Marketplace Partner Spotlight: AppFox

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To keep the Partner Spotlight series alive and well, Atlassian has invited Partners to create their own articles following Atlassian’s suggested format. 

Here is the latest installment – an interview with Martin Wood from AppFox. 

What's your role at AppFox? 

I'm the Head of Product, looking after the product and engineering teams at AppFox. That means I'm responsible for the strategy and execution of all our apps, in the Atlassian Marketplace and elsewhere, as well as having the privilege of leading an amazing team of talented individuals.  Our AppFox vision is to enable our customers to work faster, smarter and better, especially when it comes to instance health, compliance and data protection, and I love bringing that to life. 

 

How does your team come up with ideas for new apps? 

It's about solving problems. We listen deeply to people at Team and members here in the Atlassian community, chat to our amazing network of Solution Partners, including our sister company Automation Consultants, and have wide ranging discussions with our customers, all to help us to understand the friction points that people have in their daily work lives. And then we try to make it better!   

Sometimes the solutions can be enhancements to our existing apps, something we love doing. But we also embrace innovation, and take advantage of new technologies and opportunities to solve problems in new ways. For example, I'm very excited about the opportunity that the Teamwork Graph presents, and - like most app vendors - we are actively exploring AI, most recently with the release of a new Rovo-powered app, Captionizer. 

What do you think has been the secret to your success so far? 

We've got 5 key guiding principles in AppFox: customer centric innovation, passionate about excellence, building careers as well as apps, a commitment to security, and enjoying the journey! These help us focus on the right things, and to not wind up unbalanced. 

We are super proud of our commitment to quality, backed up by our many 5-star reviews and certifications like ISO-27001, but it's important to have fun while we are doing it! 

Tell us about your most popular app. What problem were you trying to solve for customers when you created it? 

We have several popular apps! But the first and most widely known is Optimizer for Jira It helps Jira admins better manage their instance, keeping it clean, tidy and manageable. It's particularly useful for cloud migrations, or during a health check - it helps you understand how many custom fields, UI screens, projects you have, amongst many other types of item. But it does more than give you a grade - it lets you tidy it up and improve that grade. Our customers find it an invaluable longterm tool to help keep on top of Jira maintenance, so your instance stays performant, easy to use and well maintained. 

We were also really excited to join other marketplace partners in pioneering the App Editions programme with our Advanced Edition for Optimizer, bringing JSM operability and enhanced functionality to our already stacked feature list. 

After Optimizer, we also released two more very popular apps: Workflows for Confluence and Compliance for Confluence We love Confluence and use it intensively, for our documentation, decision making and discussion. But we struggled with approvals and knowing the status of documents - Workflows helps with that using a range of customizable automations. And Compliance lets us label documentation (such as internal, public, restricted, etc) and even perform sensitive data detection. We've had an amazing amount of positive feedback for these apps, especially from teams looking to get and, crucially, keep their ISO-27001 or SOC-2 quality certifications, amongst others. 

 

What’s next for AppFox? 

Like so many others, we are super excited about the opportunities that AI will bring. We are actively researching and developing apps to help our customers to control, secure, and maximize their data. We’re really excited about the release of our new free app, Captionizer. Using Rovo’s capabilities with image analysis, you can now easily and automatically add captions to images, diagrams and documentation to help with accessibility or to promote understanding. 

Beyond that – and a few other exciting items I can’t yet talk about! – we’ve got such a packed roadmap for our apps. We are committed to continual development and improvements, so please do look out for some super cool new features soon!  

Our team are always busy with one update or another – head over to LinkedIn and give us a follow to keep up with all our news as and when it comes in!