Executive Summary
Organizations using Atlassian tools across teams and environments are increasingly prioritizing more unified approaches to licensing and management. The Atlassian Cloud and Data Center Enterprise Licensing Agreement offers a centralized model that can provide flexibility, visibility, and coordination, helping organizations align usage with enterprisewide priorities over time.
The Atlassian Cloud and Data Center Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) gives large organizations a single, simplified way to purchase and manage Atlassian licenses across platforms, teams, and apps. By consolidating licensing under one agreement, the ELA streamlines renewals and compliance, enabling organizations to scale efficiently while providing enterprise-level support and services. The ELA also supports flexible migration paths from Data Center — Atlassian’s self-managed offering — to the Atlassian Cloud Platform, and can help organizations improve productivity, collaboration, and scalability at their own pace. To provide the right foundation for multiyear transformation, the ELA bundles access across both environments — Atlassian Cloud and Atlassian Data Center — under a single agreement. This centralized model can reduce administrative overhead, optimize costs, and provide access to enterprise-grade capabilities, such as centralized governance, designated enterprise support, and the flexibility to shift users between environments.
Atlassian commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying ELA.1
To better understand the benefits and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four decision-makers with experience using the Atlassian ELA. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization, which is a multinational conglomerate with 25,000 employees and $5 billion in annual revenue.
Interviewees said before adoption the ELA, their organizations struggled with fragmented licensing and widespread tool sprawl. Teams purchased licenses individually, creating multiple disconnected instances that limited visibility, slowed decision-making, and made cross-team collaboration difficult. Managing separate licenses for Cloud and Data Center environments added administrative overhead and made standardization nearly impossible. Despite efforts to fix these issues, interviewees’ organizations continued to face rising procurement complexity, operational inefficiencies, governance issues, compliance risks, and escalating costs.
After investing in the ELA, the interviewees’ organizations now have consolidated tools, simplified procurement and licensing, cost optimization, cost predictability and an agile cloud transformation strategy. Key results from the investment include savings from license flexibility between Data Center and Cloud environments, price stability over the duration of the ELA, and savings from centralized procurement and licenses administration
Key Findings
Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:
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$2.4 million saved from license flexibility between Data Center and Cloud environments. The ELA bundles Cloud and Data Center access under a single agreement, enabling the composite organization to shift seats between Data Center and Cloud environments as needed. This also enables license tier adjustments without renegotiations. All of this allows the composite organization to use cross-instance access without needing duplicate licenses, resulting in 25% savings over three years.
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$923,000 saved from price stability over the duration of the ELA contract. The composite organization avoids customary annual price increases of about 10% over the duration of the ELA contract.
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$265,000 saved from centralized procurement and administration. Previously, the composite organization had 15 departments that independently purchased the same Atlassian products. The ELA allows the composite organization to centralize this function into one enterprisewide unit. This action eliminates multiple purchasing and enables accurate license monitoring and management, saving time and resources through the reallocation of sourcing agents’ time and efforts to other value-added tasks.
Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:
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Cloud transformation. The ELA allows the composite organization to run self-managed and cloud environments concurrently during migration, enabling teams to transition workloads at their own pace. While self-managed deployments still require ongoing security maintenance, Atlassian Cloud provides automatic patching and built-in security controls that reduce administrative overhead and exposure to vulnerabilities. The ELA gives the composite organization access to these enhanced cloud security features throughout the migration period, allowing it to benefit earlier from advanced capabilities in the cloud environment even as some workloads remain self-managed.
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Improved governance and compliance. The composite organization strengthens its governance posture by consolidating Atlassian usage and enabling centralized administration through capabilities such as Atlassian Administration and Atlassian Guard. Under the ELA, teams no longer need to conduct fragmented, department‑specific security reviews across isolated products and instances. Instead, centralized oversight reduces duplicative assessments and allows the composite organization to apply consistent security and compliance controls across its Atlassian environment.
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Enhanced support and engagement. The composite organization benefits from a support account manager (SAM), a designated Atlassian point of contact who helps orchestrate and prioritize support across teams. In addition to SAM guidance, the ELA provides enhanced support offerings, such as prioritized routing, coordinated escalations, and expanded access to Atlassian expertise, which together help the composite organization resolve issues more efficiently and improve overall support outcomes. These combined resources enable the composite organization to manage incidents more effectively and strengthen operational resilience during ongoing use and modernization of Atlassian tools.
The financial analysis that is based on the interviews found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $3.6 million over three years.
Key Statistics
$3.6M
Benefits PV
25%
Discount organizations receive when purchasing through the ELA compared to buying Atlassian products individually
Benefits (Three-Year)
The Atlassian ELA Customer Journey
Drivers leading to the ELA investment
Interviews
| Role | Industry | Region | Revenue | Employees | Atlassian Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product owner, enterprise IT tools | Financial services | Global | $60B | 80,000 |
50,000 |
| VP, agile tools | Consumer finance | US | $4B | 28,000 |
15,000 |
| Networking lead | Information technology | Global | $50B | 100,000 |
60,000 |
| Software engineering services owner | Diversified technology and manufacturing | Global | $38B | 100,000 |
20,000 |
Key Challenges
Interviewees described a familiar pattern of operational and financial friction before adopting an ELA. Their organizations struggled with:
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Fragmented licenses and tools usage. Interviewees noted that before the ELA, their individual teams and business units purchased Atlassian licenses independently, creating a patchwork of contracts, vendors, and renewal dates. This fragmentation made it difficult for central IT and procurement to see who was using what, where risk was concentrated, or whether tools were configured consistently. As a result, governance and compliance reviews were slow and manual, and leaders lacked confidence that they had a single source of truth for license usage or security posture.
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Escalating and unpredictable costs. As interviewees’ organizations moved from server to Data Center and began adding Cloud instances, each environment was purchased separately, often on different timelines and with different commercial terms leading to overlapping spend during transitions, underutilized or stranded licenses, and unexpected increases in renewal spend due to limited visibility into usage. Without a unified commercial framework, finance and procurement teams struggled to forecast software spend or demonstrate clear return from Atlassian investments.
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Operational inefficiencies and risk. Because usage and entitlements were not centrally managed, teams frequently ran into license caps and overages that pushed instances into read-only mode or triggered emergency true-ups. Admins relied on ad hoc monitoring and manual workarounds to keep systems running, pulling focus away from strategic work. These reactive cycles increased operational risk and slowed teams down at critical moments. The absence of centralized controls, combined with fragmented management, created challenges in maintaining consistent day-to-day administration.
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Procurement complexity and administrative overhead. The absence of a centralized agreement meant every new instance, product expansion, or renewal kicked off its own procurement process with separate approvals, negotiations, and vendor interactions. Procurement teams juggled fragmented billing and multiple renewal calendars.
Solution Requirements
The interviewees’ organizations searched for a solution that could:
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Provide tools consolidation and modernization to enable migration from legacy on-premises instances to Cloud.
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Support enterprisewide agile adoption by enabling cloud-first IT strategies and portfolio management.
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Simplify tools procurement by reducing overhead and provide license flexibility between Data Center and Cloud environments.
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Provide cost optimization and predictability by avoiding separate costs for Cloud/Data Center licenses and reducing overprovisioning, enabling multiyear pricing protection and tiered discounts.
Composite Organization
Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite organization, and a benefits analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the interviewees’ organizations, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite organization has the following characteristics:
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Description of composite. The composite organization is an international, business-to-business organization with $5 billion in annual revenue that provides sales, customer support, service, and warranty support for its products. The composite has a strong brand, global operations, and a large customer base. It uses various Atlassian products for both internal product and services production and customer support. It has 10,000 daily Atlassian product users with seven distinct Atlassian products in its tools portfolio and operates in both Data Center and Cloud environments.
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Deployment characteristics. The composite organization begins using the ELA in Year 1, following a three-month implementation period. The initial rollout covers 100% of the current Atlassian product users within the workforce and scales to replace other comparable tools within the organization by Year 3. The implementation includes all geographies and channels.
KEY ASSUMPTIONS
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$5 billion in annual revenue
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25,000 employees
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10,000 Atlassian product users
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Seven distinct Atlassian products in portfolio
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Operating in both Data Center and Cloud environments
Analysis Of Benefits
Quantified benefit data as applied to the composite
Total Benefits
| Ref. | Benefit | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | Present Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atr | Savings from license flexibility between Cloud and Data Center | $960,000 | $960,000 | $960,000 | $2,880,000 | $2,387,378 |
| Btr | Savings from price stability over the duration of the ELA contract | $0 | $384,000 | $806,400 | $1,190,400 | $923,216 |
| Ctr | Savings from centralized procurement and license administration | $135,720 | $89,712 | $89,712 | $315,144 | $264,926 |
| Total benefits (risk-adjusted) | $1,095,720 | $1,433,712 | $1,856,112 | $4,385,544 | $3,575,520 |
Savings From License Flexibility Between Cloud And Data Center
Evidence and data. Interviewees told Forrester that the ELA helped their organizations save on license costs due to the ability to seamlessly alternate license seats between Data Center and Cloud environments since those seats were no longer tied to particular instances. The ELA eliminated the need to duplicate seats for employees working on projects that were in both Data Center and Cloud environments as a consolidated purchase could be used flexibly to support work needs regardless of the environment. Unused seats across siloed departmental instances were eliminated, allowing the interviewees’ organizations to optimize license allocation at the enterprise level.
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A product owner of enterprise IT tools at a financial services organization explained: “We had 15 instances, and every instance ran as a separate license. You could be using 5,000 seats on one instance and 7,000 seats on another instance but had to buy 10,000 seats on each instance. We were always over the number of seats that we wanted. We had this big, sprawling, old-fashioned plant that was still running on server licenses that would cost a huge amount of money to switch to Data Center licenses. We were also planning long-term migration to Cloud and needed Cloud licenses, too. That was when Atlassian came to us and said, ‘Let’s talk about an ELA.’”
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A software engineering services owner at a diversified technology and manufacturing organization explained: “We are getting enough time to migrate our content from Data Center to Cloud without worrying about licenses for all our 20-plus instances. Without the ELA, we would need to buy licenses for 20 Data Center instances plus licenses for Cloud before migrating. Instead, this year, it is combined. We are getting it all with the ELA and so far, we have spent around 18 months on it. We are able to run all these instances in parallel and migrate our data to Cloud at our pace.”
Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:
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The composite organization purchases 35,000 seats under the ELA, spanning seven Atlassian products — 10,000 Jira seats, 10,000 Confluence seats, and 15,000 seats distributed across five additional products.
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Without the ELA, annual Cloud and Data Center license costs for these seats were $3.0 million and $1.8 million, respectively.
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Under the ELA, these same licenses are provided at 75% of the combined baseline cost.
Risks. An organization’s realization of the benefits due to savings from license flexibility between Cloud and Data Center may vary due to several factors, including:
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The number of independent siloed on-premises instances they currently have.
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The number of seats the organization currently has.
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The number of seats they truly need across the organization versus the idle seats being paid for before the ELA.
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The stage of an organization’s cloud transformation journey.
Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.4 million.
Savings From License Flexibility Between Cloud And Data Center
| Ref. | Metric | Source | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Cloud licenses without ELA | Composite | $3,000,000 | $3,000,000 | $3,000,000 | |
| A2 | Data Center licenses without ELA | Composite | $1,800,000 | $1,800,000 | $1,800,000 | |
| A3 | Subtotal: Cloud and Data Center licenses without ELA | A1+A2 | $4,800,000 | $4,800,000 | $4,800,000 | |
| A4 | License cost after contract consolidation | Interviews | 75% | 75% | 75% | |
| A5 | Cloud/Data Center licenses with ELA | A3*A4 | $3,600,000 | $3,600,000 | $3,600,000 | |
| At | Savings from license flexibility between Cloud and Data Center | A3-A5 | $1,200,000 | $1,200,000 | $1,200,000 | |
| Risk adjustment | ↓20% | |||||
| Atr | Savings from license flexibility between Cloud and Data Center (risk-adjusted) | $960,000 | $960,000 | $960,000 | ||
| Three-year total: $2,880,000 | Three-year present value: $2,387,378 | |||||
Savings From Price Stability Over The Duration Of The ELA Contract
Evidence and data. Interviewees told Forrester that the ELA helped their organizations save on annual price increases due to a fixed price over the duration of the ELA. They said that prior to the ELA, prices were renegotiated annually and they also had to pay overage if they exceeded usage.
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The interviewees said the ELA allowed for a satisfactory range for seats in their contracts, making them more secure in their tool spend. This enabled their organizations to budget effectively over the duration of the agreement without worrying about unexpected price increases. This stability helped avoid the financial uncertainty that used to arise from fluctuating prices and made long-term financial planning more straightforward. Additionally, the fixed pricing simplified procurement and contract negotiations, saving time and reduced administrative complexity. They said that, with stable costs, their organizations were able to focus resources on scaling their use of Atlassian tools to meet operational needs without being constrained by sudden price changes.
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The product owner of enterprise IT tools at a financial services organization explained: “If we were going to convert 15 Data Center instances, it would have cost millions. Then to add Cloud on top of that? But an ELA gives us stability because we can do a three-year deal. We get price protection for three years. If Atlassian increases prices in the second or third year, that doesn’t matter to us until the end of the contract.” They also said that price stability provided transparency and fostered trust between their organization and Atlassian, strengthening their collaboration.
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The interviewees said stable pricing also supported strategic decision-making, as leadership could confidently approve long-term commitments knowing that costs would not unexpectedly rise. The ELA enabled their organizations to align their software investments with growth objectives, ensuring scalability without financial barriers. They explained that price stability enhanced operational efficiency, allowing teams to focus on maximizing the value of Atlassian tools to drive productivity and innovation.
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The VP of agile tools at a consumer finance organization explained: “Our budgets are divided into special projects and operational cost. Most of these tools come under operational costs. At the end of each year, we must forecast. Will we need an increase in Bitbucket seats or a decrease in Confluence, etc. As an application owner, I should already know by just gauging the number of licenses that I am provisioning every month. Within the ELA I can move things around within the contract terms without going through an entire funding process again”
Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:
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The composite organization’s cost to purchase 35,000 seats for seven Atlassian products without an ELA would have been $4.8 million in Year 1.
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Outside of the ELA, this price would have grown at a rate of 10% annually.
Risks. An organization’s realization of the benefits due to savings from price stability may vary due to several factors, including:
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The number of Atlassian products used within the organization.
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The number of licenses and seats the organization actively uses.
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The fluctuation of use and how often an organization exceeds the number of seats purchased for each product.
Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $923,000.
Savings From Price Stability Over The Duration Of The ELA Contract
| Ref. | Metric | Source | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B1 | Cloud and Data Center license annual price before ELA | A3 with 10% annual growth | $4,800,000 | $5,280,000 | $5,808,000 | |
| B2 | Pricing after ELA — fixed | A3 | $4,800,000 | $4,800,000 | $4,800,000 | |
| Bt | Savings from price stability over the duration of the ELA contract | B1-B2 | $0 | $480,000 | $1,008,000 | |
| Risk adjustment | ↓20% | |||||
| Btr | Savings from price stability over the duration of the ELA contract (risk-adjusted) | $0 | $384,000 | $806,400 | ||
| Three-year total: $1,190,400 | Three-year present value: $923,216 | |||||
Savings From Centralized Procurement And License Administration
Evidence and data. The interviewees told Forrester that within the ELA, they observed savings from bringing purchasing and management of Atlassian products under one unit with enterprisewide visibility.
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Interviewees described how centralizing the purchasing of Atlassian products away from individual departments eliminated the need for multiple teams to handle separate purchases, freeing up valuable time and resources for other priorities. Interviewees said centralization also minimized errors and inconsistencies in license usage, ensuring smoother operations with fewer delays or miscommunications. Overall, centralizing purchasing saved time and operational resources, allowing their employees to focus on higher-value activities while maximizing the efficiency of their Atlassian tools investments.
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The VP of agile tools at a consumer finance organization said: “The funny thing was that each of those teams were buying licenses from Atlassian themselves. Some were just using their corporate credit cards, and we will have about 75 different instances of Jira. Imagine that within the same company, we would have 75 different [project portfolio management] tools that were using the exact same supplier. With the ELA, it was easy to bring such teams in first.”
Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:
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The composite organization consolidated purchasing from 15 separate teams to one centralized unit.
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Before the ELA, the separate teams focused only on the tools they required but spent significant time and resources managing usage manually.
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Before the ELA, the average team spent about 64 hours to research, perform proof of concept, and purchase Atlassian tools in Year 1. They also spent one day a month monitoring usage and interfacing with Atlassian to do license management and governance, totaling 96 hours each year.
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The fully burdened hourly rate for a unit manager who is responsible for purchasing at the team level is $72.
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After the ELA, centralized purchasing is done by two FTEs working 20 hours a week for one month to research, perform proof of concept, and purchase all Atlassian tools the composite organization needs. They also spent 5 hours each quarter reviewing usage and working with Atlassian on license management and governance.
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Purchasing after the ELA is done by two enterprisewide-level leaders. The fully burdened hourly rate for an enterprisewide-level leader is $100.
Risks. An organization’s realization of the benefits due to savings from centralized procurement and license administration may vary due to several factors, including:
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The number of teams purchasing Atlassian products independently within the organization.
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The number of products and licenses each team was managing.
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The amount of time used for license purchasing and administrative tasks.
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The pay rate for purchasing FTEs in the organization.
Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $265,000.
Savings From Centralized Procurement And License Administration
| Ref. | Metric | Source | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Departments involved with purchasing Atlassian products before ELA | Composite | 15 | 15 | 15 | |
| C2 | Time used for procurement and licenses administration per department before ELA (hours) | Composite | 160 | 96 | 96 | |
| C3 | Fully burdened hourly rate for a department procurement manager | Composite | $72 | $72 | $72 | |
| C4 | Subtotal: Department level procurement cost | C1*C2*C3 | $172,800 | $103,680 | $103,680 | |
| C5 | Centralized procurement centers after ELA | Interviews | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| C6 | Time used for procurement per center after ELA (hours) | Interviews | 220 | 40 | 40 | |
| C7 | Fully burdened hourly rate for a centralized procurement director | Composite | $100 | $100 | $100 | |
| C8 | Subtotal: Centralized procurement cost | C5*C6*C7 | $22,000 | $4,000 | $4,000 | |
| Ct | Savings from centralized procurement and license administration | C4-C8 | $150,800 | $99,680 | $99,680 | |
| Risk adjustment | ↓10% | |||||
| Ctr | Savings from centralized procurement and license administration (risk-adjusted) | $135,720 | $89,712 | $89,712 | ||
| Three-year total: $315,144 | Three-year present value: $264,926 | |||||
Unquantified Benefits
Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:
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Cloud transformation. Interviewees told Forrester that the ELA allowed for the usage of various tools seats for the parallel operation of Data Center and Cloud instances during migration. They said that being able to move seats while maintaining both environments during migration allowed their organizations to test and validate the Cloud instances while ensuring on-premises systems remained operational and minimized disruptions. They also said that the dual setup was particularly beneficial since securing on-premises Data Center instances often required extensive resources, such as managing firewalls, patch updates, and physical security protocols, while Cloud instances benefited from Atlassian’s built-in security measures, such as encryption, compliance certifications, and regular updates that reduce vulnerabilities.
The interviewees also mentioned that parallel instances enable teams to migrate incrementally, ensuring data and processes are transferred securely without overwhelming IT teams or risking loss of data. A networking lead at an IT organization said: “Under the ELA, we have access to Atlassian’s migration tools which simplify the transfer while maintaining data integrity and addressing security concerns. Running both environments in parallel also allows our IT teams to assess and compare security gaps, ensuring that Cloud instances meet organizational standards before full adoption. Additionally, the Cloud instance can be tested for scalability and performance while the on-prem systems continue to provide uninterrupted service.” The interviewees explained that this setup ensures users have continuous access to critical tools, reducing downtime and potential productivity loss.
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Improved governance and compliance. Interviewees told Forrester that consolidating Atlassian tools under an ELA significantly improves governance and compliance across their organizations’ technical ecosystems. They explained that the ELA provided centralized control over all Atlassian products, enabling streamlined management of licenses, users, and permissions.
A VP of agile tools at a consumer finance organization said: “This consolidation allows our IT administrators to enforce consistent governance policies, ensuring that tools like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket adhere to organizational compliance standards. Technical governance is now more robust as the ELA simplifies user provisioning, role-based access controls, and audit trails, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches. Centralized license management also eliminates the complexity of managing multiple instances, ensuring proper version control and reducing fragmentation across teams.”
Another interviewee expanded further about the benefits of the ELA on governance and compliance. The product owner of enterprise IT tools at a financial services organization explained: “Under the ELA, everything is now visible in one place. Atlassian’s built-in features, such as advanced encryption and audit logs, further support governance by ensuring data security and accountability. Automated updates and maintenance across the company ensures that our tools remain compliant with the latest security and regulatory requirements.”
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Enhanced support and engagement. Interviewees told Forrester that their organizations benefited from a SAM included in the ELA. They said the ELA provides a designated point of contact who coordinates support, helps prioritize issues, and provides guidance tailored to their organizations’ specific migration needs, reducing downtime and helping critical systems remain operational. Interviewees said that SAMs work closely with their teams to identify potential risks and offer solutions that help maintain data integrity and minimize disruptions. After migration, support teams provided post-incident reviews, root cause analysis, and ongoing recommendations to improve operational stability. Their expertise helped the interviewees’ organizations adopt best practices, ensuring that new setups remain scalable, secure, and efficient.
The product owner of enterprise IT tools at a financial services company said: “On our side, I have about 15 people that consolidate support tickets to Atlassian. Support is fully included in the ELA. We have a customer liaison manager meeting every week for which we don’t pay. They give us that for free; all the migration management support we need. Right now, we’ve got 100 projects we’re going to migrate to Cloud in the next month, [and] we’re not paying any additional cost for that.”
The interviewees expressed satisfaction with the SAMs and said designated support during migration not only resolves immediate challenges but also builds a foundation for long-term operational success.
Flexibility
The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement the ELA and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:
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New opportunities and future growth. An Atlassian ELA provided predictable costs and centralized management of Atlassian tools for the interviewees’ organizations, freeing up resources that could be redirected toward innovation and growth initiatives. With all tools consolidated under one agreement, the interviewees’ organizations teams could focus on building new workflows, automating processes, or enhancing integrations across platforms. The scalability of tools within the ELA allowed their organizations to seamlessly add users or expand tool capabilities as business needs evolve, without worrying about licensing complexities. Having standardized tools across the enterprise enabled teams to experiment with advanced features like custom configurations, advanced reporting, or DevOps practices without disrupting existing operations.
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Support for third‑party compliance requirements. The ELA enabled centralized governance across Atlassian platform, helping interviewees’ organizations manage compliance obligations more consistently when working with external auditors or regulatory frameworks. While organizations remain responsible for operating in compliance, the centralized administration model — combined with Atlassian Guard and Atlassian’s built-in Cloud security and compliance features — reduced duplicative reviews across siloed teams and provided a more unified foundation for meeting external requirements. This consistency allowed their teams to focus more on strategic initiatives, including transformation efforts, cross-functional collaboration, and innovation.
Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).
From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in ELA.
The objective of the framework is to identify the benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that ELA can have on an organization.
Due Diligence
Interviewed Atlassian stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to the Atlassian ELA.
Interviews
Interviewed four decision-makers at organizations using the Atlassian ELA to obtain data about benefits and risks.
Composite Organization
Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.
Financial Model Framework
Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.
Case Study
Employed fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of financial analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.
Total Economic Impact Approach
Benefits
Benefits represent the value the solution delivers to the business.
Flexibility
Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. The ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.
Risks
Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”
Financial Terminology
Benefits present value (PV)
The present or current value of (discounted) benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate).
Discount rate
The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.
Appendix A
Total Economic Impact
Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists solution providers in communicating their value proposition to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of business and technology initiatives to both senior management and other key stakeholders.
Appendix B
Endnotes
1 Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists solution providers in communicating their value proposition to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of business and technology initiatives to both senior management and other key stakeholders.
Disclosures
Readers should be aware of the following:
This study is commissioned by Atlassian and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential benefits that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in ELA. For any interactive functionality, the intent is for the questions to solicit inputs specific to a prospect’s business. Forrester believes that this analysis is representative of what companies may achieve with ELA based on the inputs provided and any assumptions made. Forrester does not endorse Atlassian or its offerings. Although great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this model, Atlassian and Forrester Research are unable to accept any legal responsibility for any actions taken on the basis of the information contained herein. The interactive tool is provided ‘AS IS,’ and Forrester and Atlassian make no warranties of any kind.
Atlassian reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.
Atlassian provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.
Consulting Team:
Tsih Formuluh Kris Peterson
Published
July 2026
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