The Total Economic Impact™ Of Atlassian Confluence

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Confluence

A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Atlassian, July 2024

Fast-growing enterprises with teams of knowledge workers want to enhance collaboration and unleash creativity. But traditional document creation and sharing tools lack the ability to help users discover relevant information, connect knowledge, and collaborate across tools and departments. The result is constant context switching and interruptions from teammates, which drain productivity. Atlassian’s Confluence is a connected workspace for content collaboration where teams can create, organize, and share knowledge across an entire organization, resulting in highly productive and efficient teams and helping deliver improved business results.

As organizations scale, they become more complex and fragmented — and so does the body of institutional knowledge that powers their daily operations. Work done within different departments remains siloed, making necessary information difficult to find, especially when a number of different tools are used. This disrupts the flow of business and stifles strategic innovation.

Ensuring that current information is broadly accessible and easily searchable is critical for organizations that rely on collaboration across teams. However, for most knowledge workers, a lack of self-serve tools and information impacts their productivity and creates constant interruptions, such as hunting down the right person to answer a question and context switching between tools. Despite an increase in applications deployed by enterprises to boost employee productivity, a study by UC Berkeley found that 49% to 63% of knowledge workers’ tasks are interrupted, resulting in 8 to 25 minutes of lost productivity per interruption.1

Confluence is equipped with AI and automations that turns disparate, siloed information across departments into a reliable and searchable knowledge base. Employees can easily find information, including critical information that is proactively surfaced to them when they don’t know how to look for it. Knowledge worker teams become more productive and help deliver improved business outcomes with higher efficiencies and better alignment.

“What makes Confluence Cloud really stand out is the AI component — the ability to summarize anything, adjust your message to fit your audience, and make automations easier for everyone to create. These features save at least 15% to 25% of time for basic content creation.”

Product management lead, professional services

Collaborative teams can derive significant productivity benefits due to the melding of many minds across levels of experience and diversity of thought on one platform. When project management tools (like Jira, from Atlassian) are tightly coupled with a knowledge management system like Confluence, projects and complex initiatives are delivered with faster timelines, improved innovation, and lessons learned that are easily documented to benefit future endeavors.

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 Confluence across their organization.2 The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Confluence on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four representatives of companies across various industries with experience using Confluence. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a global B2B enterprise generating $5 billion in revenue annually. It has 20,000 full-time workers, including 14,000 knowledge workers who actively collaborate on projects.3

Interviewees told Forrester that prior to using Confluence, their organizations relied on file-sharing tools that were part of a broader suite of enterprise-level productivity platforms. With these traditional tools, they often collaborated on documents, whiteboards, and other content in one tool, then uploaded them to another tool for organizing and sharing in the future. The process was cumbersome, and content remained disconnected, all while files were often only discoverable for a single team and not across departments across the organization. Limits to search, discoverability, and rich content resulted in the absence of a central source of organizational truth; the inability to access necessary, useful, and up-to-date information; and inefficient collaboration for project teams.

After the investment in Confluence, the interviewees’ organizations benefited from a dynamic, readily searchable knowledge repository. Confluence allowed knowledge workers to create shared spaces for enhanced collaboration and alignment at the team and project level. Rich content created in the process of their work is stored in a central place and is widely accessible to everyone, enhancing both individual and team productivity.

“Of course it’s worth the investment! It’s not just me telling people they need to use something. People are coming to us to say that they need the collaboration power that Confluence provides.”

Product management lead, professional services

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • Improved effectiveness of revenue-generating teams using Confluence, enabling increased revenue of 4% in Year 1 to 6% by Year 3.4 Confluence provides teams with a single source of truth and a shared space to brainstorm, align plans, and share context around their project work. Information is now broadly accessible and easily searchable, collaboration within and between revenue-generating teams is more efficient, and these team members are more productive. Moreover, the platform streamlines project lifecycles and leads to faster business outcomes. Team-based revenue improvement yields incremental profit of 1.6% in Year 1, 3.0% in Year 2, and 4.8% in Year 3. Over three years, this adds up to more than $11.6 million in risk-adjusted net profit for the composite organization.

For , the improved effectiveness of revenue-generating teams using Confluence might contribute to in risk-adjusted net profit over three years.

$11.6 million

Net profit over three years added by improved effectiveness of revenue-generating teams

  • Enhanced knowledge worker productivity of 8% in Year 1 to 12% by Year 3 for teams collaborating in Confluence. As Confluence connects teams across all departments, the composite organization’s knowledge workers become more productive. Workers can easily search for critical information, reducing interruptions and eliminating constant context switching. As a result, collaboration between departments is streamlined, which shortens the length of projects even while enabling teams to handle more complex initiatives. The composite gains overall efficiency, with a reduction in time spent looking for information; speedier alignment during live meetings; fewer interruptions; and faster, more informed decision-making. For teams that aren’t revenue generating (like HR, operations, or legal), measurable productivity improvement benefits for the composite organization also include:

    • With more effective one-on-ones and better preparation for meetings, managers and executives improve their productivity by 5.2% in Year 1, 6.5% in Year 2, and 7.8% by Year 3.

    • With easier access to relevant training and team resources, the time to onboard newly hired knowledge workers is reduced by 12% in Year 1, 15% in Year 2, and 18% by Year 3.

    Over three years, the composite organization saves $9.2 million from these improvements.

For , the enhanced knowledge worker productivity for teams collaborating in Confluence might contribute to in savings over three years.

Team productivity improvement with Confluence

Year 1: 8%; Year 2: 10%; Year 3: 12%

  • Reduced administrative expenses by 20%. Confluence’s platform requires less administrative support compared to legacy collaboration and knowledge management solutions. The composite organization is also able to reduce or retire preexisting solutions like whiteboards due to the functionality included with Confluence. Over three years, the composite organization saves a combined $330,000 from these redundant tools and administrative overhead.

For , reduced administrative expenses might contribute to in savings over three years.

“We are using Confluence for brainstorming, project planning, meeting notes, project roadmaps, whiteboarding, prioritization, and content collaboration. We are not just using it with technical teams but also business teams. It’s being used everywhere.”

Head of collaboration, luxury fashion house

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

  • Higher-quality project outcomes. Confluence streamlines collaboration and makes information easy to create, organize, and share. This results in faster decision-making, shorter project completion times, and the ability for teams to take on more complex projects without materially adding headcount — all of which contribute to higher-quality business outcomes.
  • Enterprisewide scalability and compounding value at scale. Ease of adoption and use of Confluence enables faster and broader enterprisewide usage — made possible by the scalability of the platform. Interviewees also noted Confluence’s cumulative impact organizationwide collaboration, resulting in higher productivity for the organization compared to the improvements estimated at the team and individual levels.

“We started [Confluence] in sales and then expanded that use case further to product teams. Then, we wanted to expand it across the whole company. The ability to scale was amazingly powerful for us. It is an enterprise-grade product.”

Chief of staff for the CTO, education technology

  • Improved employee experience (EX). Interviewees explained how their organizations’ use of Confluence started organically, building excitement among employees even before official deployments. Enhanced team collaboration results in higher engagement among and empowerment for knowledge workers, leading to greater job satisfaction.
  • Improved innovation and competitiveness. All interviewees stated that the power of Confluence was enhanced collaboration and knowledge management, enabling their teams to be more productive. What was perhaps unexpected and still in the stages of being fully realized was the multiplier effect on innovation — and therefore competitiveness — of deploying Confluence wall-to-wall across the organization.
  • Eliminated redundant collaboration tools. The quantified benefits for the composite organization measure the financial impact of replacing niche point solutions like whiteboard tools. The benefit of replacing redundant collaboration platforms could be much more significant when considering factors such as the reduced security risk of having less data to manage and faster innovation through a more simplified tech stack.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

  • Confluence platform subscription costs totaling $2.1 million over three years. Confluence subscription costs for the composite organization are about $95 per enterprise user annually. The composite has 5,600 users in Year 1, growing to 11,000 users by Year 3. Some additional costs are included for third-party plugins (which are optional).

For , Confluence platform subscription costs might total over three years.

  • Deployment, data transfer, and ongoing support expenses of just above $1.9 million over three years. This includes initial deployment costs over four months for configuration, comprehensive training for administrators, shorter training costs for all end users, data governance and transition costs, and ongoing administrative expenses that require three FTEs at 20% of their time.

For , deployment, data transfer, and ongoing support expenses might total over three years.

Over a period of three years, the representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $21.1 million versus costs of $4.0 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $17.1 million and an ROI of 428%.

Over three years, might experience benefits of versus costs of , adding up a net present value (NPV) of and an ROI of 0%.

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Key Statistics

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Benefits (Three-Year)

Incremental profit from more effective revenue generating teams Enhanced knowledge worker productivity Eliminated alternative tools and reduced administrative expenses

“Our agile transformation office gathers information on employee skills and organizational needs. The Atlassian product suite plays a critical role in leveraging that knowledge. Confluence certainly serves as a source of truth for our way of working and collaborating.”

Director of agile transformation, communications services

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment Confluence.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Confluence can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed Atlassian stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Confluence.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed four representatives at organizations using Confluence to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. 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.

  5. Case Study

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI 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.

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 ROI 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 Confluence. For the interactive functionality using Configure Data/Custom Data, 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 Confluence 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:

Erach Desai

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