Atlassian customers have begun to jump on board with a Jira ITSM tool released last year, citing cost savings over larger vendors’ products, ease of use and service management flexibility.
Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM) replaced a previous IT service management (ITSM) tool, Jira Service Desk, in November 2020. In April, the company made the tool significantly more competitive with industry incumbent vendors such as ServiceNow, BMC and Ivanti by integrating a configuration management database (CMDB) based on its acquisition of Mindville Insight in July 2020. Also in April, Atlassian acquired ThinkTilt, a low-code/no-code specialist, and plans to make a simplified form design UI available over the next month, closing another significant feature gap.
Competitors, especially ServiceNow, continue to dominate the ITSM space, according to analyst estimates such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which has ranked ServiceNow’s ITSM product at the top of its list of vendors for the past eight consecutive years. However, the 2021 edition of that report ranks Atlassian as a “visionary” in the category, the only vendor with that designation. Atlassian has stated that more than 35,000 customers now use Atlassian JSM, up from 25,000 users of the Jira Service Desk product.
Atlassian JSM has also outranked ServiceNow and other incumbent competitors in strategic vision in the past two quarterly ITSM Wave reports from Forrester Research.
Charles Betz
“They have rectified a number of shortcomings that they have had over the past several years [in ITSM] and, at this point, they are approaching parity with the best in the market,” said Charles Betz, an analyst at Forrester who prepared the firm’s ITSM Wave reports. “They’re not quite there yet, but they’re getting there very rapidly, and they have a compelling strategic proposition [for customers] in that they have a fully integrated DevOps pipeline.”
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Between the Atlassian Bitbucket DevOps pipeline and Jira software issue tracking tool, Atlassian has an established beachhead from which to expand JSM usage among existing customers. Here, it can dangle built-in integration with JSM that automatically syncs with the tools customers already use.
The vendor didn’t specify how many JSM converts were already Atlassian customers, but each of the reference customers the vendor presented during a virtual event and made available for press interviews this week was already using Jira Software, and in some cases Atlassian products such as Confluence, before switching to JSM. All the reference customers said the integrations between JSM and other Atlassian tools were among the most compelling reasons to switch.</…….