[Success Story]
With over 9,200 employees and expected annual sales of over EUR 1 billion in 2023, adesso Group is one of the largest German IT service providers with excellent growth prospects.
Details at a glance
The client
- adesso Group - www.adesso.de/
The requirement
- Transparent design and central management of Atlassian licenses
The solution
- Jira software
- Confluence
- Jira Service Management
The benefits
- Flexibility through scaled growth
- Cost optimization through price fixing
If product licenses are managed decentrally, this can lead to unnecessary duplicate licenses and high costs. As a fast-growing company, it was also an increasing challenge for adesso to maintain a complete overview of the license management of Atlassian products. With the support of catworkx, adesso therefore implemented the "Atlassian-as-a-Service" (SaaS) model, with which all licenses are combined under one license key and managed via the central IT department. adesso can thus not only license according to demand and save expenses, but above all benefits from a fixed price for the contract period. The model also enables the organizational structure to be replicated as required, allowing the company to grow at scale.
Unnecessary costs due to a lack of transparency and duplicate licensing
Atlassian's product range offers a wide variety of possible applications: From planning and managing tasks to improving collaboration and project management. adesso, a listed consulting and IT services company from Dortmund, has also been using the Atlassian product range for many years. However, as the company grows in size, more and more departments and employees are using different Atlassian products - and for the most part completely independently of each other. The increasing demand and the lack of consolidation of the Atlassian portfolio meant that over time it became increasingly difficult to keep track of the licenses in use. Above all, duplicate licenses caused costs to rise unnecessarily. The core requirement at adesso was to create transparency in the licensing of Atlassian products by centralizing the fragmented license management. This should avoid duplicate licenses and save costs.
Comprehensive license overview as a basis for decision-making
The joint project started in April 2022. The first step was for the catworkx experts to gain an overview of all current licenses. The following questions were broken down:
- Which products are in use across the company?
- How many users are there?
- What are the current costs?
- When do which licenses expire?
The main difficulty here was that some of the licenses were procured and managed decentrally. In order to obtain a complete overview, catworkx worked closely with adesso and Atlassian. After the inventory, the current license usage was compared with the actual license requirements in order to create a rough calculation of how many licenses and users would be needed in the future. Possible solutions were then designed and scenarios run through. In the end, the hybrid umbrella model was chosen, according to which Atlassian is provided as Software-as-a-Service.
What our customer says:
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Slawomir Jelonek IT-Procurementadesso Group
It was very important to us that it was not just a technical fit, but above all a human fit - because people do business, not machines. Our positive experiences from the past made it easy for us to decide to rely on the experts at catworkx.
In order to manage the Atlassian licenses centrally, the catworkx experts implemented the "Atlassian-as-a-Service" model. This means that all Atlassian products are combined via license management in the central IT department. This central point gives adesso a complete overview of all license distributions and users. In addition, this model enables needs-based licensing of Atlassian products and precise billing of costs per user or business unit.
"We ultimately opted for the Enterprise version because it gives us significantly more flexibility in terms of licensing. The fact that we save a lot of money per user is of course great," says Slawomir Jelonek, IT Procurement at adesso.
The contract for the umbrella model was concluded for three years. During this time, the service company will benefit exclusively from two key advantages:
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Flexibility through scaled growth:
The model enables the organizational structure to be replicated as required. From the implemented central IT, adesso can grow in a scaled manner and license products for new business units independently and easily under this license key. The umbrella model simplifies the handling of licenses and enables a complete overview of the licenses and their users. This eliminates multiple licenses across companies.
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Cost optimization through price fixing:
With price consolidation, 11 percent of user costs can be saved, which represents an enormous cost reduction for 3500 users. In addition, adesso benefits from the price stability as well as the price-fixed option to purchase Atlassian products as an exclusive advantage of the "Atlassian-as-a-Service" model. This means that the Atlassian products used by adesso remain unaffected by price increases.
"There were initially some internal concerns about the new model. Here, the experts at catworkx provided us with excellent support in convincing all stakeholders of the advantages of the model," says Slawomir Jelonek.
Atlassian as a company-wide service
In the end, the project was successfully implemented. The catworkx experts consolidated all domains and instances in a central license management system. This centralization of licenses and user management gives adesso full transparency and enables it not only to optimize its license purchasing, but above all to prevent duplicate licensing of Atlassian products. The result is reduced costs of 11 percent per user.
"For a collaboration to work so well, a goal-oriented exchange is important. With the committed and competent catworkx experts, communication was always open and at eye level - I really liked that," says Slawomir Jelonek.
adesso offers the products Jira Software, Confluence and Jira Service Management in the SaaS model for currently 3500 users, while all users are managed via a central user directory. In the future, the service company will also be able to add new company acquisitions to the model at any time and thus grow at scale. As a result, adesso benefits from both a multi-year fixed price and a high degree of flexibility. Requests can be managed independently and new Atlassian domains can be created autonomously at any time in order to meet the constantly growing demand for Atlassian products. At the same time, adesso benefits from Atlassian's highest security and enterprise standards.