DevOpsery-dispenser Atlassian's customers settle into the cloudy subscription world

Don't ask about profit, but over half cash came from subs in FY2019

Atlassian, home of DevOps stalwarts Trello and Jira, has reported over half of its takings from the company's subscription model.

At the end of the financial year, the firm chalked up more than $1.2bn in revenues for FY2019. As for the company's subscription model, this time last year, subs had not quite reached half of FY2018's revenue – reflecting the firm having some success in the drive away from those pesky perpetual licences.

The $1.2bn figure is quite a jump from $881m at the end of FY2018. On a quarterly basis, Q4 2019's revenue of $334.6m was up 36 per cent year-on-year.

The company did, however, report some impressive losses in IFRS-adjusted figures. The company adopted the new revenue recognition standard, IFRS 15, on 1 July 2018.

While the cost of those revenues in FY2019 came to $210.3m (leaving a gross profit of just under $1bn), "operating expenses" of over a billion dollars along with R&D, marketing and admin costs put the company down $637.6m in its IFRS results, compared to a loss of $113.4m for FY2018.

The steady rise in customers also continued to 152,727 for the financial period ending Q4 2019, up from 125,796 a year ago. The figure is triple the target set when Atlassian was founded, something co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes was quick to brag about.

Cannon-Brookes also highlighted Atlassian's cloud chops, pointing out that 125,000 of its customers are using a cloud product and 90 per cent of new customers seem to prefer life in the cloud.

Unsurprisingly, it'll be the cloud where the company plans to spend its cash in fiscal 2020.

The gang has been banging the drum for the cloud for a few years now, introducing the cloud-hosted Jira Studio in 2007 and shunting much of its underlying infrastructure and workloads to AWS as part of Project Vertigo.

It has also recently snapped up the likes of OpsGenie and AgileCraft in recent months as well as Trello in 2017. The company also put the "ass" into "Atlassian" last year after inadvertently spaffing some customers' credentials at places they didn't belong.

Still, the odd security snafu and TITSUP doesn't seem to have harmed revenues too much, although the DevOps darling cheerfully told investors that it doesn't expect quite the same jump in revenues for FY2020. It is aiming for between $1.54bn and $1.556bn for next fiscal year and a 40 per cent rise in subscription revenues.