How India is powering the growth of Atlassian worldwide

Young tech talent is what attracts global collaboration software company Atlassian to India as it deepens its engagement with the country.

The desire to learn, adapt, and explore is a key driving force of tech professionals in India, according to Shamik Sharma, Head of Product - IT Service Management (ITSM), Atlassian India.

“The younger demographic in India is eager to learn new things and wants to explore different areas. They are always keen to take up new technologies and platforms,” Sharma said in an interview to EnterpriseStory.

The expanding talent pool in the country has expertise in the mobile-first approach, design thinking, software engineering, and product development, making them an attractive proposition to Atlassian.

“The availability of talent here (in India) is not just in quantity but increasingly in quality as well,” he said, adding that young talent needs to be complemented with senior tech leaders who have domain experience and long-term systemic thinking.

The Australia-headquartered company established its India centre in 2018 in Bengaluru. The centre has grown rapidly over the years to over 2,500 employees and is one of Atlassian’s largest R&D hubs outside Australia and the United States.

Globally, the company has a headcount of around 13,000 employees.

Atlassian’s India team has been also entrusted with leadership roles and key responsibilities in certain product areas.

Expanding AI efforts

Atlassian sells a comprehensive suite of cloud-based collaboration, productivity, and software development tools for planning, tracking, and managing work. Key products include Jira (project tracking), Confluence (knowledge management), Trello (task management), Bitbucket (code collaboration), and Loom (async video messaging).

Atlassian India is engaged in deep product activity and has also become Atlassian’s hub for IT service management.

Today, India’s R&D team is making core contributions on Atlassian’s tech platform and in new product areas such as project tracking, service management, and enterprise search. Many tech platform components are built out of India, including data portability, commerce migration, tooling, and some AI as well.

“India for us has been exceeding expectations, and we have really benefited from the team we have built here,” said Sharma.

Today, AI is a dominant theme for enterprises across the world, and Atlassian is no exception. The company’s India team is focused on building products that enhance the value of teams though collaboration.

“We are deeply invested in the problem of how do we make humans collaborate better,” Sharma said. “The collaboration aspects of human plus AI agents working together in a team is the problem we are focused on and trying to solve.”

Atlassian is also investing in areas where customers interface with its products.

The company has built its own GenAI platform ‘Rovo’ which is focused on enterprise search, with inbuilt AI agents aimed at solving the challenges of collaboration.

While Atlassian India is spearheading some of the company’s AI efforts, Sharma believes these are still early days for AI, and one needs to be patient. There are still clear gaps both from a technical point of view and the kind of business impact AI can deliver, he said.

Future roadmap

Going forward, Atlassian is looking to make further inroads into the Indian market and deepen its R&D capabilities here. The company’s customer base spans the segments of technology, financial services, and manufacturing.

“We are going to continue to invest in India because we see it as a big part of powering our growth worldwide,” Sharma said.

Sharma is encouraged by the growing talent in the country, which will play a key role in Atlassian’s future plans. He believes there will be a large pool of AI specialists in the country in the years to come, steered by youngsters’ desire to learn and the upskilling initiatives undertaken by the technology industry.