3 steps to convince your team it’s time to get Data Center

It’s a brand new year, and with it will come a brand new budgeting cycle. Something many wait for, and maybe even dread to some extent! You start thinking about the tools and services that could accelerate your business results. Perhaps you’ve already spent months evaluating something, and now really want to make the case for it.

Has the feeling of dread come over you yet? Those people responsible for the approval – your team, your boss, procurement – may not have seen the amazing benefits that you have seen. How do you convince them to carve out a significant chunk of the team’s budget for the tool or service you’re recommending?

We often talk to admins of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and other Atlassian Server products who face this question when they want to upgrade to Data Center products. They see rapid growth in usage and users, and notice that teams use these applications every day. They need more guarantees of uptime and performance at scale than their single-node Server applications can deliver. So they learn about, and evaluate, Data Center products. Here’s what we tell them when they get ready to build a business case and convince their team and their boss that it’s time to get a Data Center product:

1. Clearly describe what value Data Center can deliver to your organization

Your team or perhaps your boss didn’t go down this evaluation path with you, so help them reach the same conclusion. You are the expert at this, and definitely the best person to help them understand why you think your team or company will benefit.

Can you write down the 2 key benefits you identified that are very relevant to your situation?

• Perhaps this is about reducing planned and unplanned downtime because a lot of your teams use these products and can’t get their jobs done without them.
• Or perhaps it’s about making sure that as new users from the latest acquisition your company made start using these products, they see good performance.
• It could even be about needing to manage user authentication with SAML SSO.

Also see if you can find an example customer who may be similar to you. This will help if your boss wants to know “if someone like us uses this product”. From LinkedIn with Jira Software Data Center to Mitchell International with Confluence Data Center, you can find a customer example that is similar to your organization.

Pro tip: Check out this article to find more ideas on information your team may find valuable.

2. Prove that the timing is right

Everyone wants to know “if we really need this right now”.

Atlassian has worked with thousands of enterprises like yours, so we’ve been able to gather some numbers that can help both your evaluation process and help you convince your team. You can check out this whitepaper for more details.

• Number of users: Is your Atlassian Server installation at the 500-2000 user tier, and/or do you have hundreds of concurrent users?
  60% of Jira Software and Confluence Data Center customers upgrade to this offering from Server at the 500-2000 user tier, so this could be the right time for your organization.
• Jira issues: Is your Jira issue count in the hundreds of thousands?
  At this point, you’ve slowly started to outgrow your Server installation’s limits to serve your team with the same high SLA you promised. It’s a good idea to proactively move to Data Center.
• Distributed teams using Bitbucket: Are the clone and fetch times in Bitbucket distributed repositories in hours?
  Those are lost work hours for your teams. Bitbucket Data Center can bring this down to minutes, improving productivity for distributed teams. The number of lost work hours are something you can share with your team as a motivator for moving to Data Center.
• Planned or unplanned downtime: Is your team giving up multiple nights and weekends to maintain Atlassian applications, to ensure high uptime during work hours?
  This is reduced quality of life for your team. With Data Center products, you can minimize planned and unplanned downtime. So you can share with your boss how many hours of maintenance-related downtime you can avoid by upgrading to Data Center.

Pro tip: See if you can connect these numbers to the 2 benefits you identified previously.

3. Quantify the benefit

This is the clincher. Everyone sees the benefit, everyone understands this is the right time.

But they are attaching hard dollar amounts to this. Bring your own dollar amount – what will the organization save?

The biggest benefit our enterprise customers see is in saved person-hours of productivity. When there is downtime due to a maintenance window or even due to performance issues as many users use the system, hours are lost as people can’t get their work done. This results in increased workforce expenses for your company. Did you know that workforce expenses are one of the biggest cost items for any company? With Data Center products dramatically reducing such issues and hence avoiding increased workforce expenses, you could be saving your company a lot of money.

Here is a simple formula to quantify these savings:
Cost per 1 hour of downtime = average salary of a developer per hour * number of developers

A simple formula to quantify these savings:
Cost per 1 hour of downtime = average salary of a developer per hour * number of developers

For example, using the average pay for a software engineer in the US and approximately 2087 working hours in a year:

Cost per 1 hour of downtime for an organization of 500 developers = >$19,000!

You could also show a comparison with Data Center licensing cost, which is <$19,000 for a 500-user license for Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket.

Pro tip: Show that even delivering one additional hour of uptime as compared to your Server installation would help your organization recoup what it spent on a Data Center product!

Bonus pro tip: We’ve already done some of the work for you! Download this ready-to-use business case presentation template for Jira Software Data Center. Or check out this short guide for everything you need to make a case for Bitbucket Data Center.

So that’s it – 3 steps to identify and confidently share the information your organization needs to support your request. In fact, I recommend doing this analysis during your evaluation phase itself – then you know for sure that it’s time to get Data Center products.