Atlassian launches data lake and analytics to help companies ‘see the big picture’

Atlassian has launched new data lake and analytics tools to help customers pool, query, and visualize data from across its suite of products.

The company said that it wants to help its customers, which includes NASA, Airbnb, and Cisco, “see the big picture” on all their work.

At launch, the Atlassian Data Lake will support the main Jira issue- and project-tracking software and Jira Service Management. However, the company plans to extend support to its entire product suite, which includes the likes of Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket.

Atlassian Analytics, meanwhile, essentially brings utility to the data lake, allowing companies to access their data in useful ways, and includes interactive dashboards out-of-the-box to serve up cross-project and cross-product insights visually — this supports both SQL and no-code approaches.

The new analytics product is built upon technology created by Chartio, a cloud-based data analytics company that Atlassian acquired last year, and which Atlassian sunsetted as a standalone product last month.

So how much of a problem does Atlassian’s new data lake and analytics suite solve, exactly?

Well, prior to now, customers that needed to conduct cross-product / project reporting would have to extract data to spreadsheets or build their own custom dashboards in business intelligence (BI) tools such as PowerBI, Looker, or Tableau. This was a difficult and resource-intensive process not only to build, but maintain — mostly due to the fact that it required extensive data modeling and dealing with slow or restricted APIs.

“With Atlassian Data Lake, customers now get pre-modeled, enriched data ready for analytics so they don’t have to spend time with data preparation and speed insight generation,” Atlassian COO Anu Bharadwaj told VentureBeat. “We also recognize that most customers don’t always have the right expertise or tooling to build custom dashboards. With Atlassian Analytics, they will get a built-in enterprise-grade data visualization capability to analyze data in different ways.”

Intertwined

While Atlassian Data Lake and Analytics are designed as tightly intertwined, complementary products, they are not bonded with glue. For example, Atlassian Analytics can be used to query data stored in external databases, so companies could correlate their financial data in Snowflake with engineering data in Jira, and visualize how developer velocity impacts their revenue.

In the future, Atlassian also plans to enable companies to connect the data lake to third-party business intelligence tools, to “give customers the flexibility to use their BI tool of choice,” according to Bharadwaj

It’s worth noting that Atlassian had previously announced a data lake product for Jira Software under an early-preview program, but last month the company revealed that it would not be pursuing with that product as “originally designed.” It said at the time that it would be “taking the architecture in a new direction,” and would be “rolled into a more comprehensive analytics offering” for enterprise customers.

And that, effectively, is what we’re seeing today.

Both Atlassian Data Lake and Analytics are available now through an early access program for existing customers, but only for those signed up for the Cloud Enterprise edition of Jira Software or Jira Service Management.