How Zip saved $1M USD on Atlassian Licensing

The Opportunity

Identifying the Challenge

ZipMoney noticed a pattern of significant cost increases happening across their Atlassian products month-on-month and recognized the need to take control of the situation. The end goal was to move its global multinational operations onto a single set of tools which would deliver what they needed to support the business.

The Solution

Licensing Audit and Consolidation

After business acquisitions, ZipMoney also acquired multiple Atlassian instances, and employees were consuming licenses across multiple domains. Elegance Group (EG) performed a licensing audit to obtain a baseline of licensing distribution and utilization. This resulted in engaging EG to consolidate all user accounts to ZipCo organization domains, removing duplicate accounts.

Transition to Enterprise License

An important transition for ZipMoney was to move from Standard instances of Atlassian products to an Enterprise license, leveraging the multi-site feature to reduce overall costs. ZipMoney was also able to utilize native features available within Enterprise tier products, removing the need for multiple existing add-ons, resulting in further cost reductions.

Operational Enhancements

Additionally, as per EG’s recommendations, licensing billing was changed from monthly to annual. ZipMoney introduced a governance structure and streamlined the process for provisioning Atlassian licensing, initially managed by EG.

The Impact

Cost Savings

• 36% Year One on Licensing
• 38% Year on Year Savings
• $1M+ Savings over Five Years

Testimonial

Richard Lane, Director of Security & Global IT at Zip says:

“To begin with, I was somewhat apprehensive about using an Atlassian Partner; my concern was that they would see me as a blank chequebook. That hasn’t been my experience, my experience with the partner program has been very good.

When I joined the company, our US instance of Atlassian with 150 devs had about 600 users, our Australian instance had about 800 users, we had about 6 Statuspages, 6 Opsgenies, 2 Confluences, 2 Jiras, the list goes on…

The goal was to get the global multinational onto a single set of tools which was not easy - we tried to do this clean up internally.

Elegance Group spent time analysing our environment and figured out we were spending about US$550k/year. EG figured out that through a basic clean-up, some consolidation and a migration to enterprise licenses, we could drop this by about US$220k/year. In reality, it was very challenging work to do - we tried ourselves. Our team broke it once, backed out, and then engaged Elegance Group who moved it the second time. We’re now in the process of moving the six OpsGenie instances down to probably two JSM Premium instances - that’s a saving of over US$80k/year in OpsGenie licenses in exchange for about US$35-40k upgrade to the JSM licence. Again, it does end up being really complicated work - even with some really good IT automation engineers in my team, we struggled to do it internally.

After overcoming my initial concerns of being a blank chequebook - there were a number of things where it just made sense to pay EG to do it because they can do it far faster than my team can do it, and it lets my team go and work on other stuff. EG identified five or six add-ons we were paying for that were now not necessary due to the built-in functionality with the Enterprise upgrade of Jira/Confluence. That was about US$50k/year savings by eliminating those add-on subscriptions.

So in summary, what I will spend this year with EG will save me 3-4 times that amount in Atlassian licensing. But it has also led me to moving to Enterprise, consolidating and retiring a lot of other products.”