It’s an exciting time for us at ALM Works: We’re launching Structure Cloud at Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas.

Recently, Igor Sereda, ALM Works founder and CEO, sat down with Ryan Spilken of The Adaptavist Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast to talk about the launch of our newest product: Structure Cloud. With this new product, we are bringing many of the features and capabilities of Structure for Jira to Jira Cloud users for the first time.

A little background...

Structure for Jira is one of the leading Jira apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace. It’s used by more than 4,000 of Atlassian’s customers worldwide.

Structure Cloud helps project managers that work with Atlassian Cloud visualize, track and manage progress across Jira projects and teams. It does this with adaptable, user-defined issue hierarchies, presented in a familiar spreadsheet-like view of Jira issues.

“With Structure, I eliminated the use of Excel for program management at my last company. Thankfully, I convinced my new employer to let us use it on Jira Cloud. I don’t know how I would have gotten along without it."
-Mike Hayes, Program Manager, Motor Trend

And cloud hosting is a great option for businesses using Jira. Since its inception, Jira Cloud has gone from zero to 75% of Atlassian's 50,000 customers and it now has data centers around the world.

Jira Cloud provides immediate access to software updates and new features; it offers optimized performance and elastic scale via AWS; and, of course, it cuts out the hassle of managing and maintaining servers.

Here's the full interview...

Here’s the full transcript of Ryan’s interview with Igor Sereda:

Ryan Spilken: We’ve got some big news from one of our close friends and partners, ALM Works, and here to join us to share that news is ALM Works’ CEO, Igor Sereda. Igor, thank you so much for joining us.

Igor Sereda: Thanks for having me.

Ryan: Always a pleasure to see you, sir. Your most successful product is Structure. Tell us a little bit about what Structure is before you tell us about this cool news.

Igor: Sure. Structure for Jira helps Atlassian’s largest customers visualize, track and manage multiple projects and teams, so it’s all about visibility and making decisions. We support that with a central feature that we introduced, a user-configurable, adaptable hierarchy of issues.

Ryan: And this is shown in what’s called a structure, which is a visual representation of the data that’s all in your Jira instance?

Igor: Yes, exactly. We introduced this concept of a structure, which acts like a container where you can define the scope of the work, the issues that you are interested in, and then add some automation, add some rules, formulas, columns. Basically, create your own workspace where you can effectively see what’s happening, see some data, drill down into minor details where needed. That’s where the hierarchy plays out and then acts upon that data.

Ryan: Awesome. To this point, Structure has been a massive success but it’s only been on Server and that brings us to what we’re here to talk about today. Do you want to do it? Go ahead.

Igor: So at this coming Summit, in April in Las Vegas, we’re going to be launching Structure Cloud. That has been a long time coming. It is very important for us, it’s an important release. We’re hoping to expand what we are able to do and basically have big plans for this.

Ryan: You say that Structure Cloud was a long time coming. How long did Structure Cloud take you to develop?

Igor: So, we started about a year and a half ago. Actually, Atlassian has been pushing all the marketplace vendors very hard to create Cloud versions of their apps. We were planning for the market, trying to understand what it means for the whole project. Because, frankly, it’s a whole new system. Although it’s named the same and the ideas are the same, technically it’s different and, actually, we need to think about it as a next step.

Ryan: So, what kind of challenges did the team run into when making the next step in the Structure evolution?

Igor: Speaking for most Atlassian app vendors, all of them run into this challenge of the APIs that are available for Jira Cloud or other Atlassian cloud products, they are less powerful, naturally, than the APIs that are available for Server. The apps run in the same process so they can access much more of the product’s functionality. We have features in Structure Server, like bulk cloning or walking some issues through a workflow. They would not be possible in Jira Cloud, at least not in the same way, so we had to find a way around that.

For us, it took so long because we had to make a serious investment in building the infrastructure. I’m probably pitying myself but it was like creating a whole new product from scratch. We started with research, with selecting technologies that would run our own cloud system, that will be able to scale and support large installations in a scalable manner, so we can grow as our customer base grows. And I hope that will pay us back sooner than later!

Ryan: Well, I think that it’s almost a shoo-in with the popularity of Structure Server, there are going to be Cloud users who are certainly interested. One thing that we talk about a lot on the podcast, that we joke about almost at this point, is, well, that’s a feature that’s on Data Center, or that’s a feature that’s on Cloud but it’s not on Server. So, does Structure Cloud have any neat little bells and whistles that our listeners should hear about that’s different from Structure Server?

Igor: We are going to release Version 1. Version 1 is pretty much what we had in Structure Server Version 1. And the current version of Structure Server is 5.3. [So Structure Cloud is] pretty basic [for now]. That’s because we spent most of our time just building the system. The plan is to build new features pretty quickly during this year - and if not catch up with Structure Server, at least move all important features there. Automation, all the formulas, those are the cornerstones of Structure’s flexibility and power.

Having said that, there are some things that will be possible only on Structure Cloud. We caught on early on and that was one of the reasons we decided we needed to do that. For example, we could connect to multiple Jira [systems] and actually aggregate data and give visibility throughout the whole company, or maybe multiple companies, if that’s the case.

Ryan: Wow, that’s actually really, really interesting. That opens a very wide door for you.

Igor: I hope so.

Ryan: I’m certain that it will. This is awesome. Congratulations on the big news. I hope all our listeners who are heading to Summit stop by the ALM Works booth and give Igor and Eugene and the whole ALM [Works] team, give them a hard time for us here at the podcast. We always look forward to seeing them and hanging out. But Igor, before we let you go, what’s next? What’s ALM [Works] got on the burner that we should know about?

Igor: We are focused on this release right now: Structure Cloud Version 1. We’ll get it done, [then] we have a pretty aggressive backlog road map based on the backlog for [Structure] Cloud itself. We’re going to move our Gantt chart [solution], Structure.Gantt, to cloud as well. We’re going to start coding soon after the Version 1 release. We’re also releasing a new version of the Structure.Gantt for [Jira] Server. Version 1.4 will have special support for Agile [teams], so it’s going to be a sort of Agile Gantt chart.

Ryan: Agile Gantt. You heard it here first.

Igor: And then we’ll follow with features that work around resource management - resource leveling, constraint scheduling where we can actually help teams manage their time in the company, their availability.

Apart from that, we have this experimental idea that we’re going to be trying out at Summit. So if you’re there, please stop by and take a look at our predictive CFD [Cumulative Flow Diagrams] charts that will help people basically think about planning based on [historic] evidence in your Jira, without much analysis.

Ryan: Well Igor, thank you so much for your time today, we really appreciate you stopping by Adaptavist Live, and we look forward to seeing you at Summit. Thank you for sharing this news with us. And catch you in Vegas - well, I won’t, but Matthew and Brenda will be there, so you can say hi to them!

Igor: Ryan, thanks a lot, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Conclusion

Looking ahead, we’re very excited to see Structure coming to Jira Cloud - and to potentially see many more teams using our tools to manage and oversee their Jira projects.

If you’re interested in Structure for Jira Cloud (or Server or Data Center), you can find it on the Atlassian Marketplace. Ask your Jira administrator to install a free 30-day evaluation.

In the meantime, if you’re attending Atlassian Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, drop by our booth to see Structure Cloud for yourself! You can even request a meeting with us before you head to Vegas.