the FIFA video game in a green room in Amsterdam, and how quickly the Ted Lasso show went from a single season with an uncertain future to a full three seasons in weeks. We also learned that “wagged” is the Australian term for ditching school—something the pair may have done occasionally.
Live from the tradeshow floor, it’s Atlassian Team ’24!
It wasn’t all celebrities and free pastries, however. There was serious business to take care of as well! The convention hall was filled end-to-end with marketplace vendors, partners, and community members, as well as several displays from Atlassian themselves. Some impressive products were flanked by enthusiastic and friendly teams eager to show off their technology. I was blown away by how friendly this community is. Every person I met was practically vibrating with enthusiasm and energy, eager to make a new connection. The hall also included some areas for breakout learning sessions, with plenty of space to sit and talk with potential partners. There was also seating for those, like me, who had to stop and do some office work between sessions.
The Rewind booth was located at the back, near a large seating area for lunch events. The spot provided a steady stream of foot traffic, especially at mealtime, and we had the pleasure of meeting with some exciting future customers. It’s always surprising to me how many IT professionals don’t realize that SaaS apps aren’t responsible for your data. Most just assume that SaaS comes with backup and recovery natively or that the cloud never fails. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, and sharing this important education is very rewarding. Being a former IT manager, realizing that over 80% of the data my company relies on isn’t protected in any way would be heart-stopping. The result of Atlassian Team ‘24 was hundreds of in-depth conversations with some incredible brands.
The community every company dreams of
Last but not least, I accompanied Rewind’s own Dan Laframboise, the newly minted leader of Ottawa, Canada’s chapter of ACE, to the packed Adaptavist pool party and the ACE Leader’s party at TAO nightclub. Both were fantastic events and in only a few short hours, Dan and I met dozens of outgoing, friendly people from the community.
After all was said and done, the team hopped on a 12:00 AM red-eye back to Canada. Although we were all exhausted, we agreed it was a fantastic event that was one to remember. We will be back!
Safeguard your team’s vital Atlassian data with Rewind backups
Teamwork is fostered with Atlassian apps—but they’re only responsible for their platform, not your account-level data. Trusted by over 25,000 organizations & backed by Atlassian, Rewind safeguards your Atlassian Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello data.
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