introducing mattermost 6.0

Introducing Mattermost 6.0: A New Approach to Developer Collaboration

Today, too many software organizations are in crisis. They face soaring expectations on delivering digital solutions, a complex and fast-changing array of new technologies and new threats to understand, and a limited pool of experienced developers, SRE, and SecOps professionals ready to execute in modern environments. 

What’s worse, technical talent is too often misconfigured. On average, developers report 39% of their time is wasted in meetings, interruptions, and processes that aren’t productive. When engineers can’t flourish, expect to see short tenures, delivery delays, and unstable operations. 

We’ve spent the last five years working on these problems with hundreds of organizations through our open source community, and we found one striking difference between leaders and followers: commitment to developer collaboration. 

Teams where technical leaders designed the collaboration patterns materially outperformed their peers. Far more than video calls and calendars, developer collaboration is about thoughtfully integrating technical teams, processes, and tools to maximize context and productivity, reduce unnecessary interruptions, and operate as the sum of an organization’s strengths. 

At Mattermost, we’re dedicated to making these technical organizations a wild success, and we’re thrilled to announce new ways to accelerate their most important work. 

40% of a Developer’s Time is Wasted Every Week — We’re Here to Fix That

Today marks a significant milestone for Mattermost, the over 800 customers we serve worldwide, and our community of over 4000 contributors. With the release of Mattermost 6.0, we are bringing digital operations teams—from developers to IT—the world’s first unified, open source platform for developer collaboration across the entire software lifecycle. 

Security, extensibility, flexibility, and depth of integration have always been Mattermost’s open source collaboration platform pillars. With our platform’s evolution of real-time messaging into task management, project management, and workflows, we can now dramatically accelerate a software organization’s ability to integrate collaboration across teams, tools, and processes at scale, while meeting the world’s most stringent privacy, security, and compliance needs. 

You can learn more through our website, docs, and resources that reflect our new product capabilities, use cases, and industry solutions. We’ve even updated our packaging to better align with the needs of our customers. 

Rather than summarizing all of the above, I wanted to share a bit more about why we believe the time is now for digital operations teams to adopt fit-for-purpose solutions that have been designed from the ground up for their specific use cases.

Increased Complexity in Digital Operations

Mattermost was built in-house by the engineering team at a gaming company that we started in 2012. Like many teams, we struggled with efficient collaboration despite multiple tools that purported to solve the problem of aligning technical teams across myriad complex R&D processes. 

Since we believed so strongly in open source software, we released our first version of Mattermost to the community, where it received an immediate positive response. Months after release, enterprises were running mission-critical operations on software we had just built—demand was enormous. Not long after, we switched our business from online games to focus on Mattermost. 

That was 2016. To say the world has changed dramatically since then would likely be the understatement of the century. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate acceleration of digital transformation—driven by the rapid shift in remote work and the fundamental shift in how products and services are delivered—the expectations on digital operations teams have surged.

While virtually every company is now competing on the ability to build and operate software with increased velocity and quality, digital operations teams continue to struggle with exponentially complex development toolchains, distributed teams, increased specialization within their functions, knowledge silos, talent shortages, operational bottlenecks, an unprecedented attack surface and continuous rise in security risk. 

At the same time, the number of applications that will need to be built and operated is projected to grow to 500 million within the next five years. This is with a near-0% unemployment rate amongst software engineers and an expectation of consumer-grade experiences across business tools and applications, and 24/7/365 availability. 

Building a Better Future for Digital Operations 

So how can we help developers and technical teams move forward? We believe that the first step to mastering digital operations is to align your teams, tools, and processes across each stage of the development lifecycle – from sprint planning to release to incident management. 

This is easier said than done—and it’s only getting harder. The numbers speak for themselves: Research shows that up to 16 hours a week of developer time is wasted due to tool fragmentation, manual tasks, and broken workflows. Add to this the mounting pressure of incidents, emergencies, and shifting priorities, and it’s no wonder why software leaders say that less than 18% of their teams are truly agile. 

Armed with little more than general-purpose collaboration tools, teams are at a significant disadvantage to supporting the complex, fast-changing needs of digital operations at scale. These tools aren’t built for the extensibility and security required to integrate technical teams with the processes and customizations digital operators rely on. 

This is the problem that we are committed to solving. With Mattermost 6.0, we are bringing to market a platform built explicitly for digital operations, unifying team communication, task and project management, and workflows into a single point of collaboration. 

We believe the best way to solve this problem is through open source technology and co-building solutions with thousands of engineers from over 100 countries, including our customers and partners. Through deep integrations with the tools that digital operations teams rely on every day—from Gitlab to PagerDuty to Splunk—Mattermost gives our users a collaboration platform that teams can customize based on how they work, complete with playbooks and automation that you can define and adapt to orchestrate sophisticated processes across your people, processes, and tools.

Moving in a New Direction as One Community 

We owe our recent and future success to our vibrant community of co-builders—our customers, partners, and open source contributors. Thanks to over 4000 open source contributors, we’ve continually innovated to help teams around the world overcome the challenges inherent in delivering always-on digital operations in new and powerful ways. Their commitment to Mattermost is the foundation of our success and has helped shape this latest release and our vision for the future of developer collaboration. 

Along with our open source contributors are the over 800 companies around the globe that rely on Mattermost every day. For example, the team at Crossover Health initially deployed Mattermost as a secure HIPAA-compliant collaboration platform to keep their teams connected. Over time, our partnership has helped Crossover streamline IT support management and automate repetitive processes. Clinicians, operators, and IT members are now using Mattermost, cementing the importance of providing a deeper, more dynamic experience through Mattermost 6.0.

Then there is the team at Fairphone, who have also deployed Mattermost to be a seamless part of the company’s workflows, improving productivity and morale across the organization. The IT team, in particular, is responding to issues faster through a Mattermost integration with the monitoring system, Nagios. This more efficient incident response process is critical to their competitive advantage, and we are motivated to help other organizations achieve a similar level of sophistication.

These impressive and galvanizing stories, including our extensive deployment on Platform One and within mission-oriented government agencies such as the US Air Force, energize our product development and commitment to growth. With our new product release, we will continue to work closely with our extended community to evolve product functionality, meet emerging use cases while helping you mitigate risks and optimize your digital operations.

Day 1 of Mattermost 6.0 is a bold step forward and we’re incredibly excited about where we’re headed. As always, thanks for challenging us to do our best work, contributing to our success, and joining us on this important journey. 

mm

Ian Tien is CEO and co-founder of Mattermost, Inc., an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle. Hundreds of thousands of developers around the globe trust Mattermost to increase their productivity by bringing together team communication, task and project management, and workflow orchestration into a unified platform for agile software development.