Enhancing Enterprise Systems with Bob Nicholson at Atlassian Team ’24

This is Techron tv. Hi, I'm Mitch Ashley here at Atlassian, team 24 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Another great conversation when we're talking with Bob Nichol, who is President with App Fire.

Welcome Bob. Good to be chatting. Thanks, Mitch.

Nice to see you. It is picked up here. You can tell things.

You can just hear the buzz is in the air. Yeah, we're talking a little louder as we go. Fortunately, we have microphones that help with that.

So tell us a little bit about yourself as well as App Fire. Uh, sure. So, um, app Fire, we are, uh, uh, the largest enterprise app provider that helps, um, augment the, extend, enhance, um, and connect, uh, large enterprise, uh, systems such as Atlassian, Microsoft, Salesforce, uh, and Monday.

Um, we, uh, my role, I'm the president. I focus on our strategic growth areas, um, within the company. So look after our global channel team, customer success team, um, our data, data insights team and, and work on our strategic alliances.

So this is a big week for us as our most important partner and, uh, excited to be here. We are, uh, the largest, uh, vendor in the Atlassian, uh, marketplace. We have about 800 employees, been around for 18, 19 years.

Um, so yeah, so excited to be here. Very nice. Yeah.

This is sort of the honeypot for business development, right? Everybody's, everybody's here. You know, kind of a theme in some of my conversations today has been, um, how the technology that we use in one domain, oftentimes it, um, as development or service support move into other parts of the company, right?

Because we're working so much more visual workflow or automated workflow across not just a CRM system or an ERP, but you gotta move outside of the bounds of that. It sounds like, you know, that's part of a big space that you cover, is not kind of unlocking what you could do across all of those platforms. Yeah, no, I, I think that's a good, a good description though.

It's, it's interesting because, you know, Atlassian is the, is the platform developer builds incredible products that are, that really span a lot of horizontal use cases across the enterprise. Where, uh, the marketplace app providers come in is really sort of extending those use cases, filling gaps, um, connecting to, you know, different parts of the organization. Um, so, you know, many of our products come from, uh, I identifying very specific needs and developing purpose built build apps often that are helping, you know, people with different teams in, in different sort of non-traditional uses get attached to the core products.

Tell me this is true or not. Um, my sense about Atlassian gotta make a comparison, I won't name names, but in some ecosystems, marketplaces, the challenge or the danger of doing what you do is the big mother elephant or whatever Oh sure. Will come in and say, that's a really great idea.

That's now a product we offer. And you're going, okay, now what am I gonna do? It doesn't seem like Atlassian On that.

No, it, it hasn't. One of the things that has made them a great partner is, you know, this was, you know, the, the marketplace originally got started and conceived and, you know, back in 2008, um, you know, early Mike and Scott brought 30 people together in Santa Rosa, California. Our founder Randall Ward was one of the folks in the room, and they hatched this idea of, Hey, could you extend the platform through plugins at the time, you know, it was, they hacked together over a long weekend and a lot of beers.

The what became the, uh, you know, the initial framework for the last marketplace took four years before, you know, it was sort of commer, commercially viable. The marketplace actually launched in 2012. And the difference was Atlassian early on recognized from the top down the strategic value of having, of opening up their platform.

And part of it comes from the open source heritage of Atlassian, right? Open up the platform and let you know, sort of really talented people build, let the be best builders build, listen to customers, and, and really start filling in sort of some of those, uh, extensions, some of those capabilities that the core platform doesn't have, um, et cetera. And so, you know, I think, you know, part of what goes along with that is a really open dialogue of, you know, what are the areas that Atlassian is gonna build and create, and what are the areas and what is the white space that, um, you know, third party, um, you know, app developers like App Fire can come in and, and really fulfill that need.

And so, um, again, I I like to think of it as, um, you have sort of a, sort of a, a, a base product which solves an in incredible number of needs. Um, the apps allow you to make that product to your own. So, so some sort, like, you know, your iPhone, you know, the phone is the phone.

If the apps that make it, the apps that you use make it yours. And so in some ways that is what, um, you know, the, the marketplace, uh, provides. But again, a lot of it is trust.

It's open communication, and it is Atlassian recognizing that this e the ecosystem that has been formed is a huge part of what's made Atlassian successful. And it results in really happy customers because, you know, the marketplace is incredibly creative. We develop a lot of new things.

And, um, you know, and that pace of innovation just wouldn't be, wouldn't be possible if it was just, you know, large enterprise software company building on their own. So it really enhances the innovation cycle. What, what is it, um, important to you that you need to communicate to in a marketplace like Atlassian?

So that you obviously have a path you're headed down and you, you wanna leverage what Atlassian is doing as it devolves and changes. You also don't wanna get any paths that are important to you cut off right? By some, by a decision that was like, whoa, actually that's not good force.

How do you balance that? Yeah, you, you know, um, interesting, Mitch, you know, people always ask us, you know, how does it work? You know, like, thi this marketplace, you know, it's a, it's coopetition, right?

Mm-hmm. So yes, we have competitors, but we also collaborate, we work together. Um, you know, perfect example is that is, you know, in workflow and automation, we have three of the most successful apps, you know, at, at Atlassian has automation.

That's right. Good point. For, and for a whole bunch of customers, that product is great.

Um, there are other customers, larger enterprises with more sophisticated use cases who need something else. So we have a product called, uh, G-M-W-E-J, mislay Workflow Extensions, one of the top selling apps that really allows customers to go further with automation. Um, and oftentimes we'll find that the fact that you have multiple products in an area really generates interest.

'cause people are like, okay, what is everybody doing automating workflows? And so, you know, that level of, um, you know, of competition per se, really isn't bad. So, you know, what we try and communicate a lot of it is, um, you know, how you rate on the marketplace.

So do customers like your apps? So marketplace rating is important. And then obviously some of the certifications that you receive, you know, are you cloud, cloud fortified?

Have you put in that hard work from a security, um, and privacy standpoint that, you know, particularly enterprise customers need? And so, mm-hmm. A lot of those things really, um, differentiate, uh, you know, products, uh, products on the marketplace.

It it, it's a really good point about instead of kind of being in your own siloed or bubble kind of value view, the market being part of a marketplace creates opportunity as well as competition, right? Like you said, you can recognize this, there's activity here, generative ai, I knew we, we knew we had that ad to come up, right? Maybe we will talk, let's talk about that next.

Yeah. But how do you kind of, from a his dev or or strategy standpoint, how do you keep your pulse on that? 'cause it isn't like you can look in one area and say, that's it.

You've gotta kind of watch out and watch it all and see what Makes Yeah, I mean, we, we spend an awful lot of time talking to the solution partners who are our, in many cases, our eyes and ears with customers, and we listen. So our heritage at App Fire, we were the, uh, original enterprise focused solution partner for Atlassian in North America back starting in, you know, 2005 until I guess 2017. So our heritage was as a solution partner, you know, helping implement some of the very first Jira deployments here in the US for customers like, you know, fidelity and Qualcomm and others.

So we came from that world. Um, and, you know, although we stopped doing that and started, you know, focusing on apps, uh, exclusively our heritage is listening to customers, listening to solution partners, um, and then trying to build products that are solving those use cases. It's amazing what can happen when you listen.

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes when y'all need to practice that a little bit more. So I brought up ai, you know, we, we've got a timer set somewhere that says by four minutes we have to mention into the Conversation.

Yeah, exactly. So talk about how ai, generative AI is kind of fitting into your strategy. It's early for all of us, right?

Yes. At least for generative ai. Um, so we're kind of on that journey together.

What, what's your perspective? Yeah. So, You know, look, the, the, the ai, the, the, the march to incorporate AI in our daily lives, it is a marathon.

It is not a spread. Yeah. And there have been all sorts of high pro, you know, high profile quasi consumer oriented applications, but that's not, in our view, that's not where the real opportunity is.

So if we look at our business, you know, we see three ways that it really is gonna impact app fire. You know, the first is, you know, we are a customer. So we, we are using some of these AI tools to increase the productivity of our own workforce.

We have, you know, close to 500 developers and product manage spread around the world. We're already seeing, you know, productivity improvement. So taking, taking some of those, you know, menial and repetitive tasks outta the work of developers or product managers, helping workflow better frees up time to do the creative work that really adds value for customers.

So first we think it's gonna improve our productivity, allow us, uh, to be more innovative. I think second, um, you know, we see, you know, AI providing, um, a sort of a, a different way for customers to access our existing products. So, um, you know, to use our, you know, our workflow and automation products, you know, we have a low code version.

We have one that has more scripting. Imagine you have an AI front end that allows, you know, a customer to more easily access that. So we think, um, we think it's gonna create different ways for our customers to interact with our apps, interact with Atlassian support platform, which really extends the utilization of those tools.

You asked the question, how does it extend beyond the classic developers and customer support agent users, right? We think AI really is gonna help expand those use cases further into the enterprise. So, you know, imagine you're a, you're a user or customer of data, and instead of having to go and figure out how you're gonna, you know, run a query in Tableau, you can type in a prompt into a, into a front end, you know, AI agent, which then goes and triggers, you know, triggers a query into a, you know, into a, into a field of data, looks into an internal knowledge base.

So, look, we, we think, you know, really interesting way to expand usage of existing products and add features to existing products. And then the last one is, it's unleashing innovation. So this is, you know, as builders, we get really excited about what we haven't thought of yet, but we are now, you know, we have, you know, 800 creative people around the world thinking about what are the ways that we can build new things for customers that utilize some of these capabilities.

And, and frankly, you know, one of the advantages of, you know, being a, a strong partner with a company like Atlassian is, you know, we are benefiting from the heavy investments that they're making. Like, we're not gonna build large language models ourself, but as we can tap into some of the innovation that's going on here at Atlassian and build products together with them that extend the capabilities, like, we're not sure what we're gonna build, but we know it's gonna be exciting. And, and I, I almost look at it as, you know, going back 25 years, you have the, the wave of the internet changing the way people worked and the way they processed and consumed information.

You had the mobile revolution where all of a sudden you have a, you know, mini computer in your hand. You know, people thought the next one was crypto. I, I tend not to, I tend to dismiss that wave.

This is the third. And this is, and like, you know, the advent and the internet, like the advent of mobile, this is a decade long supercycle of innovation. Yeah.

So yeah, I think that mobile is the smartphone. I mean, think about where we are in 12 years and when it started, like, why would I wanna put an app on my phone? Exactly.

Well, yeah. Duh. Now couldn't live without it.

You, you mentioned a couple, several interesting things. One of 'em is, as we use more technology in our business, not just in IT to support the business, um, with I ai, we can change the experience of what it's like to that. Well, I can think of AI as the next, it is the new low-code, no-code, right?

That'll kind of take that as another form of being self building. You know, if we can as a decide if we can reduce the number of spreadsheets on my hard drive, I'd be happy with that too. But that's a different problem.

But it, it's transforming not only how you can do the work, but who could do the work. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, it, I just got out of a, a meeting with one of the Atlassian Proctor just gave a presentation and, and he talked about how it we're gonna have to change the way organizations think because, and how they use these tools. So you can't, you know, somebody who's used using a slide rule, if you hand them a calculator, you know, not only they need to understand how it works, but they need to understand that it, you know, it's accelerating and enhancing what they can do. And so I think there are these tools and then there's the, what are the behavioral changes we're gonna need to make, you know, imagine you are, you know, seamlessly putting, um, transcripts from meetings into a knowledge base.

You're allowing, um, you're allowing teams to communicate through, you know, automated, you know, automated communication out to them. Like it's gonna change the patterns of work. Um, again, really exciting, but I, I also think it's gonna make some of these tools that were before now, really the domain of, you know, very technically savvy on users into the hands of more knowledge workers.

So again, if, if we think about this, this innovation supercycle, you're taking these tools, you're pushing it deeper and deeper into the knowledge worker. And so, you know, theoretically, you know, this is gonna expand how people can become knowledge workers. You can, again, there's a lot of talk about how is AI gonna replace jobs?

And it's, you know, yes, there will be changes, but you know, this is, you know, this is a huge, you know, efficiency and, and frankly it's opening up access to these types of knowledge driven jobs. A different set of people. F**k.

So talk about, you're talking about knowledge worker, knowledge base. That's been a quest, and it seems like my whole career is how do we get this knowledge shared so we don't answer the same question on the help desk, or, um, we don't make the same mistake twice, or we know there's a great approach to this that's just not widely known. It seems like we're sitting on now data representing all that information because captured on hard drives on servers.

Sure. Now it's accessible and, and accessible in ways of, uh, natural language interface tool. How does that change?

I mean, how's that changed your strategy? Yeah, so, um, you know, I would say, you know, there's the front end, which is sort the, the, the interface with the, with the end user, which is, that's, there's sort of the exciting new part. You know, there's a part about sort of, you know, I'll call data and knowledge hygiene.

So for example, we are launching here at team our, uh, knowledge management solution where, you know, we have one of the most widely used Confluence tools, uh, product called Kamala Document Management, which combined with some of our other products, really enable a series of use cases for customers which sort of take the core capabilities of Confluence and add, add things to them. So, for example, um, compliance, one of the big use cases of our products is around compliance in regulated industries. You know, making sure that you're, you know, you know, version control, uh, authorization, you know, tracking all of the changes.

So if we look at our customer base, it's large financial services companies, it is, um, for example, in the medical device industry of a number of clients who are following good manufacturing principles and using our software to really track this entire flow and this sort of hygiene of information within the organization. So part of a, part of the, the world that we live in is you, is having that hygiene and having sort of knowledge properly controlled, document and organized, and then you can layer the AI in on top of it, grab that access and get it out to the, the right people so Can prove the flow, improve the a hundred, lose friction A hundred percent. What you can't do is you can't let an, let, uh, let AI AI get AI go unfettered without access control.

Yeah. Here's Some money without document data. Go figure out Whatever.

Because the last thing you want is for them to grab, let's say you're, you know, another use case is internal policies. So you have an HR policy, for example, last thing you want is an AI bot to go in and grab a six month old Confluence document and, and serve that up as the, you know, source, source of truth. So there are ways that you can sort of standardize and, and control the flow, you know, the, the operative, you know, version for example, of an inter internal policy that you can train the AI in order to sort of access things the right way.

So, um, you know, it all, it all flows together and um, again, part of what we're we're doing here is really spending time with our solution partners, helping them understand what are some of the use cases they can get out in the world with customers and help them really enhance the value of these of the Atlassian platform by driving more and more business value. Now is the knowledge base product, is that a standalone or is that part of the document management solution? So, Um, it is, Kamala document management is part of the document management solution, but it is also a standalone app.

Oh, it's okay. So you use it either way. Yeah.

Very good. Well, it's been great talking with you Bob, and likewise, uh, congratulations on your success in the marketplace and launching the, uh, new capabilities around the knowledge base and good person to talk to. 'cause you know a lot what's going on.

So Really, thank You. Glad, uh, Bob Nicholson who is, uh, with App Fire talking with us today and sharing just some of the things that are going on in this ecosystem, which is thriving. As you can tell the, uh, it's time to be here in the expo.

Absolutely. Because it's really picked up. So we'll be back again with another great interview, just like we had with b Thanks Luke joining us.