The historical view of multinational companies only doing back-end work in India will change in the future, says Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-CEO and Co-founder of Australian software giant Atlassian.

“Many companies are discovering talent in design and product management, and leadership strategy to lead out of here. Increasingly, there will be momentum in that direction,” he said.

Adding that Atlassian has been in the country for over six years as a talent market, Mike mentioned that the company has been in India for over two decades as a customer market.

“We have had customers here longer than staff. And from a staff perspective, it is our fastest-growing region. Firstly, we came for the quality of the talent; we wanted to run a fully-fledged team - the leadership of the team and the driving is here for the global work. A lot of our IT service management (ITSM), AI, and data products are led and built in India for the world, not led elsewhere and then implemented or built for the Indian market.”

Atlassian currently has a headcount of 1,900 employees in India and is anticipated to grow.

Adding the company’s Indian customer market is growing with the economy which is growing in terms of GDP and knowledge work, he said, “We sell products to knowledge workers, and teams of people trying to improve their company to collaborate on project content, among others. With more of that work happening, we see our biggest Indian customers and volume of customers continue to grow.”

The co-founder also mentioned that Atlassian has products and big lines of business led and driven out of India that may not be entirely built here. 

“For example, some leadership teams here have staff in Australia that contribute to a product and ladder up to the team here. Some teams here ladder up to a leadership team in Australia or America. Essentially, we have leadership teams and builder teams in all three regions,” he said.

Atlassian’s Indian region is currently up and running for data residency. “Our customers can choose their data to be in the Indian region. We already have customers on it and always keep improving everything we build,” said Mike, adding that the company does data residency worldwide.

“We have 11 different regions customers can move their data into for two purposes - performance and proximity. Secondly, for some regulatory and compliance reasons that vary with countries, we want to ensure we help our customers comply with whatever their legal requirements are in different areas.”

Atlassian’s India teams run most of its data residency and compliance features for the world. The company’s platform-based data residency capabilities help Indian customers with global customers.

“We don’t just run the virtual server, but a set of them running all the virtual servers for customers. This is a very non-trivial investment in each region because we believe in the ROI and potential significant growth. In the years to come, for customers, we expect the Indian region to be significantly larger than it currently is as we continue to track good growth.”

Mike added that Atlassian’s Indian customers want their data to be in the region and performance to be high. “We see what they are asking for and try to give them the software.”

In the Indian market, Atlassian customers include Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Kotak Mahindra Bank, HCL, Wipro, Bajaj, Adani, Royal Enfield, TVS Motor, and PhonePe.

Speaking about India’s startup ecosystem, the co-founder said that Atlassian’s customers have startups of various sizes, who use its software.

“We launched a startup-specific customer program a few months ago and Indian startups are welcome to join.” The program provides up to 50 free seats across Atlassian’s portfolio to eligible startups for one year. Products included are Jira, Confluence, Loom, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, and Compass.

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