Atlassian commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview four Confluence customers for a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Atlassian Confluence.¹ This abstract summarizes the TEI study results about overall Confluence benefits with a focus on the incremental benefits of migrating from Confluence Data Center to Confluence Cloud. Forrester conducted an additional interview with a professional services provider to gain more background and insights for this Spotlight.

Background Context

The interviewees for this Spotlight are:

• The product management lead at a global professional services company with more than $40 billion in revenue, more than 250,000 employees, and 50,000 active Confluence users.

• The engineering director for a global services firm in the APAC geographic region that generates more than $50 billion in sales, employs more than 400,000 people, and has 10,000 active Confluence users.

It is a coincidence that both organizations are global professional services companies. Confluence is used across a diverse set of industries on a global scale. As noted in the main TEI study, the interviewees ranged from communications services to education technology to luxury fashion in addition to professional services. To distinguish between the two interviewees and their organizations, this Spotlight will address the former as a global professional services provider and the latter as a regional professional services entity.

The global professional services provider had more than 20,000 employees using its Confluence Data Center subscription, with additional employees using Confluence Cloud via personal credit cards and accounts. When assessing overall security risk, the company’s IT and product management teams decided to centralize on Confluence Cloud. The product management team found that users were accessing disparate, siloed information across many departments. The organization determined that Confluence was essential for work productivity due to its extensive use as a collaboration tool. It also decided that centralized implementation with Confluence Cloud would provide greater value and that migrating the 50,000-plus employees was worth the effort.

The regional professional services entity had between 2,000 and 3,000 employees actively using Confluence on its self-managed server from 2018 onward. In 2019, the organization migrated from the Confluence server, moving everything to a single instance of the Cloud. Due to the productivity improvements built into Confluence Cloud, the organization could increase its active users to between 12,000 and 13,000

Why Migrate To The Cloud

Rapidly expanding enterprises with teams of knowledge workers aspire to enhance collaboration and unleash creativity. But traditional document-creation and collaboration tools are unable to help users discover relevant information, connect knowledge, and work together across tools and departments. The result is constant context switching and interruptions from teammates that drain productivity. Atlassian’s Confluence Cloud is a connected workspace for collaboration where teams can create, organize, brainstorm, and share knowledge across an entire organization, resulting in highly productive and efficient teams that deliver improved business results.

Confluence Cloud’s AI capabilities drive collaboration, data insights, project planning, and more. Users leverage generative AI to create and transform content and gather actionable insights from data. Knowledge worker teams have become more productive and delivered improved business outcomes via cloud capabilities, even as they have benefited from seamless integration with other Atlassian products such as Jira.

Investment Drivers For Organizations Migrating To The Cloud

As noted in the main TEI study, the interviewees’ organizations adopted Confluence Cloud to address ineffective collaboration caused by multiple, decentralized Confluence Data Center subscriptions. Interviewees cited challenges relating to siloed data, the lack of a single source of truth, information not being accurate or up to date, and a loss of productivity from constantly searching or asking for information.

The two interviewees highlighted in this Spotlight cited the following unique challenges with the Data Center version of Confluence:

• Limited feature set. Interviewees noted that Confluence Data Center falls short of some advanced features and integrations offered by Confluence Cloud. These include a lack of AI-driven functionalities, essential automation capabilities, seamless integration with other Atlassian products, and improved accessibility through the mobile app, which are possible with Confluence Cloud.

• Basic integration with the Atlassian suite of products. With the broader adoption of Atlassian tools, especially Jira, interviewees stated that the basic interface between Confluence Data Center and other tools was limiting. For teams using Confluence Data Center and Jira Software Data Center, IT teams had to perform manual and customized work for workflow automation.

• Administration overhead and security challenges. IT teams spent significant time and resources managing Confluence Data Center, especially when applying security patches and ensuring uptime. Different teams running and managing their own versions of Confluence also led to security and data integrity concerns.

Benefits Of Moving To Confluence Cloud

As noted The main TEI study outlines the key value proposition for overall Confluence Cloud adoption as a knowledge management and content creation solution that can: 1) power an organization’s content lifecycle; 2) provide access to discoverable, searchable, and validated information; 3) enable cross-organization collaboration; and 4) serve as the central source of truth across teams and departments, among others.

The two interviewees featured in this Spotlight chose to migrate to Confluence Cloud for the following reasons:

• Improved automation and efficiency. Confluence Cloud includes enhanced automation features that allow for scheduling tasks, flagging pages for review, surfacing relevant content, and notifying page owners. This not only improved content management but also enhanced overall efficiency and productivity.

• Advanced AI features. With Rovo, included with Confluence premium and enterprise plans, users can leverage enterprise search and chat to find what matters across all their apps and accelerate learning with personalized insights to deliver high-impact work, faster. Users can also boost team productivity, streamline innovation, and accelerate delivery with specialized Rovo Agents and built-in AI features.

• Unified integration with other Atlassian products. The seamless integration with other Atlassian cloud products, especially Jira, allowed knowledge workers to create a cohesive ecosystem for project management and collaboration. This integration enabled real-time updates and better visibility into project statuses, enhancing team collaboration. Interviewees also stated that the Cloud Enterprise plan did not require as many marketplace apps compared to the Data Center version.

• Improved mobile accessibility. Confluence Cloud lets users access and collaborate on content remotely using their mobile devices. Interviewees found this robust mobile support to be more advanced than the Data Center version.

• Reduced administrative overhead. Confluence Cloud reduces the overhead associated with maintaining on-premises infrastructure. This led to cost savings and allowed interviewees’ IT teams to focus on more strategic activities. Additionally, Atlassian handles security updates and maintenance of Confluence Cloud, reducing administrative burden and ensuring that the platform is always up to date with the latest security patches and features.

• Enabled whiteboards and collaborative editing. The cloud version includes Confluence Whiteboards for collaborative diagramming and real-time editing by multiple users. This feature simplified teamwork and reduced the need for third-party applications.

• Advanced analytics and insights. Confluence Cloud provides insights into user behavior, collaboration patterns by team, and content usage. This enabled interviewees’ organizations to better understand how employees use the centralized knowledge base and seek out areas of improvement.

Key Results For The Composite Organization

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with the investment in Confluence Cloud, Forrester interviewed four people with experience using Confluence who work across various industries. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization: a global B2B enterprise generating $5 billion in annual revenue with 20,000 full-time workers and 14,000 knowledge workers who actively collaborate on projects.

The results of the investment include:

• Incremental profit from more effective revenue-generating teams. Confluence Cloud provides revenue-generating teams at the composite organization with a single source of truth and a communal space to brainstorm, align plans, and share context around project work.² Information becomes broadly accessible and easily searchable, collaboration within and among revenue-generating teams becomes more efficient, and team members become more productive. Moreover, the cloud platform streamlined project lifecycles and hastened positive business outcomes.
  For the composite organization from the main TEI study, 25% of annual revenue is assumed to be driven by revenue-generating teams. Revenue-generating teams are assumed to increase their adoption of Confluence from 40% in Year 1 to 80% by Year 3, with a resulting revenue improvement of 4% in Year 1 that grows to 6% by Year 3. Team-generated incremental profit grows by 1.6% in Year 1 and grows to 4.8% by Year 3.

• Enhanced knowledge worker productivity for collaborating teams. Confluence Cloud connects teams across departments, helping the composite organization’s knowledge workers be more productive. Workers can easily search for critical information, reducing interruptions and eliminating constant context switching. The result is streamlined collaboration among departments, shortened project lengths, and enhanced capacity for teams to handle more complex initiatives. The composite gains overall efficiency with people spending less time looking for information; aligning more quickly during live meetings; experiencing fewer interruptions; and making faster, more informed decisions.
  As a result, enhanced collaboration in and among the team’s organization enables knowledge workers at the composite organization to be more productive and leads to shortened project durations and improved business outcomes. Knowledge workers for the composite became even more productive with a holistic, organizationwide deployment of Confluence Cloud.
  With more effective one-on-ones and better meeting preparation, managers and executives improve their productivity by 5.2% in Year 1, 6.5% in Year 2, and 7.8% in Year 3.
  With easier access to relevant training and team resources, the organization reduces its onboarding time for newly hired knowledge workers by 12% in Year 1, 15% in Year 2, and 18% by Year 3.

• Eliminated alternative tools and reduced administrative expenses. The composite organization can reduce or retire preexisting, competitive whiteboarding solutions since this functionality is included with Confluence Cloud.
  More significantly, the Confluence Cloud platform requires less administrative support than legacy collaboration and knowledge management solutions, reducing these expenses by 20% at the composite organization.