Atlassian ushers in the era of Cambrian SaaS: Mike Cannon-Brookes

The future of cloud computing is ‘Cambrian SaaS’ according to Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.

In a pre-recorded video segment presented at Okta’s identity event Oktane22 in San Francisco Cannon-Brookes claimed to have a “unique view” when it comes to his worldview on the future of cloud.

The Atlassian boss drew a parallel to the Cambrian Explosion era approximately 530 million years ago, where the world saw the appearance of multiple distinct phyla organisms, with today’s emergence of varied new SaaS applications available in the marketplace.

“There's a Cambrian explosion of SaaS applications and we don't see that as threatening, we see that as a huge benefit for customers and for everybody else,” said Cannon-Brookes.

“It comes around because of the reduced cost of building world-class SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure. It’s possible to integrate them because you have fixed endpoints, where Atlassian.com is or Slack.com is, so that you can interact with them,” he said.

Cambrian SaaS provides customers with choices, unlike monolithic platforms he believes.

“We want our customers and teams to work well together with whatever tools they need to use, and we want our products to win in the marketplace on their strengths for your team and the job they're trying to get done, not because of some sort of vendor lock-in,” said Cannon-Brookes.

Atlassian is an Okta customer, leveraging its Customer Identity Cloud.

According to Cannon-Brookes, Okta is working to solve the identity issues that arise alongside the Cambrian SaaS explosion. These include identity permissioning, how the apps work together, IT controls and governance.

“Is this the same person across two applications? How does data from Confluence get connected to data from Slack or from somewhere else?” he asked.

“Yes, we can do point-to-point but what is in my Okta database is fundamentally a list of all my applications and who has access to which, and all of my users, staff, employees, contractors, customers, whatever I put into my identity databases, bringing those together and servicing the Cambrian SaaS explosion with that data to enable better connections for customers is a really powerful and fantastic position I think.”

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta, about the integration between Atlassian’s identity system Atlassian Access, and Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud.

According to McKinnon, the potential for the relationship is what excites Atlassian the most.

“They can actually get specific information about the apps and what the configuration of a specific customer is, which is super powerful because their customers right now, it's a pain for them to set up integration between JIRA and GitHub, and all the other project management tools and Trello and Confluence and that's very valuable to them,” he said.

“They have this vision where you will start using Atlassian and it will just know everything about the customer’s environment.”

However, McKinnon admitted that it will take time for this vision to come to life.

“It has to be more than just Atlassian. It's got to be a whole ecosystem. It has to evolve with many, many customers like Atlassian. There is already hundreds of them today that are in the Okta Integration Network that are built on the Customer Identity Cloud, but that number needs to be thousands.”

Velvet-Belle Templeman travelled to San Francisco to attend Oktane22 as a guest of Okta.