Atlassian's expert partner network is all about complimenting its products. This group of expert partners are the guys on the ground who understand the local IT market and are able to provide Atlassian with insights into how business is done in their specific region.
Speaking to ITWeb on the sidelines of an event hosted by the Australian enterprise software company in Cape Town this week, Matt Coughlan, Atlassian expert partner manager for the UK, Ireland and southern Africa, outlined how vital it is to form solid partnerships with the right people. Both Coughlan and David Hislop, MD of Korwe Software and an Atlassian expert partner, stressed the importance of choosing a partner that can be trusted to foster local relationships, and one likely to become quite actively involved in the business in the long term.
"We are enlisting these experts to fill in the gaps and expand the footprint that we already have. These people become part of the Atlassian ecosystem and help us deliver the Atlassian experience to our customers," noted Coughlan. "It is a very clean relationship, with no competition between us and them, and it has proven very successful in the past."
According to Hislop, as the working world moves steadily towards more "distributed teams" - that being teams that work together yet may be distributed across the globe - having the right kind of software to facilitate this type of work, and partnering with people who allow you to do so, is essential.
Something Coughlan sums up as a need for tools that facilitate team collaboration. And by this he means people within the same team working together, but also different teams ? be it legal, design, IT or HR - co-operating and working seamlessly with each other. "We are thinking about development for every team, not just developers. The aim is to connect the guy at the top with the developers in such a way that everyone is pulling in the same direction," he added.
"More and more, companies want to be able to demonstrate their agility and responsiveness to customer needs and one of Atlassian's company values is a no-bull approach to agile," said Hislop.
(Not) Waiting for Godot
Making reference to play by Samuel Beckett, titled Waiting for Godot, in which two characters wait in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot, Hislop believes the local IT market needs to adopt an approach of not "Waiting for Godot". Local businesses shouldn't be sitting around hoping to secure venture capital funding, noted Hislop, continuing that they should rather focus on the customer and create something that people actually need and want and get it out there.
He is confident that SA will become a software development thought-leader in years to come. Potential that Coughlan hopes will see the Atlassian customer base in SA increasing steadily over the next three to five years. "The engineering approach to software and potential in Africa and South Africa results in solutions that are more finely engineered and highly specified than what we would use in Europe or America."
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