Atlassian's Latest Acquisition Can Change the Future of IT Help

Australian B2B software company Atlassian (TEAM -0.22%) just announced its recent earnings results and told investors it would be acquiring chatbot service Percept.AI. In this video clip from "The AI/ML Show," recorded on Feb. 2, Fool contributor Jason Hall explains Atlassian's business and explores what the company's acquisition means for its customers.

Jason Hall: Here's the headline, Atlassian reported earnings and concurrent with their earnings, they announced that they were acquiring Percept.AI, which they describe themselves as a no-code chatbot. Basically, it's a plug-in chatbot. It came out of Y Combinator, which is the big investor that invests in a lot of start-ups and I think was founded 2017. With Y Combinator is one of the seed investors. They recently had a seed round, and I guess they haven't disclosed the amount, but Atlassian apparently made an offer that was too good to refuse and so let's back things up a little bit.

Let's talk about Atlassian for Fools that don't know and it's pretty popular. It's in a ton of services. But the backstory is really interesting, its founders, this is an Australian company and its two founders. They were basically college interns when they founded the company. This was back in the early 2000s after the dot-com bust, recession was a problem in Australia as much as it was in the U.S. and Europe. They maxed out the credit cards and started this business to build an app, to build a tool that became what is now known as Jira, which is like the foundational software architecture for Atlassian's business.

What does Atlassian do? Atlassian provides these incredible tools for companies to use for internal communications project management, DevOps, it's just really, really cool stuff. They reported earnings, another great quarter, 35% revenue growth across the board, like checking off the boxes of generally positive results, but something that they did. I'm going to pull up, let's see if I can find it here. I've got it. I'm going to start with this right here.

This is from Atlassian's website and not their investor relations website. I encourage people to, Jose, you can weigh in on this, too. But if you're looking at a company, that's a technology-based company that's selling to enterprise or selling to governments. It's a B2B company, it's not selling consumer products, spend some time on their business website. It will go a long way toward helping you have some idea of what they actually do. Here's Jira Service Management. This is where it looks like Percept.AI is going to live. This is where the management's saying that they're going to leverage this tool. Jira Service Management is service management. You work for a company and they have a service task. That service desk, you can get IT support, HR support, facilities management, access to all of the different things as an internal customer of the company, a different support departments. You can access the services that the company offers to you. Forrester Research just said some very good things about Jira Service Management, and Atlassian as an enterprise service management business, put it as one of its leaders, and all the way to the far right in terms of its strategy. This was announced. This Forrester's research came out before Atlassian announced that they were acquiring Percept.AI. What is Percept.AI going to do for Atlassian's customers?

There's about a quarter million of them. Thirty-five thousand of them use Jira Service Management. The short answer is it's going to allow them to take their IT team and take them off of these redundant rote repetitive tasks, responding to service requests, "did you restart your computer." The basic stuff that chatbots can actually do really well now. They are also well-defined thing. There are probably 20 requests that make up 95% of the work that these service desks get. It's pretty easy to have a chatbot that's able to address a lot of those things and help internal users self-serve, resolve their problem, or direct it properly to where it needs to go within the IT service organization to make sure the right person is able to respond to it appropriately. It's a really powerful tool to take your IT staff, leverage them more effectively. Jose, I'm not sure about your background with this. Lou, Toby. I know this is something you guys have dealt with and seen in the corporate world. There's always somebody on the IT team, they get stuck running the Help Desk or the new people run the Help Desk and they hate it.