Atlassian cloud journeys accelerated By RenWare and Tempo

Tempo and RenWare Inc joined forces to help organizations accelerate their Atlassian transformations. Our main focus is going to be on helping them migrate to the cloud in light of the sunsetting of Jira Server licenses. This case study explores how this alliance makes cloud migrations more practicable, and an easier sell for the reluctant on-premise devotee.

RenWare are an Atlassian Partner offering digital transformation services to Atlassian customers and those who want to transition to Atlassian from other platforms. They offer a unique zero-disruption Atlassian Cloud migration service and a newer service called the RenWare Atlassian Enterprise Solution. This helps business teams and other non-programmers get to grips with the Atlassian stack, so that the entire enterprise can centralize its data and workflows and achieve a single source of truth. It’s one of the reasons we’ve partnered with them, since we target our apps at users who can’t or don’t want to code to get things done.

RenWare also sell a couple of damn fine apps! They’re called Instance Auditor for Jira and Instance Auditor for Confluence and are basically the Mary Poppins of cleaning up messy instances. Namely, they use magic, ahem, automation to remove inactive projects, schemes, fields, boards, spaces, templates, and other clutter.

Moving to Jira Cloud without disruption

Most Atlassian Cloud migrations are pretty disruptive and force organizations to down tools at various points throughout the process.

But the ‘RenWare way’ is to download a backup of the customer’s instance into their own environment to work on it. They then run enough test migrations and establish all the required steps using the backup, so that when the time comes for the actual migration, it’s quick, clean, and like clockwork. RenWare will fetch the most recent live data at, say, close of business on a Friday, and have all the data migrated to the cloud by first thing Monday.

Lorenzo Phillips, founder and CEO of RenWare, explains, “The RenWare way of copying a customer’s instance and working on it in our lab is a key thing that makes us unique. We do it completely securely; our lab is only connected to the internet when it needs to be, and every data backup is isolated to no more than two people. Otherwise, the data is locked down and inaccessible, robustly protected by the same security systems we use to safeguard our own data.”

RenWare also manage cloud-to-cloud migrations in cases where customers have multiple instances that they want to consolidate.

We’re hoping RenWare’s expertise in cloud migrations will come in handy with our own customers using the Server version of Custom Charts for Jira, who are looking for support transitioning to the Cloud version.

More financially feasible migrations thanks to External Share for Jira and Confluence

Jira Cloud’s top tier has a user limit of 20,000 and Atlassian are working towards a new top tier of 35,000. This is still a long way off the unlimited Jira Server/Data Center licenses that some large organizations are grandfathered under. Many of them have way more than 20,000 users on their instance, so how do they migrate?

Lorenzo says, “Some of our biggest clients have upwards of 90,000 users on their Data Center instances. The only way of transitioning all those people to Jira Cloud would be to buy a ton of extra licenses. Custom Charts' External Share apps save our clients from having to do this by allowing specific Jira issues and Confluence pages to be shared securely.”

External Share for Jira and External Share for Confluence allow Atlassian users to create secure links to live versions of actual issues and pages, where they can add comments and attachments and get notifications of changes and updates. These apps maximize collaboration inside Jira and Confluence, simultaneously bypassing the need for more licenses.

“External Share provides a solution for those organizations who can’t transition all their people to the cloud,” says Lorenzo. “With External Share, they don’t have to. They can just share issues and pages as and when they need to with teams and users who otherwise don’t need access to their instance. It’s actually going to be more cost-effective for all of our clients to be using External Share instead of buying licenses they don’t really need.”

Better Jira reporting post-migration

The other reason RenWare were drawn to partner with us was our expertise in cloud solutions for reporting and data storytelling. Native Jira reporting is limited and a common complaint among many of RenWare’s customers. Its limitations are the reason we developed Custom Charts for Jira, which enables customers to create and customize charts using drag and drop and an intuitive search gadget. So, migrating your instance to the cloud the ‘RenWare way’ is an excellent time to be introducing some better and easier-to-use reporting capabilities.

Lorenzo explains, “Many of our clients have been forced to use EazyBI, but EazyBI is too complex and you need to understand Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) to use it, leaving a lot of our end users without decent reporting.”

In particular, RenWare engages with a lot of C-level users who have no desire to be inundated with technological possibilities in their reporting. “As you go up the chain, no one wants to be writing Jira Query Language (JQL) filters,” says Lorenzo. “They just want the thing to work. With Custom Charts, it does. The search gadget lets you easily change and customize your charts without writing any code whatsoever.”

“In the short term, we want this partnership to help us solidify our solution offerings. But in the long term, we like that Tempo aren’t traditional, uptight, or corporate, and that they do things outside the box. We’re hoping that the backing of a reputable company such as this will help RenWare to grow in much the same way.”