Beyond that, it’s also serving a key strategic role, helping to nudge Atlassian’s customers to the cloud. The Marketplace currently features more than 5,300 apps and integrations with Atlassian products. More than 2,500 of those are cloud apps – and 600 were built in just the last 12 months. “A major focus for Atlassian today is to get many of our legacy on-prem customers to our cloud offerings,” Cameron Deatsch, Atlassian’s chief revenue officer, said to ZDNet. As developers add new cloud apps to the Marketplace, “that gives our customers more and more confidence that when they move to the cloud, they’re going to have everything they need to be successful.” Atlassian won’t publicly share what commission it charges developers on the Marketplace – “it’s a constant conversation,” Deatsch said. But the company has successfully encouraged cloud app development in part by offering “very favorable percentages” for cloud apps versus on-prem apps. Additionally, the company is encouraging cloud app development by investing in resources like Forge, a new cloud development platform. Forge allows developers to build and host cloud apps on Atlassian’s infrastructure, simplifying development and ensuring app security and reliability. “We want to make sure that we are constantly bringing in new potential vendors to build more so that there’s always a good marketplace,” Deatsch said. “So from our perspective, it’s always good to get as many apps in the Marketplace as possible before we think about monetization there. While it is a great revenue driver of our business, the primary goal is to make our customers happy. And we also know that the more apps customers have, the more customized they’ve made their environments, the more loyal they will be, the more users they will add. So app success equals customer success, which means Atlassian continues to grow.” With the pandemic putting digital transformation efforts into overdrive, the Marketplace’s momentum has taken off. It took seven years for the Marketplace to achieve its first $1 billion in sales but just another two years to achieve the second billion. Customers like Audi are turning to the Marketplace to customize Atlassian apps as software development becomes a larger part of their production process, Deatsch said. Meanwhile, other customers are using it to enable their “cultural transformation” into hybrid workforces. “They’re trying to effectively take what was the in-office workflow and optimize that for an online experience,” Deatsch said. “The Marketplace was a huge enabler of that for our business.”
