In part one of this blog, we discussed the unique IT challenges facing large, complex enterprises. Today, we explore how Atlassian’s enterprise solutions are perfectly placed to meet these demands, and give you the lowdown on Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses.
Tell me about Atlassian
In 2001, Atlassian was another one of those “tech start-ups” you always hear about, with two friends, a computer and a (nearly maxed-out) credit card. Except that over the past 15 years this “start-up” has flourished into a $3 billion corporation, which launched its first IPO in 2015. Atlassian, now a leader in ALM, Agile management and ITSM, became successful through a ground-up approach, hooking resources at the developer and project management level and expanding upwards within the organisation. Knowledge of the power and flexibility of the tool spread like wildfire until the full suite began to be implemented throughout entire corporations. Today over 75 companies of the Fortune 100 are using Atlassian – how’s that for a start-up?
As use of its products began to take off within larger companies and corporations, Atlassian quickly realised its one-size-fits-all support package didn’t meet the needs of their larger enterprise customers. When a company has multiple teams operating on different schedules, launches, architectures and time zones, it’s very easy for the organisation to get out of sync. That’s why Atlassian unveiled its enterprise suite – to provide companies with features and services to cater to the unique challenges of the enterprise. Since its release in 2014, the Atlassian Enterprise suite has gained great momentum and received positive feedback from clients such as Tesla, TomTom, Adobe and Nasa.
Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses – what’s on offer?
Dedicated on-call assistance – Premier Support
For direct support of an organisation’s Atlassian tools, Atlassian offers premier support, which provides direct access to their most senior support engineers. Atlassian assigns three of its highly-trained support engineers to your company in order to learn your unique network and environment. It provides:
- 24/7 coverage to ensure your business is technically supported at all times
- Responses within 30 minutes for all business-critical tickets related to technical issues of your Atlassian applications
- Responses as soon as two hours for non-critical questions which relate to new features, minor bug fixes, minor UI issues etc
- Faster SLAs, phone support, and a dedicated support team just for you
This is why enterprises choose premier support!
Your personal Atlassian advisor – Technical Account Manager
A Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a trusted advisor that provides guidance, advice and coordination across the organisation, the Expert partner ecosystem and Atlassian’s internal teams to maximise the value of a company’s unique Atlassian solution.
Your TAM offers:
- Direct access to Atlassian’s support, product, and engineering teams, which allows you to have a champion on the inside working on your behalf
- Assistance in optimising team productivity, monitoring analytics and KIPs to ensure quality engagement with Atlassian solutions
- Providing operational and technical validation via analysing existing usage trends, and advice on best practices
- Early access to alpha/beta/pioneer programs and exclusive peer-to-peer events
The clustered environment – Data Center
Atlassian data center provides architecture for clustered server environments.
- High availability, resilience and performance at scale for business-critical Atlassian applications
- Support for companies operating at high user levels and in different geographical areas
- A clustered environment that improves performance and response time
- Improves resilience by better handling large volumes of users and data via multiple server nodes
How do I know which offering is right for me?
Premier Support
Companies that have invested heavily in Atlassian (think: thousand-user instances of multiple different products) typically require a certain level of support to maintain the suite, and much more than what’s offered with Atlassian products out-of-the-box. Typically these enterprises expect a higher degree of partnership with Atlassian and feel that the help desk portal doesn’t provide them with their desired level of service.
Premier support aims to remedy this by providing your company with three support engineers who are consistently dedicated to your specific company. That way the support team can get to know your network, your technical environment, and you can start to develop a relationship with the folks over at Atlassian. They’re quite cool people, too – that doesn’t hurt either.
Another easy way to determine if you could benefit from premier support is to analyse the amount of time you and your team spend putting out fires versus performing revenue-generating business activities. Do you look up at noon and realise you’ve spent the whole morning trying to make stuff work instead of actually doing any work? We all hate that, but the support team over at Atlassian doesn’t! Premier support allows the guys at Atlassian to be your fire rescue team so you can focus on the part of the job your boss actually hired you to do. Plus, the support engineers assigned to your company are highly-trained and therefore require much less time and effort to resolve technical issues related to your Atlassian suite.
A very common case is when (as mentioned above) Atlassian products slowly infiltrate a team via a ground-up approach and become unmanageable as they expand within the company. Eventually as the tools grow in size, number of users and amount of data they can prove to be overwhelming and incredibly confusing to administer, especially if they grew with no governance at all (which is many times the case). The premier support offering assists companies in this situation by helping to stabilise deployments and better manage business needs, and by basically serving as a sort of on-call JIRA admin for reactive support.
Multiple ways to raise tickets (including phone support), quicker response time and dedicated support engineers all make this offer attractive to companies that desire more assistance with their Atlassian stack – like having technical experts in your back pocket.
Technical Account Manager
Atlassian’s Technical Account Manager program aims to serve as a single point-of-contact to assess, align, and accelerate the enterprise-wide enablement of your Atlassian solutions. The enterprises that find value in this offering usually utilise a number of different Atlassian products with 1000+ users of each, and desire a close, consultative relationship with Atlassian. The TAM provides guidance around best practices, how to plan changes in your technical environment and advises best ways to improve your operational activities via the Atlassian suite.
Companies who benefit most from the TAM are those that want more proactive, individual guidance around how to better leverage their Atlassian stack. While the TAM doesn’t actually perform intricate solutions like hands-on implementations (this is left to the experts – aka Valiantys), they provide constant guidance around best ways to perform upgrades, ensuring deployments adhere to industry standards and best practices, and share strategic planning and insight into mitigating problem impact areas.
The Technical Account Manager progam is also useful for large organisations that require frequent customisation changes but lack formal governance of the Atlassian suite. Many times companies understand that the products could be better utilised to fit their processes, but are unsure of how to draw the actual roadmap. Enter TAM. Since they are dedicated to your company’s unique environment, the TAM will be well aware of internal processes and departments and will be able to strategise ways to customise the products in a way that better adapts to your organisation. The TAM also serves as a focal point to align your organisation with expert partners in order to streamline the handover process once any solution plans are ready to be implemented.
For enterprises that heavily use the Atlassian stack, it’s reassuring to know you have a technical product expert you know and trust working alongside you. The TAM is available to you year-round, but also performs quarterly onsite visits to meet key company stakeholders face-to-face, giving companies that extra comfort of actually knowing who they’re working with. The Atlassian TAM program strives to deliver more proactive, consultative and strategic support to enterprises who rely heavily on their products yet desire that extra edge to take their suite to the next level.
Data Center
Companies best suited for data center are those that use Atlassian products for business-critical operations. For some large corporations in the banking and finance industries for example, a brief loss of access to their JIRA or Confluence could result in an exponentially higher loss in revenue, which is something nobody is fond of (and is sometimes enough to get people fired). The data center offering clusters multiple active servers to ensure users have uninterrupted access to critical applications in the event of unexpected hardware failure. Crisis averted – and less firing.
Data center is also sometimes necessary for enterprises that engage in strict SLAs with their clients and therefore are held directly accountable for any downtime or outages. Companies in this situation require high availability and resilience of their instances at the risk of losing money and/or clients due to failing to meet service agreements with their customers.
The clustered environment provides high availability, improved performance and resilience and easy scalability for certain Atlassian products, therefore organisations experiencing issues in any of these areas are most likely to benefit from the data center option. The issues may arise from a number of different causes (unique instances with high number of users, data, or projects for example), but the solution is still the same. Many enterprises who have heavily invested in Atlassian have already transitioned to data center due to the marked improvement in these areas and to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences should the system go down. It’s enterprise IT’s best defence against system failure and its associated costs.
Tell me more…
Think this all sounds good, but not sure where you can find more information? Look no further – we has you covered. Valiantys has sold all of Atlassian’s Enterprise offerings many times over so you can take comfort in our consulting experience. We’re also in constant contact with our friends over at Atlassian, so if there are any changes or updates within their products and offerings stack, we’ll keep you informed. If it’s detailed documentation and informative brochures you’re looking for, Valiantys has plenty of those, too. You can also find documentation on the Atlassian website under their enterprise section here.
#Sold
Sold on Atlassian tools in enterprise-scale businesses? Get in touch with the team at Valiantys! You can buy any of the Atlassian Enterprise products through Valiantys directly, all of which are offered at the public Atlassian price. In this way Valiantys continues to serve as your single point-of-contact for licenses, enterprise offerings, professional services and local events and updates in your market.
