Atlassian Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
April 25, 2024

There are 14 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon and thank you for joining Atlassian's Earnings Conference Call for the Q3 of fiscal year 2024. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay on the Investor Relations section of Atlassian's website following this call. I will now hand the call over to Martin Lamb, Atlassian's Head of Investor Relations.

Speaker 1

Welcome to Atlassian's Q3 fiscal year 2024 earnings call. Thank you for joining us today. Joining me on the call today, we have Atlassian's Co Founders and Co CEOs, Scott Farquhar and Mike Kennan Brooks and Chief Financial Officer, Joe Binns. Earlier today, we published a shareholder letter and press release with our financial results and commentary for our Q3 of fiscal year 2024. Shareholder letter is available on Atlassian's Work Life blog and the Investor Relations section of our website, where you will also find other earnings related materials, including the earnings press release and supplemental investor data sheet.

Speaker 1

As always, our shareholder letter contains management's insight and commentary for the quarter. So during the call today, we'll have brief opening remarks and then focus our time on Q and A. This call will include forward looking statements. Forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by forward looking statements we make.

Speaker 1

You should not rely upon forward looking statements as predictions of future events. Forward looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made, and we undertake no obligations to update or revise such statements should they change or cease to be current. Further information on these and other factors that could affect our business performance and financial results is included in filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time, including the section titled Risk Factors in our most recently filed annual and quarterly reports. During today's call, we will also discuss non GAAP financial measures. These non GAAP financial measures are in addition to and are not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP.

Speaker 1

A reconciliation between GAAP and non GAAP financial measures is available in our shareholder letter, earnings release and investor data sheet on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'd like to allow as many of you to participate in Q and A as possible. Out of respect for others on the call, we'll take one question at a time. With that, I'll turn the call over to Scott for opening remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you for joining us today. As you've already read in our shareholder letter, Q3 was truly a milestone quarter for Atlassian. Today, Atlassian is a cloud majority company. We have over 300,000 customers using our cloud products and have seen a 3 times increase in paid seats in the cloud since we announced the winding down of support to server 3.5 years ago. And while this is just one significant moment among many across our multiyear cloud journey, we are thrilled with what we've achieved today.

Speaker 2

We migrated more pay seats to cloud than we had initially predicted, and our churn has been consistently lower than expected from our server base. This speaks volumes about the mission critical role our products play, the value they deliver and our customers' desire to realize the innovation in our cloud products. We now have an even larger opportunity in cloud than originally believed. You'll see us continue to execute it against our roadmap and do with more innovation to pave the path for the start of the customers to move to cloud in the coming years to drive durable future growth. We're also announcing that I'll be stepping down as Co CEO of Atlassian on the 31st August this year.

Speaker 2

It's been a difficult decision, but after 23 years, it's time to pursue some other passions I have, particularly philanthropy, investing and to help grow and build the global technology industry. And while there is never a perfect time to step away, I'm supremely confident of where Atlassian is at. We've got one of the best cloud platforms in the industry. Our Point A and new products are gaining real traction with customers and revenue. AI is providing new and exciting opportunities, and our customers are increasingly choosing to consolidate around Atlassian.

Speaker 2

And I'm proud to say we have the most experienced leadership team in our history. I will remain an active Board member and assume a special advisor role with Mike continuing on as CEO. I have complete trust in Mike leading the way to harness the incredible opportunities that we have ahead of us. I'll turn it over to you, Mike.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Scott. Yes, milestone quarter for a number of reasons. Now there'll be plenty of time for celebrations and farewells as this is not Scott's last earnings call, but I do want to touch on his news briefly. As you all know, Scott and I have known each other for nearly 3 decades and have experienced every major life milestone together. This company simply would not be Atlassian without Scott, and I'm truly thankful to have had him by my side every day for the last 23 years.

Speaker 3

In the next in this next chapter, I'm sure we will remain great mates and trusted partners, and I'm glad that I can support him through this both personally and professionally as I continue to lead Atlassian forward as CEO. Atlassian has always been my number one professional priority and focus. Scott and I have both worn every hat over the last 2 decades. So I'm confident in taking over full responsibility of the company. I'm incredibly excited about the massive opportunities that we have in front of us across our 3 markets in work management, software development and service management.

Speaker 3

We also have huge opportunities ahead of us in both the enterprise transition and AI, where our unique team data and insights allow us to offer unique capabilities and unleash our customers' potential. As we continue to attack our opportunities, I want to reiterate the commitments that we've made to continue to grow over the long term, while returning to our historical margin levels. We have a thoughtful plan in place to continue to drive durable revenue growth, and we feel really good about our agile approach to prioritizing resources behind key strategic areas like enterprise and AI, while driving leverage as we scale. And we couldn't be more excited about the future. With that, I'll pass the call to the operator for Q and A.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. Your first question comes from Ryan McWilliams from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, thanks for taking the question. Just want to hear about the overall macro trends at this point for developer hiring. Like did you notice any trends around the green shoots of growth for IT budgets or hiring developers? And then separately, just one quick housekeeping item for Joe. What was the Loom contribution to cloud revenue growth in the Q3?

Speaker 4

And maybe how

Speaker 3

you're thinking about its contribution to the Q4?

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Speaker 5

Yes. Thanks, Ryan. I'll start. From a macro perspective, macro trends were very much in line with what we saw in Q2 and in line with our expectations. Enterprise was healthy across both cloud and data center and that drove the record billings, strong growth in annual multiyear agreements, strong migration and good momentum in sales of premium and enterprise additions of our products that you see rolling through our revenue results.

Speaker 5

The macro impact on SMB on the other hand continued to be challenging, although also in line with expectations. And that macro headwind that macro headwind in SMB lands primarily in cloud given SMB makes up a significant part of that business. And within cloud it lands primarily in paid seat expansion. So stepping back more broadly within cloud, the trends in Q3 were very consistent with Q2 as well as our expectations coming into the quarter. And then paid seat expansion rates remained well below prior year levels, but the decelerating trend quarter to quarter did continue to moderate from Q2.

Speaker 5

So that's a positive sign. All of the other growth drivers migrations, cross sell, upsell, new customers, monthly active usage, churn, etcetera, those were all in line with our expectations and stable overall. And then in terms of Loom, we basically from a quarter perspective, we're not going to provide specifics on Loom's revenue or growth rate. We were pleased with the growth we're seeing and excited by the customer reaction to the recent AI innovations we've been introducing into Loom's product line. Terms of performance in the quarter, Loom revenue in Q3 was squarely in line with our expectations.

Speaker 5

And in terms of our fiscal year guidance, in terms of our overall revenue and operating margin guidance for the year, we continue to expect Loom to have about 1.5 points of impact on FY 2024 cloud revenue growth for the year and for Loom to be slightly dilutive to FY 2024 and FY 2025 operating margins.

Operator

The next question comes from Fred Haavimaya from Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Thank you very much. Scott, we know you're not leaving immediately, but certainly you will be quite missed on these calls. I wanted to ask with respect to those the SERFR migration at this point, it's very encouraging to hear that churn was looking much lower than expected and primarily the customers have transitioned on to data center. But are there any customers that are left over at this point in time that might make a future transition after limping along for some period of time here?

Speaker 5

Hey, Fred, this is Joe. It's difficult to know exactly how many server customers remain running unsupported at this point. We believe it's a small number and certainly smaller than we thought it would be entering the quarter. We're not assuming any material contribution to either data center or cloud revenue growth from this cohort of customers moving forward in the guidance. And operationally, our focus now is squarely on enabling our data center customers to move to the cloud.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Keith.

Speaker 7

Yes. This is Sanjit Singh for Keith. Thank you for taking the questions. I actually wanted to ask a question about a customer call out that you had in the shareholder letter. You guys mentioned that FanDuel was able to cut tickets that require human interventions by 85%, which is a pretty fantastic result for FanDuel.

Speaker 7

In terms of that customer, are you pricing that FanDuel contract on a steep basis? And how would you think about when they achieve those types of efficiency gains, how do you think about the revenue opportunity with some of the efficiency gains you're seeing with the Atlassian products?

Speaker 2

Yes, that's a great question, Sanjit. And I think one on people's minds is AI increasingly helps produce these incredible ROI experiences that we're seeing across our customer base. And at the moment, we have historically priced our almost all of our products on some sort of seat basis with some usage basis that has happened in certain areas of the product such as Bitbucket pipelines that we've charged for minutes of builds and stuff like that. We are experimenting going forward with more usage based pricing. So I don't want to get into one specific customer, but

Speaker 8

we think

Speaker 2

that there is a world in the future where we do have some sort of usage based pricing around these interactions with and the ROI that we're getting from customers. And so we'll see more experimentation with that going forward, but that's something we're experimenting with at the moment.

Speaker 7

Appreciate the thoughts. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Greg Moskowitz from Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

Okay. Thank you very much for taking the question. And Scott, all the best in your future endeavors, even though I know that Mike said he'll be with us for a little while longer, fortunately. So my question is, obviously, this is a significant upside quarter. Having said that, I think the big question is one of sustainability.

Speaker 9

The cloud revenue in the quarter resulting in line with guidance with all of the upside coming from data center and marketplace and marketplace itself is tied to the data center as well. But we're never going to have another quarter of server migrations. And clearly, there was also a decent amount of pull forward given the recent data center price increase. And so as we look ahead into next year and beyond, the question is, can Atlassian in fact continue to show good growth? Thank you.

Speaker 5

Yes, great question, Greg. Thanks for asking. Let me try and share a little bit of perspective on that without giving specific numbers for FY 2025. At the highest level, the long term revenue growth of the company is really driven by the opportunities we have in our 3 large high growth markets that Mike touched on at the top of the call. And secular trends around things like digital transformation and software is a critical factor to the success of every company.

Speaker 5

From there, there are several growth drivers across cloud and data center. In terms of cloud, given the size of the data center installed base, we do continue to expect migrations to be a key driver of cloud revenue growth over several years, although we do expect that impact to wane gradually over time. Now to drive migrations, we're delivering a cloud platform that provides the best customer experience and value with analytics and automation and AI as well as better TCO for the customer. And those factors will only improve and grow stronger over time. As part of that, we are investing in new and highly valuable product innovation as well and much of that is only currently available in premium enterprise editions of our products, our cloud products.

Speaker 5

And we are working to unblock and help customers migrate and deploy on our cloud and making good progress on scalability and certifications and app integration extensibility, all of which are very relevant to our largest customers in data centers. So we have a lot of confidence in the migration space. From there, as you know, there are multiple growth drivers in the cloud we've discussed in the past, things like paid seat expansion within our existing customer base, our opportunity to cross sell additional products to our over 300,000 customers, upselling to premium and enterprise additions of our products. And then with a smaller impact today, but growing over time are other drivers like new customer adds and new high growth products like Compass, Jira Product Discovery and Loom. And of course pricing is the final lever in the cloud model.

Speaker 5

In terms of data center, we expect organic expansion and pricing to be durable long term drivers given the high renewal rates on data center agreements and the enterprise nature of that customer base. And with AI, we are well positioned with the unique data graphs around high value workloads and there's a lot of opportunity in that space as well. And we're off to a solid start with Atlassian intelligence with more AI innovation on the way. And then finally add on significant opportunity we have for further penetration enterprise where we've had great signal and momentum over the last year. And overall, all up, we feel confident in our ability to invest behind and deliver healthy revenue growth over a multiyear period as a result of that.

Speaker 3

Yes. Greg, I just wanted to chime in at a higher level. I think Joe has given a very fantastic and comprehensive answer there. I think we should remember that any upside in data center is long term upside the cloud in terms of the destination for those customers over the long arc of time. I think our end of server journey as you mentioned from a migration point of view, overall has been a huge success, right?

Speaker 3

Over the last 4 years, we beat our original expectations migrate to cloud. We ended with less churn overall than we thought we would have over that 3 or 4 year period. We tripled the number of paid seats in cloud during that period since we in fact since we announced end of service for 3.5 years ago. I think the way I would zoom out and see that is, that is an example of Atlassian executing against the long term goal as a team and as a company and we can do hard things. We say this all the time internally.

Speaker 3

Data center customers moving to hybrid deployments, which is generally the way they go through in the middle and then to cloud, it's a different journey, right? These are our largest and most complex customers. They have different requirements, different things, but we will get them there. We will execute against that mission over the next few years in the same way that we executed against the last mission. I have confidence in Atlassian to do that.

Speaker 3

And if you want a singular statistic of how that's going, again, the data center to cloud migrations of the 1st 3 quarters of this year were up 90%, nine-zero, on the 1st 3 quarters of last year on a year on year basis. So we are already migrating data center customers to the cloud. So that over performance is a long term good sign for us.

Speaker 9

That's extremely helpful. Thank you both.

Operator

The next question comes from Michael Turrin from Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hey, great. Thanks. I appreciate you taking the question. Results were quite strong in a still tough environment. I think the stock is initially reacting more to surprise news from Scott.

Speaker 4

So maybe you can both, Scott and Mike, give us a peek behind the scenes around how you have historically divided the CEO role. And Mike would be to hear more around if becoming full CEO at all changes the role or key points of focus on your end from a product or strategic perspective? I think just any detail there is useful. Thanks very much.

Speaker 2

Thanks. Scott here. I'll take the first thing at that. Look, Mike and I have worked together for 23 years. We used to take turns taking the bins out in our first office.

Speaker 2

So we've kind of done every job equally over that period of time. Mike's run go to markets well over half that time, I've run it through a little bit less than that. I've run engineering, Mike's run engineering products. So we've kind of done everything together over that period of time. And I think that's relatively unique actually.

Speaker 2

I mean, customers are pretty unique. That's actually kind of shared and give you those responsibilities and change them over time, I think is also extremely unique there. And so I don't think there's anything that Mike hasn't done before that he'll be picking up. And even philosophies around how we run finances and how we think about the growth of business and investments like we've spent a lot of time together over the years doing and though Joe and finance reported into me for the last half dozen years or so, Mike and I spent a lot of time together looking at where we want to grow the business and what our investment profile is. So Mike, do you want to add anything?

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Michael. Look, other than Scott being clearly far better than I was at taking the bins out, we'll work on that going forward. But I want to say from a long term point of view, I would echo Scott's last point, Ron.

Speaker 3

Our philosophies as a company, our values, our mission to unleash potential of every team and the culture. This has been a constant of the company for the last 23 years and it's going to continue to be a constant going forward. We hope for a very long time. We are very long term thinking company. We have certain ways of being that we don't expect to change nor do I think Scott would want them to change or nor do I think they should change.

Speaker 3

Now we live in a highly changing environment, so we can't say nothing's going to change. What we can say is in the short to medium term, sort of the closer focus, we're very clear on our strategies and our execution. As Scott mentioned, we have the most experienced executive team we've ever had. I'm super lucky to get to work alongside them all every single day, even executing through this mini project if you like. From a strategy point of view, look, we're very clear, been clear with our investors, our shareholders, our customers, what our focuses are in terms of the opportunities we have in the enterprise and with migrations, in terms of the ITSM and ESM market and continue to invest strongly there and seeing strong results.

Speaker 3

And then in the AI era, we have some fantastic opportunities. So those are the current priorities as we said. That doesn't change from yesterday to today. And we'll keep you updated as we move forward.

Speaker 4

Maybe Scott can take the bins out one last time. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Your next question comes from Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hey guys. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe mine is tied to the data center to cloud journey that you've seen both over the 1st 3 quarters of this year in the context of some customers kind of signing more longer term deals and in the construct of kind of this notion that the end of server life unblocks the company's ability to focus on a lot more things. What does that mean for data center to cloud migration trends in terms of both from a financial perspective, maybe next quarter and next year that 10 points compared to what you maybe previously thought. And then just beyond, if you look at the activity of where those customers are migrating in terms of Yes.

Speaker 7

Thanks

Speaker 5

Yes. Thanks, Alex. A lot of questions there. So if I don't hit them all, bring me back. So I'll start with migrations.

Speaker 5

We do continue to expect migrations to be key driver of cloud revenue growth in Q4 and FY 2025 despite few of any server migrations post end of support. This is due to the significant size of the data center installed base and the opportunity we have to enable those customers, some of our very largest customers to move to the cloud. And that opportunity today is even bigger than we expected it to be 3 months ago given the strong customer retention and migrations from server to data center this quarter. Having said that, we also expect the migration benefit to cloud revenue growth to gradually decline over time from the approximately 10 point benefit in FY 2024 given the lack of server migrations. Now to drive these migrations, I talked earlier about the things we're doing.

Speaker 5

So we have a lot of confidence in our ability to execute on that and to drive it. So that's how we think about the growth impact to cloud from migrations going forward. In terms of the deal structure, as you know, if you look at our overall deal volume this quarter, even though we had a large number of absolute deals, the mix between annual and multi year were very consistent and similar to past quarter. So think of the overall volume growing and within that volume the mix between multiyear and annual being the same.

Speaker 3

I'll just add a few small points to that, Alex. Firstly, in terms of deals like you're seeing a lot more hybrid deals obviously from the data center type customer. One of the points that we like to make clear is the larger and more complex customers moving to the cloud is not a sort of a one day single button click event like changing an app on your phone, right? They have complex deployments with lots of integrations and they're enmeshed into deep customer workflows. This is fantastic for Atlassian.

Speaker 3

This shows how much value we have in our products. It means their migration journey is more of a gradual over time series of events And that shows up in their hybrid both in terms of their deployment environment topology and their deal construct. I will say, we continue to be agile with our resources. At Atlassian, we pride ourselves in our ability to move R and D around to where we need it to be. Obviously, with the end of server, we can move slightly more R and D towards the cloud, but we maintain a strong commitment to the data center business and continuing to move that forward.

Speaker 3

And there's still lots of work to do, right? We're incredibly proud of the work we've done in performance and scale, in governance and data residency. We rolled out 7 new regions this quarter and an extensibility and all the things that our largest customers need and you'll see us continuing to invest in those over the coming years as part of the journey.

Speaker 5

Perfect. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Alex.

Operator

The next question comes from Keith Bachman from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Yes. Many thanks for taking the call. Joe, I think this is for you as well. But I wanted to talk about data center growth. So the guidance that you've given for Q4 of call it 40 to 42 with 15 points of help, even net of help, it would have been it's keenly stronger than I would have anticipated.

Speaker 4

And so if we look out over the horizon, is there any puts and takes that you can give us on how to construct or think about data center growth specifically and just to even take a step back. As we look at Analyst Day next week or the analyst event, I should say, at your event, which is very much looking forward to, will management provide some longer term model frameworks either the top line or margin construct? Thanks very much.

Speaker 5

Yes, great questions, Keith. Thanks. Let me start with the data center question and frame it in terms of long term growth drivers on that model. We expect data center growth rates will decelerate through FY '25 just given the migration dynamics into and out of data center and the challenging comparables we're going to have to FY 'twenty four. To the question earlier, we're not going to have another server end of support moment in FY 2025.

Speaker 5

Having said that, in FY24 data center revenue growth benefited from migration flows from server, net the headwind from data center migrations to cloud. And with server end of support, we do expect that benefit to wane over the course of the next year to 18 months given limited, if any new migrations from unsupported server customers and accelerating data center migrations from cloud. We should see a much more pronounced decrease in that benefit in H2 FY 2025 and into FY 2026 as we lap the strong migrations from server in this quarter, at which point we'll likely have a net headwind to data center revenue growth driven by migration to So that's sort of the migration stories. I think it's also important to keep in mind as you think about long term data center growth rates, our customer base here is predominantly enterprise with very high renewal rates and price increases and expansion are the other key drivers beyond those migration dynamics. And we do expect those to remain healthy contributors to growth going forward.

Speaker 5

In terms of Analyst Day, appreciate the interest in that, really looking forward to seeing you and many of your colleagues next week. I'm not going to share a whole lot today other than to say we plan to share our optimism around the long term opportunities we have, how we think about the drivers of durable growth and the key areas of investment we'll be making that will enable us to deliver on that. And I'll share the rest next week when we get together.

Speaker 4

All right. Many thanks. I look forward to it.

Operator

The next question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies. Please go ahead, Brent.

Speaker 8

Thanks. Joe, I think many on the buy side are still hung up on why cloud isn't growing faster right now. And I know you're expecting to accelerate going forward.

Speaker 2

But what is I mean, when you

Speaker 8

think about the differential of kind of the expectation versus what you're seeing, what has been holding cloud back as much? Is it just DC was easier to make the migration? Is there something else that's going on? Because I think most felt like this would actually move a little faster and we know it's going to accelerate going forward for your guide. But just curious to get your thoughts and what you think is maybe can restrain some of the growth or maybe our expectations are just too big?

Speaker 5

Yes. With respect to the server end of support, Brent, you'll recall that we did talk about the fact that of the server customers that were there at end of support, we expected the vast majority of all of those customers to migrate to data center, right? Because those are large customers with very complex environments and it's a much easier migration path to data center than cloud and most of those customers need a little more time. So I would say migrations as part of the model has performed in line or better than what we expected all year and it's held up really well. Stepping back at the overall cloud business, I think the main pain point has been around paid seat expansion and weakness.

Speaker 5

Everything else in the model has performed in line with what we expected entering the year and continues to hold up really well in what has been a really mixed if not difficult macroeconomic environment. In terms of paid seat expansion, our rate of paid seat expansion in the quarter overall remained below prior year levels as I mentioned earlier. But I talked about the fact that trend quarter to quarter is improving and beginning to moderate from prior quarters. Within that trend, seat expansion rates in SMB continue to be particularly challenged. And so that's been if you want to center the pain point there and the expectation delta that could be an aspect of it.

Speaker 5

Our enterprise rates remain very stable. And so we continue to believe a big driver of this trend is macro as customers tightly manage headcount growth and costs and where we see SMB more impacted broadly speaking than enterprise. So from our perspective, that's been the primary pain point and the headwind on the business from a cloud perspective. The remaining drivers, whether it's migration or cross sell or up sell to premium additions, even new customers are coming back in line. All of those aspects continue to perform well and in line with our expectations.

Speaker 5

So that's from our perspective that's been the biggest expectation delta.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from Nick Altman from Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Speaker 10

Awesome. Thanks guys. I wanted to build on the last question a little bit. But just in your prepared remarks, you guys talked about how the opportunity around cloud today is much larger versus your initial expectations. And I was just wondering if you guys could unpack that a bit.

Speaker 10

I mean, you guys talked about seat counts on cloud or higher churn sort of was above expectations. But maybe just talk about why you see the opportunity more significant today than you did several years ago? What's sort of driving that heightened optimism? And just any other color you can provide around what you guys are seeing with your current cloud customers that's driving the upside versus sort of your initial expectations? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Nick. It's Scott here. We've got a couple of reasons. One is, let's just take the migration aspect first, which is that in our migration models, everything has performed as expected in terms of how many people we expected to migrate from server to cloud. What becomes when you left people churned out.

Speaker 2

And I think it's pointed to the stickiness of our overall offering to our customers. These are the times when you would expect competitors or alternatives to be researched out there in the market and we haven't seen that. We've seen people really stick with and double down on investments in Atlassian's products. And so they may not have made the first step to cloud, they've made the first step via data center. But I can tell you with every one of those customers I speak to, large or small, cloud is in their future.

Speaker 2

And it's really okay, they either need a feature from us or they want a particular data residency or a particular compliance that we're already working on or they've just got a project internally that they're trying to schedule when they want to get the migration done. And so I have a huge kind of excitement around what that holds for us to our migrations. If we take then just the market size and opportunity, we can share some next week around that, but I'm super excited by what that shows bottoms up of just the opportunity inside our customer base. And that is getting larger for a couple of reasons. One is that we've got new products that are coming to market.

Speaker 2

Our Point A products are gaining real customer usage and sort of early in the revenue usage, but they're growing pretty fast. And we know that those new products can then be sold across our entire customer base. 2 is the consolidation motion we are seeing across the industry. And in times like this, our customers are looking to deal with less vendors and they are looking for a single system of work across their entire organization to make sure that work can move across every department. And so we are seeing competitive switch outs of the products to consolidate on our last year.

Speaker 2

And so that is really exciting. And lastly, with AI and what we can do there, it does a couple of things. One is, I firmly believe that more software is going to get built on the far side of this. And so the market for people who want to use our tools and products and so forth to broadly help build software is going to increase. And the ROI or the dollars can charge for this for our customers over time is changing, whether that's usage based or some other business model.

Speaker 2

But we're now providing so much more value for our customers than we were before the AI revolution came over the last year and a half that our opportunities there are a lot. So I can go on and on. I don't know if Mike or Joe want to add anything to that answer. Yes. The only thing I would add, Scott covered

Speaker 3

all the basics and obviously we're incredibly bullish about AI. Got some exciting stuff coming up next week. We hope to see you all there at Team 24. The Atlassian platform is probably one of the areas that I always think is underestimated in terms of durable growth and in terms of long term advantage, right? Again, Atlassian is a company that thinks very long term and very strategically and thoughtfully.

Speaker 3

As we go through Equinox and Solstice and Equinox and Solstice and Equinox and Solstice, The world goes around and around and we try to think about that across more than just a singular quarter. In terms of engineering, you see we have significant R and D investments, right? That is a part of how we think about the world. And in the cloud, a large amount of that goes into the Atlassian platform. Building out the platform to scale across our products is a unique competitive advantage.

Speaker 3

It is increasingly resonant with customers as a differentiator and as a moat that allows them to choose multiple products, allows them to adopt our products more seamlessly, more quickly, get automation across those products, get analytics across those products and build out the teamwork graph that underpins a lot of our Atlassian intelligence and other future capabilities. That is a super unique advantage that comes only from our large R and D investments and our long term thinking and our ability to in a capital efficient way fund that build out over a many, many year period and it will continue to be so over over the future periods.

Speaker 4

Awesome. Thanks guys.

Operator

Your next question comes from Kash Rangan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Speaker 11

Yes, toggling from one call to the other. Thank you so much for the time here. My question is, it looks like given the continued strength in the data center product, this is going to be here to stay for quite a while. So I'm curious when you look at the product roadmap ahead, how much of an emphasis is being placed on the development side on the cloud, particularly with respect to the functionality and how when are we going to start to see a divergence by design, by intention between the cloud and the surviving entity? And what new incentives are we going to see in the fiscal years ahead?

Speaker 11

And also migrations, are we going to make those migrations easier going forward? Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Speaker 3

Sure, Kash. I can take that. Look, I would say from our customers' point of view, it's well understood that the cloud is our future and our customers know that. As Scott mentioned earlier, 5 years ago, you had a lot of customers that said I'm not going to the cloud. Now it is a when, not an if, right?

Speaker 3

I do not run into customers who say they will not go to the cloud. I run into customers who say we can't go now because of this reason or that reason, either internal reasons or Atlassian related reasons. The divergence of features to some extent has already happened because of the nature of the cloud. So you need to look no further than Atlassian Intelligence, right? AI and LLM driven features with large scale foundational models requiring the Teamwork Graph in the Atlassian Cloud Platform is not something that we can bring to a data center customer and they understand that.

Speaker 3

It's a completely logical reason and hence an extra reason or incentive for them to migrate. Now we are building continually hybrid supporting features things like our migration tooling and in other areas as those customers move parts

Speaker 2

of their workload to the cloud,

Speaker 3

if you think about it that way. And that is helpful to those customers over time. Beyond that, we do continue to invest in the capabilities of data center for those customers, right, in terms of security, in terms of their scale and compliance and in terms of features where we can take certain features, which makes sense to build in data center and in the cloud simultaneously. So I think the customers understand that. In terms of additional incentives for DC customers to move from a financial and other point of view, we continue to work with our customers and our partners as to the best way to do that.

Speaker 3

Often it's not financially driven, right? It can be as much about compliance and data residency and FedRAMP and enterprise scale all the things that we are continuing to work on with those customers.

Operator

Your next question comes from Fatima Boolani from Citi. Please go ahead.

Speaker 12

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. And Scott, congratulations to you for an absolutely legendary run. Just on the point of the carrots or the incentives for your existing data center customers to move to the cloud. I wanted to ask you the question in a different way.

Speaker 12

You all have made substantial progress in solving for data residency demands and other compliance and security blockers for some of your most regulated, and complex customers. So I'm curious what is left to address or alleviate from a cloud blockers standpoint and what type of investment should we expect that will entail in the medium term? And the reason I ask this is because the expectation is that your data center migrations to Cloudera can accelerate, presumably most of those blockers have been removed. So we just want a little bit more color on that front. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Sure, Fatima. I can take some part of that. Look, I think at the highest level, it's a pretty big testament to our enterprise maturity that 3 quarters of our enterprise customers in regulated industries have a cloud footprint today. So you talked about our achievements and thank you for noticing that by the way. That's very gratifying.

Speaker 3

We have been working incredibly hard on those areas and it is resonating with customers and that's an important place to start. 2nd, I would say these customers, we call them our largest, most complex, most enmeshed customers. That is one of the things that just takes time for them to move. Like for a lot of these customers, it is a 3, 5 year roadmap they're running in these large complex IT organizations. That's not about, I think you referred to them as cloud blockers.

Speaker 3

That is just about that company saying, yes, I get it. I have these projects going on. It's going to take me a year, 2 years, 3 years. I'm going to move this piece first, then this piece second. Some of that's a natural progression pace of those customers.

Speaker 3

There are certainly things we can do, improving migration tooling and lots of other things we're working on, but some part of the pace is in terms of the customers. And there's no doubt we will continue to work on governance. As we mentioned, we're in process with FedRAMP Moderate and we continue to work on things like that for governmental customers. We have more data residency regions we'd love to roll to for sure. There is always more performance and scale that we can account for our largest customers.

Speaker 3

So there are a lot of things that we have to continue to work on. In the app and extensibility area, we continue to ship improvements every single quarter. Now the other thing is building customer trust. We see our relationship with the customers, especially in the subscription environment like data center and cloud, has about demonstrating continued trust over time. They are subscribing to get our future offerings.

Speaker 3

We can see that in the last two quarters, we've hit 100% of our cloud road map in R and D in terms of delivery. So when these customers are making a multiyear or even decade long commitment to Atlassian as a partner, they want to see that we're going to deliver on the things that we tell them we're going to deliver on, which is certainly what we've done over the last period of time. That said, having customer conversations, they acknowledge and they are clear and they see that we are continuing to remove the, as you call them, cloud blockers over time. So that trust is going up when you talk to customers. They are seeing our progress just as you are.

Speaker 3

So I hope that's helpful.

Speaker 12

Gary, thank you so much.

Operator

Your next question comes from Arjun Bahatia from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Speaker 13

Perfect. Thank you. Maybe one for Mike or Scott. I just wanted to touch on the AI landscape, but maybe more from the sense of what it means for the role of the developer, right? We're hearing a lot more about text to code capabilities and how that's automating a lot of the workflow for the developer role and you have companies popping up that are addressing this, startups that are doing this more and more.

Speaker 13

But from your perspective, how do you see the role of the developer changing? And maybe what does it mean for from an Atlassian perspective? What does it mean about how Jira might need to change or evolve to manage the agile process overall?

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks, Matt. I can certainly take that one. Lots of thoughts here. Firstly, AI is awesome for software development in the broadest sense, right?

Speaker 3

Large language models, their ability to generate code, their ability to understand code, which is arguably more important is phenomenal for the world. We take the position that the world has a supply constraint in the number of engineers, not a demand constraint in the amount of ideas we have for software that we would like to be built. What AI does is loosens that supply constraint. We're not going to hit demand ceiling. So people will be able to do more with the number of engineers that they have is the way to think about it.

Speaker 3

That is good for us for a number of reasons. Firstly, most developer time is not spent on coding. It's spent on coordination activities. It's spent on how developers work with product managers and marketing teams and service teams, how they support and operate the software and services that they've built rather than just the sort of classical view of coding a piece of software and then delivering it. That is a collaboration activity.

Speaker 3

That is a difficult hard problem that we spent 20 plus years working on and I suspect to spend most of the next 20 years continuing to work on. Secondly, AI, we believe will generate far more software, far more services and apps and tools and that is a great thing for us, especially for things like Compass, which are about managing developer experience, managing your software sprawl. Again, resonating extremely well with customers only a few months into GA, but obviously but already taking off on a pretty strong growth path and well ahead of our expectations. So Compass and AI is a great thing that have more software. And thirdly and lastly, the ability of AI to allow non developers to write code in some sort of a form to be able to do more programmatic capabilities is quite fantastic.

Speaker 3

You can see this in Atlassian Analytics where the ability to use natural language to turn into SQL and then charts and dashboards is kind of a developer like activity, but allows a democratization of the ability to get to that analytics, to get to your data, to understand it. I think there'll be many, many more things like that that allow these AI capabilities to democratize what we used to think of as software development. Maybe that's a way to say it. So, Scott, I don't know if you have any follow ons, but

Speaker 2

I just just to reiterate the first point you made, which is just that I think that people who don't write software, I think it may be not well known how little time people actually spend hands on keyboard writing code. A lot of software is working out the requirements and what is success look like and how do we want to build things and where is data going to come from. And so you can make huge differences in how much time a developer spends with hands on keyboard. But percentage wise, it actually doesn't change their week that much because they spend a lot of their time in JIRA, in Confluence, in like talking to customers, gathering requirements. And you look at where our products touch our customers, that's a way larger percentage of a customer's week than a developer's week than writing in an IDE.

Speaker 2

And so the opportunity for us to save time for these hands on keyboard software developers is immense, because like, so if you've got a lot of coding like it's a huge difference. And so I just want to echo that because it's not particularly well known if you're not a software developer.

Operator

Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. I will now turn the call over to Mike for closing remarks.

Speaker 3

Thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. As always, we appreciate your thoughtful questions and continued support. We're incredibly excited for Team 24, our flagship customer conference next week in Las Vegas. We've got some incredible speakers, fantastic customers and some hopefully mind blowing announcements that we can't wait to share with you. We'll also be hosting our Investor Day at Team 24, So we really hope to see you there.

Speaker 3

And with that, have a fantastic weekend.

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Key Takeaways

  • Cloud majority milestone: Atlassian now has over 300,000 cloud customers and has tripled paid seats since announcing server end-of-support, with migrations ahead of plan and churn lower than expected, expanding its long-term cloud opportunity.
  • Strong Q3 financials: The company delivered record billings and healthy data center and marketplace performance, while cloud growth was in line with guidance despite headwinds, with Q4 cloud revenue growth targeted in the low-40% range.
  • Macro and mix dynamics: SMB cloud seat expansion remains under pressure as customers tightly manage costs, whereas enterprise trends and migrations have stayed robust, and paid seat expansion deceleration moderated quarter-to-quarter.
  • Leadership transition: Co-founder Scott Farquhar will step down as co-CEO on August 31 and become a board member and special advisor, leaving Mike Cannon-Brookes as sole CEO with confidence in the seasoned leadership team’s continuity.
  • Enterprise and AI innovation: Atlassian is accelerating investments in enterprise migrations, usage-based pricing experiments, and AI-driven offerings like Atlassian Intelligence and Loom integrations to drive cross-sell, upsell, and new customer adoption.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
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