We are running Atlassian Jira and Confluence Data Center. I am experiencing frustration when I see that app vendors add new features to their Atlassian Cloud apps and we cannot use them in our on-premise environment. Why is that?
Atlassian has been focusing its investments on Atlassian Cloud for years now. Their most recent quarterly reports highlight, that Cloud is now their biggest business area with the highest growth. 90% of their customers start in Atlassian Cloud. And while both Jira and Confluence still have massive amounts of users in on-premise deployments, the speed of migration is accelerating. Customers move from their server and data center instances to Atlassian Cloud.
No matter if you do that as well or not. The message for app vendors is clear:
App creators must invest in Atlassian Cloud. That’s where growth is.
There are some apps like draw.io for Confluence that are very close to feature parity on Cloud and Data Center. But especially small vendors need to focus on certain areas and more and more choose to invest in their Cloud deployments.
So it’s likely that you’ll keep noticing, that a lot of innovation is seen on Atlassian Cloud and that the data center variants grow older. The challenge is going to become more challenging for on-premise customers in the future. As customers abandon data center and server and the total addressable market shrinks, vendors will be forced to raise prices to keep financing the maintenance costs of their on-premise products.
You will see differing strategies from different vendors. But overall it may be a good idea to talk to an experienced Atlassian solution provider about switching to Atlassian Cloud. You’re welcome to get in touch and directly schedule a meeting. We’d be delighted to help you.