Atlassian famously listed on the Nasdaq in the US rather than the ASX in 2015, with shares debuting at $US27.67.

Atlassian shares closed on Thursday at $US92.92, giving it an implied market valuation of $US22.13 billion ($30.74 billion). In after-hours trade, shares in the tech company surged 10.1 per cent higher to $US102.30.

Loading

In its results, Atlassian reported an operating loss of $US3.2 million for the second quarter of the 2019 financial year, down from $US13 million for the same period last year.

Net income was $US45.2 million for the period, compared with a net loss of $64.2 million for the same period last year.

Mr Farquhar said Atlassian's flagship product Jira had hit over 65,000 customers and the company ended the quarter with more than 138,000 total customers.

Loading

"The quarter also highlighted the growing demand for Atlassian products to drive digital transformation in businesses large and small," he said.

In an investor call following the results announcement Mr Farquhar said the "key topline metric" Atlassian focuses on to measure its business is revenue.

"That's because we are not like most traditional enterprise software companies in that the significant majority of our business is made up of either monthly or annual subscriptions or annual maintenance contracts," he said.

Atlassian is chasing total revenue for the financial year in the range of $US1.195 billion to $US1.199 billion.

Mr Farquhar had to undertake some further explaining of Australian lingo when he was asked by analysts if the development of the market for Atlassian's core project software could be compared to a baseball innings.

"Your second question was around are we in the third, second or third or fourth inning?"he said.

"I think that's an American term. I think you have to translate that to like a cricket term, are we the third [day] of the test I guess. The software market is growing incredibly fast, every company is becoming a software company.

"We are growing out, continue to grow our customer base within that market incredibly well and then we're also growing our share of wallet within our customer [base] as we do more things for them."

Mr Farquhar also pointed Atlassian's $US295 million acquisition of IT systems incident alert company OpsGenie in September last year which he said customers had responded positively to.

Analyst Bhavanmit Singh Suri, of William Blair & Company, described the results as "a spectacular, spectacular quarter".

Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss said the performance was "a very nice quarter indeed" but questioned why margins appeared "muted".

In reply, Atlassian chief financial officer James Beer said margins would be lower in the second half of the year as the company hired new staff and also pushed through pay rises for existing employees.

Jonathon Kees, from Summit, said the performance was all the more impressive given the "gloom and doom" in the global economy particularly surrounding China and the US government shutdown.