How I saved 62% on a customer's Atlassian licence
Kevin Anderson
SVP Strategy & Partnerships - Atlassian Platinum Partner @Sentify.co
I get asked a lot about how it's even possible that a company can be overspending by 62% on their Atlassian licence - I mean it's a pretty simple procurement process is it not??
Yes, it is a simple procurement process and that's why many procurement teams get stuck: the devil is in the detail and unless you dig a little, then you'll simply go through the simple process and simply spend a simple 60% more than you should.
Quick background:
Atlassian's account management support is set up to serve large enterprise customers best (their official rule for enterprise customers are customers with more than 5000 unique users). It's the old 80/20 rule - they make 80% of their revenue off the top 20% of their customers (it might even skew more 90/10...), and so naturally, they only sit down, negotiate and optimise with these top 20% enterprise customers. And this business plan makes sense! ...for them... But if you are not in the top 20, then you are left to fend for yourself and make the most of their simple self-serve procurement process.
So, if you are one of the 80%, what can you do to reduce your Atlassian licence cost by 62%????
Here are my top 5 tips on how to reduce your licence cost:
1. Co-term your licences
This could save you 40% straight off the bat. This point comes back to the "simplicity" of the self-serve model and how problematic it can be. Here's why: when a department within your organisation starts using Atlassian, they usually "self-serve" and purchased their licences by credit card. As time goes on, what usually happens is more than one department will ALSO have done this and what you get are a number of departments who own their own licences. This is EXTREMELY common and the result is each department paying a huge premium on their licences.
Here's an example - One of my customers came to me with 110 agents on Jira Service Desk (premium). With a bit of digging, we discovered that a different department within the organisation (in another state) also had 110 Jira Service Desk agents (premium) that they were managing on a separate instance.
If you use the simple - self serve Atlassian pricing calculator (https://www.atlassian.com/software/pricing-calculator) you will see that each of these instances of 110 users costs the company USD $42,250 each p/a. Now, if you simply change the total Jira Service Desk users to 220 on the calculator..... Yep, that's $52,500 USD p/a... Which is not $84,500!!! It's nearly 40% less.
With a bit of admin to get the two departments to work together, allocate their portion of the budget to the procurement team bla bla bla - they each pocketed a neat $16k USD (which with these exchange rates...) And that was only on their Service Desk Licence.
NOW if you were a top 20% enterprise customer - Atlassian would allocate you with an Account manager to help you look into streamlining your account so that you simply didn't get into this mess in the first place... But you are most likely not one of these top 20% so what can you do?
Co terming licences can simply be done with an Atlassian Product Partner. And if they are a good Product Partner, they will do this for free.
For account management support to help you co term your licences, AND for the rest of my top 5 tips,* shoot me an email at [email protected]
*It's free - we consider ourselves a good partner :)