Atlassian Corporation (TEAM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining us for day-1 of Baird's Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference. I'm Rob Oliver. I follow the Software SaaS sector at Baird. It's my pleasure to have Martin Lam, Head of Investor Relations at Atlassian. Martin, thanks for coming. We really appreciate it.

Yes, of course.

So Atlassian is a very important company in the software ecosystem, pioneer in software development, has broadened out to be a leader in the broader work management space. A lot going on in this space. We will try -- with the company. We will try to make this interactive, so please don't hesitate to send an e-mail and we'll get your question in. But Martin, let me start by -- maybe for those -- there are some generalists in the room. For those who maybe haven't been caught up on the Atlassian story, how has the business evolved over the years? You guys started with Jira really with this global phenomenon around Jira, and have evolved into a much broader set of offerings which I want to get into, but how has the company evolved and how do you guys think of yourselves?

Thanks for having me, Rob. Yes. So at our core, we are a collaboration company. And you kind of look across our portfolio of products, that is what we focus on, is how do we facilitate collaboration, how do we make collaboration easier and people more productive and more efficient in that sense. I've been with the company now for 10 years, I've seen a lot of different evolutions using your word, and like that for [indiscernible] coin. We changed quite a lot in terms of broadening the portfolio, as you mentioned, started out with Jira, Confluence, slowly grew the portfolio of products. Over the more recent years, we've started to focus much more on our cloud migration. We started out selling traditional kind of on-premise software managed by clients. And now -- of course, now we're trying to shift customers over to our own managed software in the cloud. And then more recently, we've been focused on expanding our relationship with our biggest, most complex customers. So focusing on those enterprises. Today, we have over 300,000 customers. We serve 83% of the Fortune 500, but yet they only represent a little less than 10% of total business. And so there's a huge opportunity for us to kind of increase our potential within these enterprises. So there's kind of different transformations that have happened over the past several years, whilst that kind of staying true to the values and philosophy that have kind of grounded Atlassian.

And on that point, that opportunity that you guys have moving upmarket, I think it was really evident in this year's user conference. I've been to many of your user conferences over the years, and I never felt as if there was more of a sense that this is becoming an enterprise company or aspiring to be an enterprise company than this year. And a lot of it was just in conversations with partners, but also in the product announcements that you made. So maybe let's talk a little bit about some of the new things that came out of Team '25. There were Clouds, there were Bundles, there was Rovo. So maybe we'll take them in that order and start or whatever order you want to take them in, in terms of importance or how you want to address them because there was a lot.

Sure. No, I think as you noted, as I spoke with kind of customers and partners myself, I think that was the most evident thing is I think customers recognizing kind of the enterprise focus as well as how the platform investments that we've made over the past decade have started to show up much more in a more pronounced way. Again, that's across the different portfolio, but also across the capabilities throughout our products. I would say, probably the biggest announcement that I think that people focused on is our decision to make Rovo, our advanced kind of AI capabilities embedded throughout the platform. And so therefore, they're going to be included in the premium and enterprise additions of our core products with the standard edition to come. That probably was the biggest headline that a lot of folks in the investment community came away with. The other big ones that Rob talked about were introduction of collections. And so what that means is more holistic solutions tailored for different personas. And so what we introduced was a teamwork collection, which is a core set of collaboration products geared for any knowledge worker within an enterprise. But think of that as Jira, Confluence, a product called Loom and Rovo capabilities. And then as Rob talked about, another big announcement was our introduction of Government Cloud and an Isolated Cloud offering, all in the vein of what I mentioned earlier of migrating customers over to cloud in the coming years.

And on the Rovo announcement, that was definitely the biggest surprise or buzz at the event. And subsequent to the event, I've asked just about every company I cover or talk to what they think about it and whether they would consider doing what you guys did and a lot of thinking about it. And so it may be that you guys are ahead of the game and what was it that drove you guys to just say, hey, we're going to give Rovo away for free? And I guess I use free with a lowercase F because ultimately, I have a feeling that customers are going to pay for it and some indeed at the event even said, yes, we're probably going to see a price increase in a couple of years. But if we're using it, we're getting value, but what was the calculus that went into that thought process?

Yes, I would say a couple of different things. So our #1 priority with Rovo has always been to drive usage and adoption first and foremost. And so this decision is much more in that vein of trying to mainline it throughout that customer base, trying to drive that usage in adoption as much as possible. Thus far, we've had great success. The customer response has been really good. We have over 1.5 million monthly active users of our AI capabilities across the platform today. That's up 50% quarter-over-quarter from just the December period. Again, our thinking around this is to remove as much of the friction and barriers as possible for customers and users to embed those AI capabilities and their daily workflows and habits, right? As these habits become much more ingrained, our products become stickier, more relevant. It gives us much more flexibility over time to recoup some of that value back via different monetization levers. We've always had a very patient for revenue approach. This is very consistent with that approach. It's all about delivering value first and foremost to customers and users. And then again, there's different vectors that expose themselves over time. Part of the other reason you want to drive usage and adoption is also to learn as much as possible, right? This is a very fast-moving landscape. You want to learn as much about user habits as possible, identify which different capabilities are being used and then you iterate much quicker from there in terms of the feedback loops and how do you develop the different AI capabilities and potentially expose different monetization levers. I think an important piece of this was we also introduced elements of consumption-based pricing with Rovo and so there is certain limits that we've introduced. Today, they are very generous with the name of driving usage and adoption. You don't want kind of this friction or barrier to drive that usage in adoption. And then over time, do we continue to look at those limits, make them much more of a monetization focus. Today, they're much more about almost a cost protection measure. But I think over time, we'll continue to look at the consumption-based pricing. We'll continue to look at kind of the per seat cost and respond accordingly over there. But again, it's all in the name of delivering value for us, being patient and then recouping that value back from customers over time.

And how does it work today for customers who are using Rovo? Is it -- I know you guys are providing the sort of LLM technology and the customers have the application use cases? Is it data that sits within the Atlassian ecosystem? Is -- can it absorb outside data as well? How -- and what are the use cases you're seeing right now that are sort of coming across at the forefront?

Yes. So for those of you less familiar, Rovo has basically 3 core sets of capabilities. One is Enterprise Search. And so that search not only across Atlassian first-party products, but also work and data often times sits in third-party products, right? So ability to search across the Google Suite, Microsoft SharePoint, Slack, Salesforce, some of those are the early connectors that we've built in terms of the ability to search across these different offerings. There's the chat component, right? A lot of you are familiar with ChatGPT and surfacing knowledge through kind of a chat interface. Then the third component of Rovo is, what we call, Studio, the ability to build different agents, both your own third-party agents as well as kind of second-party marketplace built agents through our marketplace network. And so those are kind of the 3 tenets [indiscernible] of Rovo. As Rob is pointing out, we've always had this integrated open philosophy, right? If you think about how we started off this conversation at our core work collaboration company, we've kind of intentionally focused on being a single pane of glass across how work gets done and really not tried to kind of fill the different niches of verticalization parts of how software gets built. And so how do we integrate with best-of-breed providers has always been a core part of our philosophy, and Rovo is no different, right? How do we now build search connectors across these different third-party providers? How do you get that permissioning and security aspect right because what -- when Rob searches for something or drives an agent to action, it's going to have different permissions across these different providers than what Martin is going to have when I do search or drive an agent to take action. And so how do you get that right? That's a difficult nut to crack. That's something that we've been investing heavily in and we've been really pleased with those early results. I think customers have been really pleased when we kind of stack those results and how do you get those search results right, really pleased with those early fruits.

How much does your -- the respect that you guys have among developers and in the IT department matter to your broader expansion? I mean if I look at ServiceNow, they started in the IT department, and they've been able to expand out. And a lot of people didn't believe they'd be able to do that, and they were able to do it effectively. And largely, it was based on the reputation they had built within the IT department is someone you can work with. And you guys had this incredible reputation with developers and to extend the IT department as well. And how much does that matter as you move into broader collaboration that involves nontechnical users?

Yes. I think that's a great point to bring up. I think oftentimes people think of us as only serving software teams, and we do serve software teams, right? They're important persona into managing a certain type of complex workflow. But it's important to think about how it's not just developers that we serve. We've served -- or we shared data previously around, hey, of Jira users, what does that mix look like? What does that composition of users look like? And it's about 52% of those users are technical in nature. So those are developers, engineers or IT. And then 48% are nontechnical or knowledge workers. And I think that shows you a couple of different things. I think it shows that increasingly, you have line of business people that have to interface with their more technical counterparts as software becomes a bigger part of company strategies, and two, our ability to kind of spread horizontally across an organization after landing with a more technically oriented team. And so we've been able to kind of traverse both those and kind of grow consistently across both those vectors as we're able to serve more and more of those nontechnical teams. But I think our kind of domain expertise with how software gets built, knowing how teams work together to build technologies and it's important kind of domain expertise. And then that's starting to cross into IT, right? The lines between software development and IT are starting to blur more and more as IT is much more about managing different software and services as opposed to the hardware, different assets that you have across an organization.

Want to pivot, talk about the cloud strategy before we move to some other topics. So I think the commercial cloud, we all get that's Atlassian in the cloud, right? And then the government cloud is new and actually was able to go to D.C. in the spring and touch and feel that, meet with customers. And I think we're quite optimistic that you guys are going to be able to be successful in D.C. particularly in a more cost-efficient, focused environment where you guys check those boxes. I want to ask about isolated cloud that -- I mean, hopefully pending rebranding. But what is that exactly and what does it provide that data center customers don't have -- what does it provide data center customers that will be sufficient to drive them to a cloud-hosted Atlassian offering? In other words, and is there an opportunity here to really accelerate that cloud number because it seems to me that a lot of the hesitancy around data center customers that just can't move for whatever reason. If you give them an opportunity to move, they might be able to. So I wanted to probe that a little bit.

Yes. So over the past several years, we've invested heavily in our cloud platform. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this is on the innovation side, right? So Atlassian Intelligence, now Rovo, automation, analytics, a lot of these curates to help incentivize those customers that are on our data center instance to migrate over to cloud. Part of these customers cannot move over to cloud, whether due to technical limitations, and we've slowly progressed and unblocked more and more of these customers. And so Rob earlier mentioned government cloud, the ability to now serve government customers in the cloud, and now with our isolated cloud offering, which is virtual private cloud offering for those customers that want a single-tenanted offering and not the traditional kind of commercial multi-tenant offering in the cloud. And so it's kind of another step in that progress of serving more and more of these customers in the cloud. The cloud is ultimately a better experience for these customers. Again, that's where all the innovation is and we're investing quite heavily to unlock that for these data center customers.

Is that a single tenant for them? Okay. It is. Okay. So is the cost to serve there are going to be higher? Or how do you manage...

Yes. And so the isolated cloud offering is to come in '26. We haven't announced pricing yet. It will be priced accordingly because it does cost more to manage that offering.

Got it. Okay. We've got a couple of questions already, and I'll hit them. We have about 15 minutes to go. I wanted to address kind of what is maybe the biggest topic we're hearing from investors most often and I noticed that the CEO of Anthropics said the other day that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs are going to be placed in 1 to 5 years, 1 to 5. So if that's the case, maybe it's not just software developers we should be worried about. However, it does appear that tip of the spear on generative AI and agentic AI is software development where you guys do tremendously well. So I wanted to kind of hear your view, Martin, on what Atlassian's viewpoint is relative to the emergence of generative AI and agentic AI and how a company who, at its core was a software development driven business has evolved can win in that environment?

Yes. So I think it's actually -- it's a good transition to kind of what I started on earlier is, we've always been a collaboration company. And over the years, while software development has been a core kind of constituent or kind of core customer within our -- kind of the workflows that we serve, we never really leaned into, hey, wanting to be the end-to-end solution of software development. Mike and Scott, our 2 co-founders, previously co-CEOs, Mike Cannon-Brookes now, our single CEO, have always said, hey, we want to focus on what's lasting, which is what kind of human problems to be solved, not necessarily solving for these technology problems because technology changes come and go, but what's lasting is human problems. And so that's why we actually think generative AI is actually a real big opportunity for Atlassian, in the sense that there's going to be a lot more software created, lot more technologies that are created. With that, comes more problems for humans to solve, right? How do you manage all this new software? How do you integrate it with your old technology? How do you sell it and bring it to customers? How do you understand what customers want? How do you manage all this and iterate on what to build next? These are the problems that humans will have to solve. I think these technologies also open up the TAM in terms of the number of users, right? Like I actually built an agent last week, I don't have any technical skills. I think you're going to see a lot more people with the ability to create software elements. And again, you'll then have more and more business people that will have to interact with all the software that's being created, right? Again, how do you hire for it? How do you manage the cost of this? There'll be all these new problems where people have to come together to solve these new problems. And I think that's a good problem for Atlassian because that's what our products serve. I also mentioned earlier that we've introduced consumption-based pricing elements within our products, and that's a way to kind of capture value, not just through a per seat basis. Earlier, I talked about 50% of our users are nontechnical in nature. So I think a lot of people are certainly focused on the developer side, but oftentimes overlook the fact that we serve -- half our user base is nontechnical in nature. I also think like over time, within this user base, you're going to have to see, again, more and more people come together, how do you solve new problems. There was going to be new economies that were created with the advent of new technologies and people oftentimes just focus exclusively on the kind of efficiency aspect and forget about all the new stuff that will be born and created with new technologies.

Got it. Yes, that half of the Jira users being nontechnical always was a head scratcher, I think, for a lot of people, but I think it makes sense, particularly you move into IT service management and other areas. And now it does seem like there's a bigger opportunity to attack those nontechnical users because I was on a panel last week, had a venture capital event and some were sort of saying, well, the code is going to write -- the Gen AI is going to write the code for everybody. So we're all just going to be involved with collaborating on the code, but you're still going to need software, I would think, to collaborate.

Yes. And when you talk to developers, and we've done a lot of surveys with developers, they only spend about 20% to 30% of their time hands on keyboard writing code. The rest of their time, it's spent collaborating, figuring out what you're trying to build, managing and ideating, right? And so I think while everyone's focused on the efficiency gains on pure code generation, people oftentimes forget that's just a small sliver of what a developer is working on.

Got it. Great.

I think what's also interesting, when we look at our seat growth, our seat growth has been very consistent over the past 4 quarters. So we continue to see really healthy seat growth. What's been also really interesting is when you cut it by tech startups, right? You would imagine that tech start-ups tend to be the most tech-forward companies. Their seat expansion patterns have been consistent with the seat expansion patterns that you see with SMBs across other industries. So that's a really encouraging sign for me, which again, I think, shows you our ability to serve not just probably developers, but also other types of users. And then earlier, you mentioned our focus on enterprise, right? And so while we certainly drive a lot of our growth via seat expansion, we also have developed different growth vectors in terms of upgrading people to premium and enterprise additions upselling and focusing on these enterprises, cross-selling across the broader portfolio of products and then pricing, right, capturing it via consumption pricing or perhaps per seat pricing over time. So I think we feel really good about kind of the culmination of these different vectors and our ability to drive durable growth no matter how the world continues to evolve with Gen AI.

Great. You mentioned the enterprise. I wanted to ask about that because you do have a new Head of Enterprise go-to-market, Brian Duffy, who joined earlier this year, enterprise software veteran, brings a lot of experience, had a chance to meet him at your user conference. He was surrounded pretty heavily. Probably as much as Mike Cannon-Brookes, which tells you perhaps how important he is within the organization. But I wanted to get a sense from you, what some of his initial priorities are here at Atlassian? What's top on his agenda? It strikes to me is delicate for you guys. I mean, you definitely want to pursue more of the large systems integrators and partners. You also have a very robust partner network that is extremely loyal to Atlassian that you don't want to disintermediate. That was my question for him. But I'd love to hear what his priorities are.

Yes. Brian, I think, has been in the seat for now for 5 months. He spent 18 years at SAP, and we're a very different organization from SAP. So I'm trying to get as arms around the Atlassian business, learn the different intricacies, learn the strengths and weaknesses. So here you can understand where to invest appropriately in the coming years. I think he understands we need to continue to get closer to our biggest customers, having closer relationship with those customers. Building out kind of our customer success organization, how do we serve these enterprises is going to have to change and evolve. At the same time, we are still going to focus on what we call kind of in a pithy way, the Fortune 500,000. So while we will increasingly focus on serving these enterprise customers, it's not like that we're forgetting about the wide swath underneath that. Because that's still going to be how we land with customers, right? We're able to land thousands of new customers every quarter through that product-led motion and the initial expansion is how that lower touch motion is going to be. Brian's going to have to focus on both and balance those. But again, it's how do you get closer with these customers, how do you build deeper relationships with them and then expand their footprint with Atlassian via more wall-to-wall usage, right? So expanding into those nontechnical areas where we may not serve and then cross-selling to additional products and upselling to the premium and enterprise additions. I think Brian has a lot of work that he has to focus on. And you talked about the channel. We have an extensive network of channel partners. That likely will have to evolve as well, right? As we want to get closer to our enterprise customers, the relationship that our channel partners serve today with these customers will have to evolve. Historically, they've been much more focused on kind of transactional selling. They'll have to focus much more on kind of value-added services within these customers. And now there's a big opportunity within these customers, especially when you think about areas like AI, there's a lot of change management that has to happen within these organizations kind of harness that ability to drive value with AI.

How about would the big systems integrators? I mean, I've noticed just in the years going to your event, just the presence -- their presence has grown dramatically, I think, at these events. And -- so how important of a role are they going to play in a few years from now? Is it going to be X percentage of our large deals were driven by Accenture, Deloitte or whoever it might be?

Yes. So we continue to build deeper relationships with the GSIs of the world. Today, they drive a pretty small portion of the business. The channel does touch about 40% of total revenues today, but the GSIs are responsible for a very small sliver of that. No doubt, I think as we continue to push up market and focus more on our enterprise cohort, the GSIs will play a bigger role in the years to come.

Got it. Okay. I wanted to touch on just the tactical thing from last quarter and that was around the data center change in contract terms, I think you guys limited to one year. And then as a corollary to that, I think we saw some of the marketplace volumes are a little lower or anticipated to be lower because of shorter commitments. But can you just walk through the thought process on that change and what you think it will do for you?

So the change that Rob is mentioning is actually just another step in kind of a series of changes that we've made to further incentivize cloud sales and kind of disincentivized data center. And it's kind of a reflection of that confidence that we have to better serve these customers in the cloud. And so we really talked about government cloud, isolated cloud, this continual kind of march forward to be able to serve these customers in cloud. We've then taken steps to kind of actively make it a little more difficult for customers to kind of renew one data center. And so that's just another step forward, is limiting customers from previously 2-year contract length on data center to now just limiting them to one year in term. And so that played a small role within our Q3 on the data center business. And then there's kind of a trickle effect into the marketplace as a result, as customers weren't renewing on their marketplace applications for 2-year periods because they could only renew for one year.

This is really going to get Brian's team more shots on goal to get in front of these customers and really articulate the value?

That's right. So if you're limiting to one year in term, then you have more opportunity to kind of have that conversation on an annual basis about shifting over to cloud in the years to come.

Got it. Got it. Okay. And then you mentioned how the Partner ecosystem is going to have to evolve. I think it makes sense. How are you currently working with the Partner system around Rovo enablement and understanding? I realize it's still very early, but educating them to get out there and explain Rovo to customers?

Yes. I think it's still really early. I think there's 2 motions that we're trying to drive, right? One is, obviously, we're not mainlining Rovo throughout the platform and making it accessible to everyone. And so there's kind of that self adoption that will happen within the Fortune 500,000 or our customer base is 300,000. Within the enterprises, in particular, where you have to get the kind of security and permissions set up in a very specific way, there's a big opportunity for our marketplace -- or our channel partners to help enable these customers and to help set up their agents, in particular, to kind of unleash the most value that you can through these agents.

Got it. Got it. Probably we have time for one more question. Maybe I'll ask on the kind of long-term targets you guys laid out, which at the 2024 Investor Day, you put out the FY '27 financial targets and those included 20%-plus revenue CAGR, 25% operating margin or over 25%. Can you talk about where you feel you are today relative to those targets? I mean, from a margin perspective, you're almost there. And why those were the right targets for you guys and whether those targets contemplated any of the recent changes and announcements or whether those could be additive?

I don't know if I have any additional comments to say. As you mentioned, we've committed to 25% plus non-GAAP operating margins by FY '27. We've made fantastic progress over the past 2 years, in particular, in terms of margin expansion this year, in particular, I'm really proud of the kind of the efforts across the company. Look, I think we've talked at least at our Investor Day about in the years to come, you'll see R&D as a percentage of revenue moderate. And at the same time, sales and marketing will modestly tick up in the years to come as we invest more against the enterprise opportunity.

Got it. Martin, thank you. Really appreciate it. Please join me in thanking Martin Lam from Atlassian. And there will be a breakout session in [indiscernible] for those who want to join. Thanks very much.