Is it just me who has a shocking price rise for JIRA 5?

[Hugh Prior]

Is it just me who has a shocking price rise for JIRA 5?

[Correction: Below I was incorrectly comparing our current renewal price with the future new license costs. The renewal license cost for us will be $8000 (EUR 5958) rather than the new licence cost of $16000 (EUR 11915):

http://www.atlassian.com/licensing/jira#downloadlicenses-2

Nonetheless, I calculate that, with the new licence structure, in our company our renewal licence cost will go up from $4754 (EUR 3540) by $3246 (EUR 2417) to $8000 (EUR 5958), an increase of 68%.

Although a 68% rise is nowhere near as shocking as the initial 236% which I calculated below, I still think that this is a huge increase for us who have little discernable benefit.

(Ref: $1 = EUR 0.7447 from 28th Feb from http://www.oanda.com/currency/converter/ )

End Correction]

I calculate that, with the new licence structure, in our company our licence cost will shoot up from EUR 3540 by EUR 8375 to EUR 11915, an increase of 236% !!!

This price rise is absolutely shocking! It is a totally unacceptable increase.

We are an enterprise customer, with many JIRA installations. The particular installation I am responsible for is a download licence that has around 1500 users, and for this we currently buy a “JIRA Unlimited users” licence which for 2012 cost EUR 2960 + 19.6% VAT = EUR 3540. Under the new licence scheme, if I understand it correctly, we will need a “JIRA Enterprise 501-2000 users” licence. This will cost us $16000 (i.e. EUR 11915).

Other than JIRA itself there is nothing in the Enterprise package which has any value to us: we have our own dedicated software team which resolve 99.9% of the problems without any help from Atalassian, and the 0.1% of problems we cannot solve are inevitably design restrictions, so the 24×7 online support is worthless to us. The JIRA training appears based on JIRA 4, but because we are an enterprise we are currently stuck on JIRA 3.13, so the training would be worse than useless, since it would confuse users. The JIRA Administrator Certification is a 1-day course in San Francisco; we are in Belgium, so it’s utterly worthless as a benefit. Enterprise Customer Community? Who cares. Worthless. Enterprise Team T-shirts (5)? That’s about the only thing of any arguable value. I make that about EUR 1375 per T-shirt.

References:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing/?tab=download
http://www.atlassian.com/software/university/overview
http://www.atlassian.com/resources/training/certification.html

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I can't do much but agree with Jamie - my large clients who will be seeing large increases in their costs are going to directly question what they get for an "enterprise" license and the answer is "nothing of any use to them".

If Jira Enterprise had something of real use, then they'd seriously consider it. Proper clustering (not "split and integrate"), massive performance improvements for large installations, flexible and fast reporting for project-management, and built-in archiving are things we could sell to "Enterprise" users, not the (frankly paltry) things offered here.

I know that Atlassian now have a new "enterprise" team and are looking at various things that large customers need, but for a price hike like this, they're going to need to implement at least one of the big-ticket items and include it as part of the new Enterprise offering. Very quickly.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Proper clustering (not "split and integrate"), massive performance improvements for large installations, flexible and fast reporting for project-management, and built-in archiving are things we could sell to "Enterprise" users

+1

[JamieA]

Hit the nail on the head. My clients would probably be quite happy to pay the extra for any of those enterprise items, or even a step in that direction. Or in the absence of those, per user not per user per instance pricing. "Enterprise" is not even the right word for this new offering.

[JamieA]

"then they'd seriously consider it" - but what's the alternative, not upgrading anymore? On first reading of the new pricing I'd assumed that my client would stay on vanilla non-enterprise pricing, as they don't want the extras. However looking at it it seems that that's not an option if you have more than 500 users?

[Andrew Frayling]

@Jamie - there is 2 years grace to stay on non-enterprise pricing - http://www.atlassian.com/licensing/enterprise-faq#jiraenterpriselicensing-3 - maybe that's enough time for Atlassian to have a bit of a think about how crazy the hike is without delivering true enterprise features?

[JamieA]

Andrew, yep, I saw that in your comment below. And no doubt my client will take advantage of that. But 2 years can pass quickly (you know what I mean), and we've been waiting many years for the features mentioned above. So I've no faith that they will be delivered within 2 yrs, and I see nothing indicating that they are even aware of this deficiency for enterprises in http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/02/introducing-jira-enterprise/.

[Dieter]

Thank's for the link, Jamie. i can't believe what i read there. Do they really believe this is what Enterprise customers need? t-shirts? Sorry, what Scott announes as Jira Enterprise in this blog, sounds almost cynical to me or in the best case a bad joke. Enterprise means scalability something Jira does not have. I'm really disappointed to read nothing about that. Maybe someone has more details?

[Andrew Frayling]

Yeah I know, just trying to find something to ease the pain :-/ Maybe if there's enough noise something will happen, or maybe I'm just being naive.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Yes, you're right, https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-7330 is a big issue for us and our customers, too.

Some even refused to buy Jira because of this. You will see there that SOLR was refused as a solution ...

[JamieA]

I would also like to know which enterprise customers they spoke to, as Scott Farquhar mentioned in his blog entry ("We created a new position “Director of Enterprise”, and interviewed hundreds of partners, customers and our customer-facing staff."). They asked us for some metrics, and we are row 6 in that screenshot. They certainly didn't ask what features/benefits we needed. And in fact that row 6 is not evidence of this working well for an enterprise, in fact it's the contrary.

I would like to know if the people they spoke to actually asked for Atlassian university and a jira admin certificate, and not the big ticket items. Forget the t-shirt, that's just Atlassian's signature joke, I've no problem with that.

So anyone here actually have that conversation with Atlassian?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Jamie, two comments

> what's the alternative, not upgrading anymore?

Yes, although it's more a case of "not upgrading because we'll put the effort into moving to another system".

> "Enterprise Customers". I had a chat with them. We focussed on the particular problems I'd had here at my current main client and a previous one (the big bank), which boiled down to quite a lot of conversation around archiving, although we did spend a bit of time on clustering vs splitting and "enterprise search" kept coming up (if you fragment your data, you still need to be able to search it from one place).

I vaguely remember touching on the University thing, but it was quite quick - it's nice to have it there, and I can see some groups of users would benefit.

[JamieA]

Thanks Nic. Atl Uni - we will try to make use of it if we are going to pay for it, sure, but it wouldn't be in my top 5 enterprisey requests... sounds like it probably wasn't your key request either.

[tier-0 grump]

Jamie, I'm not going to comment on the pricing - it's probably above my pay grade, but I can comment on what we've been doing with the metrics we captured from customers (seeing as my team has been using these figures). We used these metrics to try to work out the shape of large instances out there - we have then been building large data sets and trying to figure out where some of the performance bottlenecks are in large instances. To that end we've been exercising JIRA 4.0.2, 4.4.4 and 5.0.1 in a variety of configurations from 100K to 1M issues. We're fully profiling and assessing these profiles to identify bottlenecks, and then we''ll remove them. Now I appreciate this effort is not specifically aimed at 'enterprise customers', but it is aimed at customers with large instances, many of whom will sit in our enterprise customer space. We've already seen benefits of this work and improvements have already made it into JIRA - see https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-27308 and https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-27206 - and I can tell you we are expending a lot of effort internally into building the kind of enterprise features that you and Nic are mentioning here, and I can guarantee you that scale is at the heart of what I'm looking at in JIRA, and scalability is improving and will continue to improve.

[Beth Schaefermann]

I think the core message from users is that there is a demand for "Proper clustering (not "split and integrate"), massive performance improvements for large installations, flexible and fast reporting for project-management, and built-in archiving are things we could sell to "Enterprise" users."

I would raise my hand as a highly interested member of that market who is willing to pay for having those needs met. In fact, I am currently searching for partners/ custom solutions to resolve these issues ASAP.

The value I see in supporting JIRA through this "evolution" is:

(1) JIRA, IMHO, is passing out of the early-adopter (geek-only) audience, and into early majority. They are still a small company that has to serve an audience that is increasing exponentially. In order to scale to meet the demand themselves, they likely, naturally, have to increase their prices to manage their audience and support capability. I'm only working on assumptions, but i would guess they're challenged to keep up with demand. Their popularity and growing user-base is a very big value and attractor, because of community support and a widening population with experience using the tools. As such, over time, I can spend less time training users, and I trust these tools to evolve.*

*That said, i don't currently plan to buy into the Enterprise solution, because we just bought licenses and maintenance that cover us for some time. If I had to do so, I would likely be grouchy, but still pony-up, due to...

(2) The next comparable (enterprise) product in quality and features is significantly higher in price and also still does not deliver to scale. Again, it's just my opinion, but I like the products Atlassian has to offer, and just as much, I like the culture of the company. I want to give them my resources, not only because the products serve my basic needs, but also because I like the people and their approach. I need them to succeed in this so that my teams and business can be successful.

Now, I would like to add a few things to Jaimie's beautiful wish-list with my own prioritization:

• Clustering (Does anyone know what happened to Scarlet (http://www.sourcesense.com/en/events/scarlet.html)? It sounds like they might have had a workable approach at one time. I can't get them to respond to my queries)
• Performance improvements
• User Management Enhancements (specifically to map and sync project membership to a group that has repo access) https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/18118/how-can-i-limit-access-of-a-repo-in-fisheye-to-it-s-corresponding-project-membership-without-manually-creating-and-updating-a-group-for-the-sole-purpose-of-managing-permissions
• Reporting enhancements
• Archiving
• Enterprise community repositories for
  • Automated test cases (for Atlassian products)
  • Workflows
  • Project templates for import
  • Dashboards
• Significant improvements in Atlassian University; orientation support https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/31320/how-can-i-send-a-series-of-orientation-emails-over-time-to-new-users

Just to sum, I, personally, don't feel that Atlassian is trying to rip anyone off. I feel like they are trying to scale and support the need as expressed. I am, though, giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Scarlet is dead (Rhett is not to be blamed for that)

[Beth Schaefermann]

Do you know if it actually worked? Because we may try to reproduce what we think they did...

[JamieA]

It did work at the time, but this was back in the 3.13 days.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Beth, another one for your rather good list - federated search.

Totally random situation - Jira and Confluence installed and used for issue tracking and technical documentation. Second pair of Jira/Confluence installs (can't merge them for legal and technical reasons I won't bore anyone with). Third is a set of public documents, blogs, journals, web-content, etc, indexed by google and so on as you'd expect.

More obvious one - if you "archive" Jira issues, or split because of the size of an install, there's a good chance you'll end up wanting to go hunting through several of them for a theme/concept/specific info.

The user wants to be able to type in "XYZ" and get a list of things that might match in all of the systems...

[Beth Schaefermann]

Yes, but are you talking about many JIRA instances to one DB, or multiple DBs to one or many JIRA instances? If the latter, I could see how that could be a Big Hairy Booger of a feature to deliver and maintain, especially in consideration of applied role-based access controls.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Multiple Jira installations - across several databases, and then there's the wider issue that you'd want it to search other systems too. Part of the challenge might be that you've got 6 Jira installs on 6 different databases (from memory, an old client had 2 Oracles, one PostGreSQL, two MySQLs and one MS-SQL which I got them off as fast as possible, but even then, the versions of the MySQLs were different!)

I've no magic bullet for it, it's just that everywhere I go, people want the functionality of Google - type X into it and it finds X in all the systems inside the current organisation.

[Beth Schaefermann]

Hmm. That's sounds wicked in a wonderfully challenging way, but high-value. Likely an opportunity for a completely separate product.

[JamieA]

Yeah, it's a massive increase. Agree about the "enterprise" options, almost worthless. I can barely remember when the last time Atlassian support actually solved one of my company's support calls.

I wouldn't mind, if they were charging per user, but actually they're charging per user per instance, and absolutely refuse to negotiate on that point. Yet jira is inherently not scalable, nor can you properly federate project admin tasks, forcing you into multiple instances.

I have worked at companies with 11 instances for both of the above reasons. Add in Balsamiq, Gliffy, Bonfire and others, and you faced with a serious bill. How is FogBugz looking these days?

[JamieA]

Correction - Balsamiq have taken the sensible option and offer an ELA regardless of the number of instances. I wish Atlassian would go a similar direction.

[JoshuaJ]

Thanks for the feedback here. I'll provide a bit of background and context to the JIRA Enterprise offering and attempt to tackle the various concerns and questions raised.

Background

Scott (CEO) provided some background on his blog introducing JIRA Enterprise so I'd suggest a read over there first.

Last year at our Summit, one of our biggest take-aways was that we needed to evolve our focus on our Enterprise customers. Our products are being used in very large deployments and those needs differ from the needs of our smaller customers. As a result, Enterprise has been Scott's #1 personal focus this year and my role was changed to focus solely on the needs of Enterprise.

The feedback we have heard has fallen into a few categories:

• improved training of users: a lot of time was spent in tedious front-line support tasks
• a higher level of support (advanced customers, understanding configurations etc)
• scalability
• a mechanism for providing feedback on enterprise concerns
• specific enterprise features such as auditing and archiving and analytics

JIRA Enterprise offering works to address quite a few of these needs by surrounding JIRA with services, training and support in an attempt to ensure successful usage and deployments at these higher levels.

Pricing

With this change, new user tiers were added to better reflect actual usage of JIRA (as Scott mentioned in his blog). When we first created JIRA user tiers, we were not fully aware of JIRA's broad usage and so we have better mapped those out now. It is important to note that cost changes are limited to installations of over 500 users (those up to 500 can opt into Enterprise). To make this change smoother for that subset of our customers, we included two year grandfathering where all existing customers can continue to pay at their current levels without change. With the new tiers, we believe JIRA offers great value and services for the cost at these larger (2k, 10k, and 10k+) sizes.

It was also mentioned that some customers run multiple instances of JIRA internally and might face budgeting challenges once the grandfathering expiries in two years. We're aware of this and are working on an option for large scale licensing. This is very early on so I don't have any details but we'll have an option for this situation long before grandfathering winds down.

Scale

One of the senior JIRA developers, James Winters addressed some of our work scalability in his comment above. We're working to both improve the scale of a single system and also improve how systems work together in federation. JIRA 5 has some of those improvements and you'll see more in the future.

T-Shirts

I do have to mention that the included T-Shirts are a humorous throwback to our original JIRA Enterprise product from years ago where T-shirts were included (and popular I might add) and a standard of our culture. We're aware they are not an "enterprise" feature in and of itself. :)

Training & Certification

Atlassian University training will be offered on the latest versions. The largest UX changes were in 4.0 so once you are able to upgrade to 4.x or 5 it will be less different to your users even if you are not able to upgrade frequently. The Certification program is a new offering for us and the SF based training will be where it begins but definitely not where it ends. Based upon need and popularity we will expand and improve this. Certifications are an important long term initiative for us.

Enterprise Evolution

We made this change because we believe our customers will be better served by the new offering, whether a result of today's offerings or in the future. Both the JIRA Enterprise offering and our overall Enterprise focus will evolve and improve over time. I know that the change in costs coming in a few years for some of our customers is an adjustment, and we plan to convince you it's one worth making with continuous improvement to our product and the JIRA Enterprise offering.

Sometimes these sort of discussions are also effective in person so I'm happy to exchange emails or have a phone call with anyone with continued concerns or questions that are not answered here. Just shoot me off an email (josh at atlassian.com).

[JamieA]

Thanks for posting. Personally I feel that you should let bigger users opt-out until they feel that the add-ons are worth the money, rather than just left smaller users opt-in. The two performance issues James mentioned are really not big-ticket items, and also everyone gets the benefit, not just the customers paying the extra 50%. Letting people choose to pay for these extras would be a great advertisement for the company. As it is, and I'm sorry to say this, but it appears to me like you are just charging your bigger customers more because you can.

> We're aware of this and are working on an option for large scale licensing

Now this is something that my clients would be happy to pay extra for.

[MatthewC]

It would have been a lot easier to explain the price hike if Atlassian had actually done the Enterprise work before charging for it. The first question any client will ask is what am I getting for the extra money? If there was a Jira 5 Enterprise version that already had clustering & archiving then it would be a no-brainer.

Can you imagine the answer I would get if I turned round to my client and said, "I am demanding a 50% pay rise because I *may* do something really cool in the next couple of years".... there's the door, thank you.

I'd certainly agree with Jamie in that you're charging the bigger customers more because the pain of moving away would be seen to be too much. Feels a bit like racketeering....

Good will -1

[JoshuaJ]

@Jamie - thanks for the continued feedback. If you have some clients interested in a large scale licensing option they can email me and we'll get their name on a list to contact once we get closer.

@Matthew - our existing clients have the option to remain exactly as they are without change in their price for two years. We have already made some product (and service) improvements specific to enterprise deployments and there will be more between now and then. Thanks for the feedback.

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

Most of these comments are truly stunning. Stunning.

Kudos to Beth for a) having the nerve to share your thoughtful comments, with very useful input, among the naysayers, and b) sharing some reality and realistic expectations.

On planet earth, where I live - for fact, Atlassian is hardly ripping off anyone in this new pricing given the maturity of their product(s), feature levels, continual releases, and 24x7 email support (minimum) provided via support.atlassian.com, as well as the massive DIY online resources provided for free, which is far and wide more in-depth resources than just about any other Enterprise SW provider that I know (competitor or not).

Atlassian's new Enterprise pricing/value per user per year is still cheap cheap by ANY Enterprise SW measures. ANY.

Please do your pricing fact checking on comparable solutions with HP or Microsoft or IBM or VersionOne or Rally or or or - all of which are bit piece solutions, compared to the full suite solutions provided by Atlassian.

Regardless, whether you consider yourself Enterprise or not - their packages are clean and pack a powerful punch compared with ANY competitor. Again, if you can really find one, if you consider their FULL set of compatible offerings.

Finally - every corp that has a license now, that wants the new Enterprise offering in TWO years (which is plenty gracious grandfathering by Atlassian, imho), has plenty of time to plan for it - or sadly, move on/migrate to a more expensive, significantly less featured, or cheaper solution if you are too upset.

But even if you decide to stay, which we hope you do, it is STILL cheap, since you roll into the 50% maintenance cost - not the full price.

<Toto - we're not in Kansas anymore - but I *think* we are still on earth. Yep, we are. I'm sure of it!>

[Tarun Sapra]

Hi Ellen, I think you have given a very balanced opinion and I couldn't agree with you more when you say -

"Please do your pricing fact checking on comparable solutions with HP or Microsoft or IBM or VersionOne or Rally or or or - all of which are bit piece solutions, compared to the full suite solutions provided by Atlassian."

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi,

we are in the same situation. A new Jira license will cost us 16.000 USD, another year of maintenance 8.000 USD. And this is what I am really angry at: 50 % maintenance cost.

Usually, maintenance is 20 % of the cost, not 50 %. 50 % was ok, while the regular price of Jira was quite low. But now, 50 % maintenance is annoying.

Best regards

Thomas

[Hugh Prior]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. You are right. I certainly think that we will reconsider whether to pay the annual maintenance charge at all, and simply buy a new licence each time. The JIRA instance I am currently responsible for we bought the licence for in 2007 and I am not aware that we have have used any of the maintenance features in that time (we have not upgraded I am pretty sure), so it looks like we have thus paid 4 years (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) maintenance fee for nothing. I will certainly look at whether it makes more sense for us to simply buy the new licence each time since it is a perpetual licence.

regards

[JoshuaJ]

@brusselsshrek - I'm hoping you've been able to upgrade JIRA in those four years... trust me: JIRA now is an immensely better product than it was four years ago. In all seriously we're very interested to make sure that you are able to upgrade easier in order to make use of the maintenance program. The 4.4 has some pretty serious upgrade improvements in it to make it easier.

[Beth Schaefermann]

While the primary goal of clustering is to improve performance; there are some additional benefits:

(1) Assumed reduction of network latency tax for globally distributed teams

(2) Provide customization opportunities for really large accounts without the increased overhead/ noise in Administration in a single instance. Customized instances get hairy really fast. Our adopted customization policy is to provide a few standard options for the instance, and to approve custom requests for issue-types, workflows, etc. on an extremely rare exception basis with strong rationale for ROI. Ideally, Project Admins could create workflows, issue-types, and fields at the Project-scope level without exposure to Sys Admin, but JIRA doesn't work that way. Thus, the lock-down in customization at the system level.

As for size for 2012, I am looking at:

• At least 5 geos (London, Delhi, Miami, Singapore, Sydney)
• 2550 - 5000 active projects in JIRA
• 2550 - 5000 SVN repos
• 4,000 - 6,000 users
• 4,335,000 - 8,500,000 issues

Ideally, users and data would be managed without boundary.

We are using most JIRA products, but Bamboo introduction will likely come in 2013, due to the infra investment. We are using Jive instead of Confluence and are working with AppFusions to evolve their connector this year. We hope to upgrade to JIRA 5 in Q2 and are currently running JIRA 4.4.4 on Macs. I know. I know. But we already had the infra in place, and there was not strong enough rationale for the additional investment in Atlassian-supported hardware.

I'll shoot you an email about the community.

[Andrew Frayling]

The price hike is a shock, but you're able to stay on your current pricing for unlimited users for two years and if you want to upgrade you don't jump to the $16,000 tier the upgrade price is $8,000. See http://www.atlassian.com/licensing/enterprise-faq#jiraenterpriselicensing-3 for details.

Not sure if people were aware of those prices because they're a bit buried and not easy to find if you follow the normal pricing routes through the sites.

Not much of a consolation I know as prices are still going up, but it may not be quite as big an increase as people first thought.

And I do agree it's one hell of a hike and I wouldn't be surprised to see quite a few lapsed renewals unless there are some changes.

Andrew.

[Hoan Pham]

We are going from Unlimited Commercial license (4000usd) to 2000-users Enterprice (16000usd) exclusive taxes. All plugins also increased in price. The license change and price rise did give us some challenges. We are planning to rolle out Jira to all employees (2500+), now we need to reconsider the strategy. The budget had been approved now need to iterate another round. I am waiting for the new Enterprise functionality, but cannot ensure that we stay with you forever.

[L Taylor]

Good user management can keep costs down.

Remember to remove old users from the jira-users group as this will then mean that their presence doesn't count towards your license limit. I add old users to a specific group as well, so I can easily manage them.

[Trevor Samaroo]

Don't #@!% the Customer

so much for that.

I agree with the person who said :

"It would have been a lot easier to explain the price hike if Atlassian had actually done the Enterprise work before charging for it. The first question any client will ask is what am I getting for the extra money?

[Valentijn Scholten]

Interesting topic, especially since with JIRA 4 (or was it 4.2?) we already had an price increase of around 50-60% already for the unlimited user license.

If there's a demand for high level of support/training, it's good to have it available, but it shouldn't be forced onto us.

I don't think each large installation needs more support effort from atlassian (compared to smaller installations).

Actually, I rarely use support since it's quite cumbersome to submit all the required info and get the support engineers to understand the question/problem.

I would be interested in a license that includes updates/upgrades but no support.

[J Thomas]

I hope the JIRA Enterprise standalone Windows installation will come ready packaged with an x64 compatible Tomcat! If you don't need more than 1GB memory for JIRA then you're not really an enterprise user...

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

They now have one. No more replacing tomcat service files ;)

[J Thomas]

Yay, a faint light at the end of the tunnel for when we finally upgrade to 5.0... Unfortunately I need one for 4.4.5 :(

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

You can manually replace the tomcat 64 bit files (only tomcat6 and tomcat6w files). Just make sure you use the same version as that of the one that comes with JIRA. Works fine.

[AM]

Beth, you wrote

> JIRA, IMHO, is passing out of the early-adopter (geek-only) audience, and into early majority.[...]
> [...] have to increase their prices to manage their audience and support capability.

I'm just wondering if it's the right step to assume that running >500 user leads to need of services included in "JIRA Enterprise" and the planned "JIRA Enterprise" features.

Especially in environments with a lot of "jira-users" (read-only or sometimes just writing comments) and minor "jira-developers" (assignable jira users). In my case, the new pricing spoiled my planned Atlassian software budget completely.

If you take a look to the "Enterprise software" market, vendors ususally split pricing for features, users and services.

I'm not suggesting this for JIRA (especially not switching back to the beginning of Atlassian with different JIRA editions and feature set), but at least to offer:

1. different service levels for JIRA "non-Enterpise" customers and "Enterprise" customers (e.g. 8h x 5 vs. 24h x 7), instead of connecting it the total amount of "configured" user
   
   
2. or thinking about offering an additional license model: concurrent vs. configured users (I don't think that all configured users are always online in JIRA)
   
   
3. and probably JIRA editions with different non-functional (compared to features usable by users) enhancements like geo-clustering or distributed system, assuming that customers with >500 configured JIRA users != need all this upcoming new "Enterprise" features

And please be aware of the Atlassian "ecosystem" (Plugins). Most of the vendors took over the 50% renewal pricing policy of Atlassian, this will lead also to a massive cost increase for "Enterprise" customers in need of commercial JIRA Plugins.

As you mentioned, audience changed and I'm pretty sure that some business and mission-critical JIRA systems running out there.

But becoming more "Enterprise" like and reaching this level of investments will lead to new contacts in the purchasing departsments ;-) which will start to compare the licensing and service model to other "Enterprise" vendors.

So my hope is that the "Enterprise" team at Atlassian are still open to question their new Enterprise pricing model descisions and have the courage to adjust in case of new insights.

[Beth Schaefermann]

I'm not with Atlassian, but since you addressed your response to me, I am happy to reply with my thoughts. First, it's interesting that your purchasing department would make product comparisons and selections for you, but whoever does that will come across a wide variety of vendors and products that meet different feature/ scenario needs and hit different price points. Ultimately, the product you decide to invest in is your choice, but changing products, especially for larger organizations comes with hefty change management costs and a longer timeline for doing so; this should be a factor in making your case for budget to whatever governance board makes the decision.

The "approach" I said that I liked includes both how Atlassian is heavily focused on building community and how they have taken an ala cart approach to the build of the products, meaning that they have not built some monolithic monster that slowly dies over time due to the build-up of technical debt. If something needs to be ripped and replaced, they can rip pieces of it. Both of these things give me confidence that the product suite will persist, evolve, and succeed, and this is very important when making long-term tooling decisions.

As for the "Enterprise model" they have selected, I suspect that, too, will evolve over time as they gain a better understanding of the needs and can shape it accordingly; however, and I could be unique in this, but I like that Atlassian tries to keep it simple and fair with an open price structure that isn't specially negotiated from buyer to buyer.

Aside: It very much reminds me of the approach Saturn took to selling their cars. The price you saw on the sticker is the price - everyone - paid. Saturn, too, was very early in recognizing the value of community in building a great brand and product. If you can't tell, that's another company I dearly loved, and am saddened that they were eaten up by larger influences.

[J Thomas]

I'd also question defining an 'Enterprise' customer purely on the number of users - surely the number of issues, workflows and custom fields is a more accurate measure of complexity?

For instance we have nearly 500 active users but only 66k issues and nearly 200 of those users haven't logged into JIRA in the last month. 'Enterprise'?

[JoshuaJ]

@Ahmad - Thanks for the feedback and questions. Frankly I think Beth responded pretty much the same as I would have. As far as making more items optional - we are very intent to keep things as simple as possible in the pricing model. Every variable we introduce into the purchase pricing has trailing affects into renewals, upgrades, academic pricing, etc and so we work to purposefully keep everything simple. We want our price sheet to be public and transparent (quite different than other Enterprise apps) and very easy to understand.

@Beth - Thanks for the feedback and vote of confidence.

@J Thomas - We decided to stick with users as the measuring stick as we feel users are pretty good indicator of value derived and evolving requirements. You're right in that its not always correct but per the above comment, we want to keep things as simple and straight forward as possible.

[ScottF]

Beth,

Thanks for your clear and thoughful post. Most of what is on your list is on our radar (which is good for both of us!).

In terms of clustering, performance improvements and archiving - are they all aimed at increase in performance for you? If so - can you articulate the size of the instance you currently have, and are estimated to have? Assuming we could wave a magic wand and fix performance, would you still want clustering, archiving etc?

Your idea about Enterprise community repositories is intruiguing. Would we be able to continue this conversation via email? Email enterprise@atlassian.com if you have a moment.

Scott