I had my tickets to attend an annual development, information technology operations and support conference in Las Vegas last week, but, out of an abundance of caution, it instead ran Atlassian Remote Summit this year. So I covered it virtually, and even visited with a few select ecosystem vendors that were planning to sponsor.

Atlassian’s push this year was all about cloud enablement. The ubiquitous development and support collaboration provider is doubling down on transitioning customers to service-based, high-scaling Enterprise Cloud versions of its popular Jira and Confluence solutions.

Though there will certainly be local installations for years to come, as part of that push the company also launched Atlassian Forge as a cloud platform-as-a-service for development and test teams.

This show was also all about automation. That included automated “Butlers” in Trello, automated robotic process automation-like workflow handlers in Jira and Confluence, and an automated IT ops service desk combined with execution of continuous integration/continuous delivery or CI/CD tools and change requests. There was also further OpsGenie automation, allowing incidents to flow into root cause discovery and remediation workflows.

One other interesting aspect of Atlassian is its unique ecosystem of vendors, who may sell low-priced per-seat apps at high volumes through the company’s Marketplace offering. With lifetime Marketplace sales topping $1 billion by the end of 2019, it’s a legitimate channel for many customers that would rather extend than leave the suite.

Here are a few hot company highlights from my virtual expo floor visits:

ALM Works: Structured project and portfolio management

Development and operational teams will tend toward optimistic estimates early on, and pessimistic ones later on as project deadlines loom. ALM Works seeks to end that discontinuity with a two-way synchronization between a portfolio of development projects with Jira issue data.

Its Structure project management offering may look similar to other project planning tools, but because it uses Jira as a back end, it can assign tasks to groups and individuals in Jira, and take feedback from ticket responses to update the project status.

A Structure Cloud edition was just released to fit the Atlassian Summit timeline.

Apwide: Push Jira button, get environments

Apwide allows dev/test teams to schedule and orchestrate preproduction environments from within a Jira issue.

Using webhooks to call up current environment definitions or recipes from most known repositories, and then launch them in on-premises, AWS or Google Cloud infrastructure, the Switzerland-based startup’s Golive platform maintains the connection between a task and the environment work is being done in.

A single view of dev/test lab provisioning keeps teams in their own swim lanes to avoid scheduling conflicts and constraints.

Easy Agile: Scaling agile in well-planned increments

There are several agile planning and practice tools out there, but fellow Aussie startup Easy Agile has struck a chord with Atlassian Marketplace customers by focusing exclusively on their needs.

Available for server or cloud editions, its suite offers a slick embedded interface for mapping roadmaps, cross-functional programs and user stories alongside the burndown of feature points and the status of Jira issues.

New for this show is a novel persona development module that allows user archetypes to be designed and associated with agile project workflows.

Profit.co: Setting objectives and measuring results

While the need for OKR, or objectives and key results, may be a bit of a stretch for some technically minded or task-oriented Atlassian users, aligning work with meaningful goals and results appeals to everyone in the organization, from management to development and IT support.

Profit.co loosely couples big, hairy strategic objectives to multiple tasks and user entities within Jira, so they can encompass broader success measurements and roles instead, since initiatives like “improve employee retention” or “increase customer satisfaction” could be resourced from several teams or projects over their lifespans.

This approach seems especially relevant to larger, multidepartmental or distributed teams, and service delivery firms that want to offer clients a business strategy alignment for IT projects.

Unito: Self-service control plane across workflow tools

Atlassian is intentionally shifting its growth and vendor acquisition efforts to cloud-based solutions. Therefore, the need to integrate work and data flows across the mix of project and collaboration tools that exist within virtually every company is only increasing.

Unito offers a self-service, drag-and-drop control plane for bidirectionally synchronizing Atlassian tools like Trello, Jira and Confluence with a broad portfolio of many other commonly encountered SaaS tools such as Trello, Jira, Asana, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, HubSpot, Zendesk and Wrik.

New coordination features for this year include enhanced message filtering and progress dashboards for user stories that cross multiple service platforms.

Yasoon: Syncing Jira and Microsoft Office

Yasoon is a 100% Atlassian marketplace vendor focused on improving user experience across the Atlassian and Microsoft Office product ecosystems.

While Atlassian already offers Microsoft 365 integrations, Yasoon can process Jira requests and responses with Outlook emails, tasks, calendar items and Teams discussions.

Companies deeply rooted in both suites can reduce email notification noise, and process many incoming tickets outside of the well-known “reply above the line” responses.

(* Disclosure: Microsoft is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other vendors mentioned in this story is an Intellyx client.)

Jason English is principal analyst and chief marketing officer at Intellyx LLC, an analyst firm that advises enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives, and publishes the weekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters.

Image: Atlassian