Atlassian Corporation (TEAM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Without much ado, Anu, welcome back. Great to see you.

Thank you so much, Kash. It's great to be here again.

Thank you. Congratulations, being promoted to President.

Thank you.

What does that entail? I mean, what are the new things in your portfolio that you're taking care of these days?

And so we created the President role primarily to bring together all of the product strategy and operations pieces. We thought it was the appropriate time as a company that we unify all of these functions under a single leader so we could accelerate some of the momentum we are seeing across all 3 markets. So that's really the new scope.

Great. Good to see that. Many clients -- you will not believe, many clients tell me that, hey, I came to the Goldman conference. And you were talking about this RV College of Engineering, quiz time thing. So I just want to let you know that it's deeply resonating with a few clients.

That's wonderful to be making RV famous.

I know. I know. Yes.

How would you like Atlassian to be in the next 5 years? What are your goals? And when you come back, hopefully, in 2028, we hope we'll come back every year. When you come back in '28, what does this company look like or your best prediction as to the profile of Atlassian?

Yes. So at Atlassian, we have this saying, we say a lot, both internally and externally when we talk to others about Atlassian. Our Dream for Atlassian is to be a company that lasts for 100 years that grows and thrives for 100 years, a company that will outlast all of us. So we built something enduring, a lasting legacy. And for a company that has that kind of aspiration to be around for 100 years, we think very long term because we realize that we have to face various different problems, different kinds of environments. And so our focus is very much to build a company that is built on enduring pillars on enduring strategic foundations. So from that, from that very fundamental notion of we want to be around for 100 years, we tend to think about, okay, so over the next 5 years, what's the next phase of Atlassian, what would we like to do? And when I think about that, I think the major areas that will continue to be a focus for us is very much the 3 markets we operate in, the agile DevOps, ITSM and work management markets, they continue to be expanding markets. They're growing, and we have strong positions in all 3 of them. So I expect we will continue over the next 5 years to make more inroads, continue to grow across all 3 of those markets. I expect that we will have a lot more focus on serving enterprise customers. As you know, we have a really large customer base, 260,000 customers, very unusual for a B2B company. That means we serve both SMBs and enterprises. And traditionally, our legacy has very much been start small and then grow alongside the customers to large scale. But as we are seeing over the last few years, more and more enterprises are adopting products. And more and more of our small companies are growing up to the large enterprises as well. So I expect over the next 5 years, Atlassian will also evolve to become a company that serves more enterprise customers in addition to SMB, will very much be a flywheel led business. I think the fundamentals of our business mechanics don't change. But the profile of customers that we serve is going to skew more towards enterprise, I would imagine.

Got it. I thought you're going to say we're going to have a TAM on Mars because in 100 years, we'll have civilization. And [ Gilly ] was about to tell me I need to build out my Excel spreadsheet for another 100 rows multiplied by 4, actually 400 rows by the [ quarters ]. But we'll get there.

We'll get there. We'll get there.

Yes, we'll get there at some point in time. So you're in a unique position. You got 260,000 customers. You're in practically all geos, all kinds of verticals. You have a really good feel for the pulse of the spending environment. So what does that pulse telling you when you speak with customers? What is your outlook for going into next year?

Yes. So it's a constantly evolving thing, right? As part of my job, I end up talking to customers a lot. And as I took on the new role at the beginning of the year, one of the things I committed to was to make sure that I talked to at least 2 customers personally every week. And typically, I try and make it one enterprise, one SMB, so as to get more of a directly pulses what our customers are experiencing, what they're feeling. And things have changed over the past year in some ways, but in some other ways, they've remained somewhat stable. We are seeing more and more customers want to consolidate on top of the Atlassian platform. So I hear a lot more customers come in and say, hey, we use various different products today, but we would really like to consolidate on the Atlassian platform because we trust you, we've used your products for a long time so help us get to that point. So we definitely hear more of that. Overall, in terms of how that impacts the business, though, we continue telling you folks about user expansion coming down and free-to-paid conversion is coming down. We've overall kind of forecasted saying, it's probably going to remain constant to flat. There's not enough data points that I could extrapolate that and say, or something drastically changed so we have to change so...

The rate of change has slowed down.

Yes. Yes. But we see customers continue to be more price sensitive than they have been in the years past. And Atlassian has a strong position in that place because our value to price ratio is really high compared to anything else out there in the market. And customers continue to want to really serve multiple use cases using a single vendor. And coupled with the fact that we are serving more and more enterprise customers now we see a lot more of that pattern.

Got it. The last 18 months have been really tumultuous. I mean, we didn't -- we've not seen many periods when rates went up from 0 to whatever is [ 525 ] basis points, we're not seeing this level of inflation. So understandably, IT budgets were in a bit of a flux. We went through it tumultuous time. But here we are, our economist has been calling for a soft landing. He's been right so our, we call it, software landing. So software has landed really well. You guys have heard this many times over. I'm so sorry, you've not heard it, so I have to tell it you. Goldman Sachs software landing seems to be playing out. So if we're in a stable environment, rates do not go up and they probably go down a little bit. Stability, everybody was expecting and fearing a recession. It looks like the opposite has happened there. So what does this mean for tech spending, your customers' appetite and how better position Atlassian could be in an era where you don't have this tumult in the macro? People open up their wallets, feel a little bit more positive about the...

Yes. It's a variant situation, I would describe it as. So in terms of budget, tech budgets and what customers think about, like I said, they continue to be price-sensitive and they continue to manage their budgets far more prudently than perhaps 3 years ago. So there's more discretion. There's more looking at what are we spending on? Is that the best value or not. But there is also an increased appetite for productivity enhancers. So a lot of the customers I talk to are very keen to make sure that their budgets get spent on things that will make their teams a lot more productive, the introduction of AI and mainstreaming of AI has helped a lot with that conversation. So we hear customers, like I said, talk a lot about, we would like to consolidate on one platform and how can you, as a vendor help us do that. And in those situations, for us, it's an advantage, like I said, because of our price to value ratios are below compared to what we deliver, we don't charge very much for -- across all 3 of our markets. But also the nature of our products is very horizontal because we're a company that believes in teamwork that wants to make teams work better, that's the philosophy we've used in all 3 of our markets and all of the products that constitute our 3 markets. So it's very much at the heart of what tech as well as nontech consumers are looking for now, how can I do more with less? How can I unleash the full potential of my current team using the budget that I have.

That's why AI is so relevant in this discussion AI meaning Atlassian Intelligence. I was actually at your user conference and watch you guys launch AI. So what do you think is the most compelling aspect of the -- of your Atlassian Intelligence? And what is so unique and differentiated about that offering?

And Kash, you've actually said this before, we've had this conversation. The thing about AI is what makes any AI offering unique amongst the tech providers today is what kind of data do you have? Because just the model in and off itself is not necessarily a differentiator for the business or for the technology. And because Atlassian operates in these 3 markets, and we are very much at the heart of collaboration, the kind of data we have is very, very unique. It ranges all the way from the beginning of the software development life cycle all the way to the very end of the software development life cycle. As a result, the kind of data that we have, the kind of knowledge and insights that we have about our customer is very broad as well as deep. That is really hard for point vendors to be able to [ sequester ]. And therefore, the unique thing about Atlassian Intelligence for us is the kind of data that we have across the products that our customers use and how we can then convert that data into insights that customers can use and act on in their day-to-day life. So in Atlassian Intelligence, the capabilities we introduced. One of them is the virtual agent in Jira Service management. And we use virtual agent internally ourselves, and we've seen great productivity gains that saved us person months in various different places and customers report the same when they try it out. The thing with virtual agents is it's able to actually infer knowledge from various different parts, and it's not just a simple -- well, I'm operating a service workflow. So in this particular context, what's the knowledge I have and how do I convert that into an answer? That's interesting but not as interesting as being able to work off of an entire graph of connected objects with their work and team object. That really makes Atlassian Intelligence unique because we are able to build on top of that graph. Other use cases we serve and Atlassian Intelligence, the customers report a lot of interest in. And now we've actually put out an early access. The thing we announced that you said you saw at our team conference, it's now available as early access too. Several thousands of customers are now using it. So I'm very excited about when we hit general availability to track usage and how we can iterate and improve on that.

What's the feedback been from these customers that have played with that in beta?

So thus far, this is early access and the customers that have played with it have actually tried out a breadth of different use case of it. The virtual agent, like I said, has met with a lot of positive feedback. I think customers, like I was referencing earlier, are very interested in how do you increase the productivity of your existing team and virtual agent helps a lot with that particular use case. So that has been very positive. The feedback that we hear from customers on...

Anu, this is virtual agent for the service management product or...

Yes, for Jira Service Management, okay? And in Confluence, we have artificial intelligence embedded into the editor. So the thing about Atlassian products is we have a common Atlassian platform that powers all of our products. As a result, Jira Service Management, Jira software, Confluence, all of them get the benefit of the intelligent editor. So the intelligent editor has AI, Atlassian Intelligence embedded in it and the use cases there that we hear a lot are generating content, generating help desk articles, generating pages and block posts and support articles that kind of thing, changing tenure, summarizing, creating and collaborating on content is very much at the heart of many of our team work use cases. So that's a place where we hear customers enjoy a lot of our offering.

We also work as a team. So hence, I'm going to, at this point, turn it over to [ Gilly ] from my team.

Yes. No, thank you for taking the time and being with us today. I mean I think I wanted to continue the conversation on AI and how that's driving the conversations that you're having with customers, where Atlassian kind of stands and ability to offer that in the compelling use cases across the 3 different segments that you're in? And is this a [ carrot ] for cloud? And how is that driving those conversations as well?

Yes. I've been at Atlassian for 9 years so I've done the user conference that Kash talked about 9 times. And this year, in April, we did the user conference and man, the customer response was incredible after that. We announced Atlassian Intelligence. I got off stage and so many customers came up to say how excited they are about using this and how they understand why this is going to be unique for Atlassian. Why it's going to supercharge the usage across multiple Atlassian products. So the conversations with customers have very much been a positive one of excitement and waiting to actually try out the product. So we've had a lot of demand as we've gone to early access and now moving to general availability. The thing that AI, Atlassian Intelligence is going to drive for us in the short term is very much an acceleration of migrations because technologically, we can only offer this in the cloud, the graph resides in the cloud. And we're going through a multiyear migration journey as a company. I've been here talking about it several times. That very much accelerates this. So we have a customer in Japan. I was talking to a couple of months ago, a large deployment. And I've been talking to that person for the last 3 years explaining why cloud has the best experience possible for Atlassian. And this person came up to me in April this year and said, oh my God, I need to go to cloud now. And so the conversation was very much reversed once they saw what is achievable when you put the data together across products, and apply Atlassian Intelligence on top of that. So we definitely expect to see an acceleration in migration as a result of Atlassian Intelligence. It's a powerful pull on cloud and one that we can really deliver behind the firewall. So it's a differentiator on the cloud platform. And another one is when we think about it in terms of monetization of Atlassian Intelligence, it's early right now to say, hey, here is how much it will drive or the specifics of what we think will impact the business, but we very much expect that Atlassian Intelligence is going to help accelerate upgrades from our standard edition to the premium edition and enterprise edition because clearly, there is capability that we can splice across editions and be able to offer across multiple existing cloud editions.

And you mentioned the migration to the multiyear cloud journey. And so I wanted -- and thinking about team and the other announcements that you guys made around security and encryption and there was definitely a lot there. It was a really exciting conference. And so how -- what are the roadblocks are you seeing from those migrations around from data center to cloud or server to cloud?

Yes. So the migration of customers from server and data center to cloud has been a multiyear journey for us, where the starting point was very much -- we had to start from the inception of cloud. So at that particular point of time, what we did was we took an approach of saying, let's make a list of capabilities that we need to build on cloud to get to parity with server and data center first. And then beyond of that, how do we leapfrog to build exclusive things in cloud that are not possible in server and data center, which was the whole crux of why we had to make the platform shift in the first place. So in the parity segment, I think we are very close to -- you can pretty much do what you can do on our server DC products on cloud. And you can do a lot more on cloud in terms of the user experience, it's way better. It's objectively way better on cloud than it is on server and data center. So most migrators that [Audio Gap]. But, in terms of the capabilities we've built to get off of the roadblocks in the migration, they fall in broadly 3 buckets, one around scale. So we started with supporting just 1,000 users on cloud, and then we went up to 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 and now 50,000 and now we say unlimited instances are supported on enterprise editions of our cloud. So that has been one stream of roadblocks that we've removed. Another stream is around data management, data sovereignty, residency, those capabilities. And like you noted, we've consistently delivered on those capabilities back then HIPAA compliance and data management certification kind of capabilities in cloud. And a third bucket has really been around reliability, availability because now we hosted instead of customers hosted themselves. So we've offered SLAs, again, we've offered SLAs that are different by edition. So enterprise customers that have mission-critical workloads of our products, typically opt for the enterprise edition where we offer elevated SLAs. So those 3 buckets are really the primary buckets that we've thought of as -- what do we need to do on cloud in order to remove roadblocks for customers to come from server to here.

And when we think about those different customer cohorts that you have and also the different end markets that you serve, right, how -- which one do you think -- or that you've seen have embraced the cloud the most or the fastest? And where do you see room for unlock in the future?

Across the 3 markets, I believe the cloud adoption, I would say, has been consistent, right? There is the agile, DevOps market. Developers typically tend to be ahead of the curve. They are very much onboard development teams. Because of the advent of AI, a lot more software gets developed than before. And that is a good thing for companies like Atlassian because we believe that the amount of software that gets generated that gets written, if that increases, it increases the surface area for us to the number of people that can use our products. So in the agile, DevOps space, we see very much the adoption of cloud continue to be healthy, and it's going to get even better. In ITSM, the adoption of cloud has very much been consistent with technical teams. And we have several of our new capabilities, things like Compass, [indiscernible], a lot of our capabilities are available on cloud exclusively. So any of the new point A products that we've released have all been cloud only, and that helped spur more cloud adoption across markets as well. And in the wealth management market, of course, cloud adoption is pretty much baseline has been higher than other markets in any case, and I expect that to continue to be the case, especially collaboration, multiplayer collaboration tends to easier to do on the cloud.

Anu, I had a question for you on the AI staying on this AI thread. The pricing, if you put some framework around how to price it. And there have been 2 streams. Some companies have said we're going to put a SKU on a charge because of Microsoft, we just came back, Amy Hood presented from Microsoft, CFO, $30 is the price of Copilot. And some of those have said, well, we're going to introduce it as part of the higher end, the enterprise plus SKU. So you automatically get it. So that's one way of monetizing it. In your case, the cloud is clearly the way to monetize it. But in the future, do you think there's a potential to actually charge a higher price for some of the AI capabilities? Because today, your capabilities are whatever they are, and they're going to grow in the future. We can uncover more and more cool applications and unlocks. How do you think about the pricing road map for AI?

Yes. I believe there are multiple options like the ones you laid out and different vendors take different routes. For Atlassian, I would say it's a little too early to commit to a particular path. Having said that, I agree with the notion that, yes, we can build capabilities that can potentially be a lot more value generated and therefore, justify price increases, whether -- well, whether they're part of a different edition or whether we create a different SKU, all of that. We don't know. At this particular point, I would say it's too early. But the thing about AI capabilities and the thing about the Atlassian business model is we very much want to do the high-volume play. We want our AI capabilities to be available to as many people as possible. And then we want to figure out, okay, great, in addition to that, what are capabilities we want to monetize on top. So we very much take the philosophy of how do we make it available to the largest cross-section of people. And therefore, the monetization is kind of still early for us.

Got it. Got it. Got it. On that count, you said something like the code that's being developed is going to -- is already going through a massive spurt, right? Therefore, that's a good thing for AI. I'm surprised to hear that given that your products are still in control release. And of course, Microsoft GitHub, Copilot has seen some rapid adoption quickly. Help us understand, so it looks like the pace of automatic cogeneration is much faster than we thought. So extrapolate that into the future, how complicated and how much of an overwhelming thing can this be that could actually play to your advantage, automatic code regeneration?

Yes. The thing about -- when I say the amount of software that gets built is going to increase over time is not just limited to code generation, right? So today, what is the classic process of building a software app. Somebody has to think about an idea, somebody has to then say, does it actually work for customers? Is this what we need to build and then someone has to design it, then somebody has to write code for it and then somebody has to deploy that. And then when you deploy it, there's going to be incidence somebody has to manage that. That entire loop is going to get faster. So the code generation is just one part of that loop. And thanks to AI because the entire loop is going to see acceleration as a result of the other side of it, a lot more software gets developed. So now what it means is a lot more people that could think of ideas before but not necessarily draw it up or code it or deploy it into production, they are now free to do so.

I have ideas for apps that I've not had the coding expertise to put it to work.

Yes. The design expertise necessarily are the deployment into production, managing production environments, all of that, right? So code generation is one aspect of it, is one part of it. But when the whole loop gets accelerated a lot more software gets produced. And for Atlassian, we play in that whole loop. We are not just constrained to the code management part of it and that's a very deliberate decision because fundamentally, Atlassian's philosophy is very different than many other companies, which is to say, we don't think there should be a best-of-breed tool that controls every single splice of that app development mechanism. We believe that there should be a good steel thread that connects all of those different phases. And if each of the phase gets faster, for the person that provides the connecting thread, it's a great advantage because now more and more of such loops get generated in the market. And so in -- as the person that provides that steel thread in that loop, whereas a lot more consumers that weren't able to traverse that full loop before are now able to. So that's why we think of it as hey, more teams are going to build software. And the notion of teamwork, how do you make teams more collaborative, more productive, it's going to be a constant problem. So that's the problem we focus on.

So this will include CI/CD testing et cetera?

The entire app life cycle management.

Yes. And that's where you have Microsoft, GitLab, et cetera. So how does Atlassian, is there a competitive overlap with the SDLC products of other companies in this regard?

So fundamentally, when we say SDLC or ALM, the difference between other philosophies and the Atlassian philosophy is what we call the open tool chain. I worked at Microsoft for 10 years before. So I can speak with confidence about in the Microsoft universe, the strategy is very much to say, hey, use all of the Microsoft products and they all connect very well together. And you can do the full loop in the Microsoft [ forest garden ]. But the Atlassian's philosophy is even though we are operating in SDLC, we are effectively saying we are going to build GitHub integrations that are going to be just as good as our bit bucket integration. We're going to build Miro integrations that are just as good as our existing whiteboards and Confluence. So we very much want to be that connecting thread, but with integrations to third parties. Because fundamentally, we believe that there isn't really a world where all development teams are -- all software building teams are going to say, I will use one product for every single need and that's really the big differentiator and advantage for us as a company.

Got it. so anecdotally, some CIOs have talked about developer productivity going up between 20% to 40% as a result of using the SCO pilot. Does it mean we're going to have 20%, 30% more code for the same unit of work, therefore, more complexity and more things to be managed for Atlassian?

Actually I was speaking to the Goldman Sachs CIO and you guys are doing some pretty great work on early AI adoption...

He is here today.

That's awesome. I should say hello. Does it mean that there will be 30% more code generated? I don't know, maybe. But I think the more interesting part of it from my perspective is really that there will be a lot more software that gets generated, a lot more applications that previously wouldn't exist that will now exist. And I think that's where the magic is going to happen. And because more and more people now are in the category of creators, more and more people are now in the category of bringing their vision to the world and letting others experience their vision, that's, I think, going to unleash kind of new world, which should be beneficial across all kinds of different roles.

So Gilly, Matt and Jacob, promise to learn coding and implement my ideas and create apps in our marketplace. Will you guys -- will you do that? Okay.

We're looking forward to having some level of implementation of AI into our workflows. I think Kash mentioned that to Marco in the keynote earlier today. I wanted to shift a little bit of gears actually to just in the last few minutes that we have with you around enterprise. And in the last quarter, Jira Service Management saw 80% growth in their cloud enterprise sales. And what -- can you talk through -- I know you guys have been working through a lot of your enterprise sales motion over the last year or so. And so tell us kind of where we are today and what's been driving that growth?

Yes. We've seen phenomenal acceleration in JSM adoption in enterprises. We're super happy about it. In general, we've seen more enterprise adoption. Like I said in the first question, I expect that trend will continue for Atlassian, where we have more and more enterprises, users, software deployer, software try and consolidate on the platform. Specifically with respect to JSM, we've been in market for a few years now. And what we've done is we've built up a critical mass of capabilities that are pretty complete when you look at it from an IT service management perspective, but also the spirit of our service management product has very much been consistent with the other products of Atlassian, which is to be a horizontal and serve workflows across not just IT service teams, but also across marketing service or HR service or any kind of nontechnical or technical teams that want to deploy a service workflow. And for enterprises, that's especially appealing. Jira Software management has the advantage of very quick time to value. Repeatedly, when I talk to customers, they are pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to deploy this and start seeing ROI pretty immediately. And we are priced very competitively compared to everybody else in that market. So for enterprises, it's a very, very compelling value proposition, especially on the service management side. And we expect that we will continue to grow that horizontally as well. So well over 50% of Jira Service Management users come from nontech teams. So it's not just IT. And that play, I think, is going to continue to accelerate, especially in enterprises. And we've been very thoughtful about how we have evolved our enterprise sales motion as well. So as the number of enterprises have grown in the customer base, I think in the last earnings call, we were talking about the number of customers who pay more than $1 million has grown well over 50%. And our enterprise sales has grown well over 50%. So we see strength there because we've evolved our traditionally superefficient GTM model, to also be able to serve enterprises while retaining high efficiency that the flywheel requires because the business is very much still flywheel driven. So we evolved that model and we've seen success in terms of enterprise adoption there.

We should see if there are any questions from our clients here, if you have a question. We have 3 minutes or so to get to you. Just raise your hand if you have a question. If not, I have one, the migration. This is a question that has come up a few times. How has the company fared with respect to removing the technical obstacles and resource obstacles to ensure that your customers that are sitting on the server and data center editions can more seamlessly easily upgrade to the cloud?

We are very pleased with where we are. Having driven much of that technical road map myself personally, I can also reflect on it from a personal side. I think we've been really good in terms of executing to where we need it to be. And when I speak with customers who are embarking on the migration journey, it's enterprise ready, the fact that we had an Atlassian platform has been a substantial advantage for us. We've built enterprise ready in a scale, performance, compliance, data management, all of that in one place, and we've been able to leverage that in all 3 of our markets. So in terms of removing roadblocks, I think we are at a great place. We are where we expected we would be. But in terms of describing the journey itself by February, which is server end of life, we expect more and more migrations to happen to DCN cloud. And even beyond of that, remember that migrations won't stop because there is a substantial DC customer base, and we see a lot of DC customers come to cloud as well. So while the web data is an inflection point for server, we fully expect DC migrations to cloud will continue. And especially the DC customer base is large enterprises typically tends to skew more enterprise. So migrations will continue to happen more and more for a larger company.

How you think of end of life for data center?

So data center is a substantially big number of customers today. And we continue to ship releases on data center. We continue to invest in performance, scalability, all of that. We are very clear that we want customers to be on cloud as the final destination for sure, right? Because without doubt, that is the place where you will get the best experience of Atlassian, where you will get a lot more of the innovation that's possible because of technological differences. But we see data center as a stepping stone, is an important stepping stone for customers to come from...

Customers saying (no AI).

Yes. So a lot of...

Precaution, no, AI.

Yes, a lot of that innovation tends to happen in cloud simply because of the technological benefits of product.

What about a hybrid deployment or within an enterprise, do you see some going to data center for one aspect and then maybe cloud for others. How does that -- do you see that happen at all?

That's a great question. We very much see that with enterprises specifically the larger deployments, they tend to have certain workloads, which they want either for regulatory reasons or for policy reasons, where they want to retain it behind the firewall while they start moving all of the new workloads the faster moving workloads to cloud. So we see a lot of our enterprises adopt the hybrid model where they start moving to cloud and then they do it over a period of time.

That's great.

On that note, we wish you really well. Congratulations on your promotion, and keep up the great work and it was entertaining discussion, informative discussion. So thank you to your client -- to our clients as well for your patience and participation. Let's rock and roll and bring this day 3 to a close. And may this be the best conference ever.

Thank you so much.