Padraig Byrne (Gartner)
Atlassian is putting the Ops back into DevOps following the software vendor’s acquisition of OpsGenie, as part of wider plans to target IT operations.
That’s the view of Padraig Byrne, research director at Gartner, in assessing the finer details of the $295 million transaction.
“Much of the focus in DevOps and Atlassian since its inception has been centred on the development side," Byrne told ARN. "But as organisations continue to transform into digital businesses, they realise they need to understand IT operations in order to react to customer experience issues.
“This is increasingly important for CIOs responsible for reporting to the executive team and the board.”
A combination of scheduling, escalation paths and notifications helps OpsGenie to notify the right people within an organisation once an issue is identified.
OpsGenie goes further and takes into consideration things like time zones and public holiday calendars.
For Byrne there is a great opportunity for such a solution locally, as this year saw big banks such as NAB and CBA, as well as supermarket Coles suffer outages that affected the businesses and its customers.
"Locally, in Australia, we have seen the significant impact of IT outages which generated front page negative publicity and affected customer satisfaction and revenue," Byrne said. "This directly led to increased interest in the market for service management tools.
"Market spend on IT service management tools in Australia increased 30 per cent in 2017 with a combined spend of just over US$100 million.
"This growth is faster than worldwide (25 per cent) showing that Australian organisations are maturing in their approach to IT operations management."
As reported by ARN, the acquisition is designed to allow Atlassian to help IT operations teams resolve outages faster and incur fewer incidents over time.
According to Scott Farquhar, CEO of Atlassian, responding to service disruptions has become one of the biggest challenges facing IT organisations today.
US-headquartered OpsGenie manages more than 3,000 customers' on-call schedule and notify the assigned people as soon as an incident occurs.
With the acquisition, Atlassian also announced the release of a new product, Jira Ops designed to help IT operations teams deal with costly software outages.
As previously reported, the launch of Jira Ops at the Atlassian Summit is part of the vendor’s plans to better focus on serving IT and technical teams after striking a deal with Slack to discontinue its team chat tools, HipChat and Stride.
"Tools like Atlassian’s newly announced Jira Ops, alongside competitive offerings such as PagerDuty, VictorOps and ServiceNow, will help ensure that companies proactively respond to outages, identifying the root cause of a problem quickly and alerting the correct team members in a timely manner," Byrne explained.
"This will limit revenue impact and improve customer experience."
In addition, Byrne said this specific acquisition by Atlassian differs from other acquisitions such as the Trello acquisition in January 2017 where products remained independent.
"[This time] they have immediately announced a new product, Jira Ops, based around the integration of current technology and the OpsGenie platform," he added.
