Convincing Your Team It’s Time for Data Center

by | Apr 23, 2018

With the New Year upon us, many enterprises are looking at the Server versions of their Atlassian applications and add-ons and wondering one thing—is it time for an upgrade? Whether you are facing rapid user growth or handling increased maintenance and upgrade requests, transitioning your teams to Data Center versions of the tools they use the most can help streamline resources while making your enterprise more agile and collaborative.

Atlassian recently put together an article outlining three steps to persuading your team that it’s time to upgrade to Data Center versions of the Atlassian applications they use the most. We’ve summarized their thoughts and invite you to keep reading to learn more:

1. Identify a Clear Business Value

The key here is to pinpoint at least two benefits that are applicable to your organization like:

  • Reducing planned and unplanned downtime to increase overall productivity levels.
  • Ensuring new users start working with products right away so they become familiar with your processes and see good performance.

Don’t shy away from technical points that are highly relevant for your situation like the positive effects of managing user authentication with SAML SSO.

Pro tip: To provide further validation, look for success stories from organizations that might be similar to yours. You can browse real use cases on Atlassian’s customer page.

2. Prove That This Is the Time for Change

When you present your case for Data Center, one of the first questions you might be asked will be, “is now the right time?” The short answer—yes.

Having worked with thousands of enterprises across a range of industries, Atlassian has some numbers that can help you reinforce your argument:

  • Is your organization at the 500-2,000 user tier? Do you have hundreds of concurrent users? These are the points at which enterprises typically switch from Server to Data Center.
  • Do you have thousands of Jira instances you need to manage? This means you have already started to outgrow your Server’s ability to provide the high SLA your teams need, which makes shifting to Data Center a proactive choice.
  • Are clone and fetch times in Bitbucket distributed repositories now counted in hours? This translates to lost time and reduced productivity for your teams.
  • Do your employees spend excess time on nights and weekends maintaining your Atlassian applications to ensure uncompromised uptime during regular work hours? Find out how many hours of maintenance-related downtime you can avoid with Data Center, and share that number!

Often you can directly connect these numbers with something you identified during the previous step.

Pro tip: To learn more about the benefits of transitioning from Server to Data Center, click here to download an Atlassian’s whitepaper.

3. Quantify Benefits

You know what the value is, you know that the time is right—now it’s time to quantify your gains.

Bring it down to this: in hard dollar amounts, what will your organization save with Data Center?

In Atlassian’s experience, the clearest benefit for enterprises is saved person-hours of productivity. Downtime, maintenance, performance issues, and more cause valuable time to be lost when people can’t get their work done or can’t complete tasks as quickly as they could if they had access to the right tools.

Pro tip: Atlassian’s formula for calculating savings is simple: cost per one hour of downtime = the average per-hour salary for a developer * the number of developers you have on your team.

Get Expert Support to Unlock the Potential of Your Atlassian Tools

To make your Data Center transition a successful one, work with Elasity’s experts to:

  • Optimize and customize your Atlassian applications, configuring them to suit your requirements.
  • Integrate applications and add-ons securely and seamlessly.
  • Take advantage of administrative, functional, and consulting support to help users stay on top of best practices and get the most out of their tools.

We will help you onboard your teams and accelerate the process—enabling you to exploit the full value of Atlassian’s suite of tools.

Before you start, reach out to Elasity for assistance in configuring the Atlassian Suite. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner, we offer Atlassian Administration & Functional Support (AFS), to help best configure and implement the Atlassian suite with best-practices.  Contact us to get started today!

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Andy Mao
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