JIRA Software and JSM Datacenter maintenance renewal cost

[Dawn Fama]

We upgraded our server licenses to Datacenter this year and are attempting to renew.

With server licensing the maintenance cost for renewing an existing license was 1/2 the initial cost of the full purchase. 

Is Datacenter the same? Half price of the initial cost?

I'm having problems finding that answer in licensing FAQ.

Thank you

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi @Dawn Fama

your calculation is correct.

Now with DC, our cost every year is 23,000.

Yes, basically correct. Note that the price could be raised in future (what just means: whatever the increase would be is the new value instead of the mentioned 23,000).

Regards,
Daniel

[Dawn Fama]

Thank you Daniel for your response, 

We were fine with our server version of JIRA/JSM and Confluence.  We only purchased Datacenter when we did because of the saving incentive to purchase sooner rather than later.

We really have no need for DC as we are not clustering, we are not using insight or plans.

I need to be able to justify to management or help them understand what benefit they are getting by paying more for esentially the same services.

Basically, we are paying twice as much for maintenance.  Per Kris's explaination above: 

Server licenses were perpetual wherein the license used to be valid for one year or two based on the duration you purchased it for. Once it expires, you only paid for its maintenance (upgrades, bug fixes, etc.) after a year or so. That was the reason you paid only half of the initial price. When a license expired in server and you have not renewed, you would not lose access to the instance but lose access to support from Atlassian. 

In the explaination above it seems server was a way better deal.  Datacenter will actually stop working if the license is not renewed?  With server, at least the software would still work, you just would not be able to get support.

Do you get better support with Datacenter than you did with server?  We apply updates and upgrade the same with datacenter as we did with server. 

I need to be able to justify the increase.

Also, JSM DC pricing for renewal for 100 agents is more than JS DC for 500 users and both applications are on the same instance.

Thank you again for your explainations.

[Daniel Ebers]

From your reply I see you summarized it perfectly.
Data Center is a subscription and the system will stop working when the license is not renewed.
Being a customer like you I can feel the frustration when it comes to a specific use case like you described. Using the solution without the need to leverage the included Advanced Roadmaps shows no benefit to you, I understand that fully.

For product and strategic questions I believe giving feedback to Atlassian would make sense. Here is not much we can do rather than explain the status quo.

[Kris G _Alacriz_]

Hi @Dawn Fama , 

DC licenses are subscription based in that, the price remains the same for a given product for a given user tier. Once the subscription expires, your instance becomes read-only unless it is renewed.

Here is the relevant link : https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#software-maintenance

Server licenses were perpetual wherein the license used to be valid for one year or two based on the duration you purchased it for. Once it expires, you only paid for its maintenance (upgrades, bug fixes, etc.) after a year or so. That was the reason you paid only half of the initial price. When a license expired in server and you have not renewed, you would not lose access to the instance but lose access to support from Atlassian. 

I hope that helps.

best,
Kris 

[Dawn Fama]

Thank you Kris, 

So by subscription based, do you mean our price will never change as long as our user tier remains the same?  So say our annual cost is 23000, if we had server, the following year it would be 11,500 ( for updates and support).

Now with DC, our cost every year is 23,000.  That seems a bit extreme!  So essentually, we are paying twice as much for maintenance and support every year. 

Our instance is self managed, we do the upgrades when they are released and have our own platform.  I could see this for cloud instance where the hosting is maintained off prem and all the maintenance/updates are managed by cloud hosting team. The extra expense would cover hosting platform and services.

Please let me know if I misunderstood.

Thank you 

[Kris G _Alacriz_]

You are correct in your interpretation about the maintenance part, @Dawn Fama . 

While you have stated the upsides of server, DC is for customers who look for high availability, have reservations about security aspects and data residency, though Atlassian is doing its best to allay these concerns from customers. It is generally advised for medium to large enterprises that scale fast and for those that prefer to maintain their software and hardware inhouse, have more control over when they want to upgrade so that users are not surprised when an upgrade is rolled out without notice (in case of Cloud). 

There are other reasons that may sometime give DC an edge over Cloud; again, it all depends on your environment and business needs. The following links should throw a light:

https://www.atlassian.com/migration/cloud/explore
https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/dc-or-cloud 

I hope that helps.

best,
Kris 

[Dawn Fama]

Thank you Kris, 

We switched to DC because of the advisory that Atlassian will be dicontinuing the distribution of server in the near future and there was a pricing incentive to switch earlier rather than later.  We were fine with server vs DC.  

As a government agency, we cannot migrate to Atlassian Cloud, we would need to use our own Azure cloud instance, which currently only hosts our agencies approved applications.  Jira Software, JSM, and Confluence are not approved to be hosted on our cloud instance.  We also use many add ons which would also need to be approved. 

Having an on prem instance gives us the benefit of administering and maintaining our own updates and changes to the applications.  My point is we had to switch to DC due to the advisory that Atlassian would be discontinuing server distributions.  We are now paying much more annually for options we do not need.  

There should be a maintenance option for DC as there was for server offered to existing customers.  We have had our instance since 2013 and since we have grown and maintain multiple projects from Project Management, Development, Support requests (emailed and entered), and general operations tasks.