Forrester study shows that enterprise companies captured $21.1M in total benefits in just 3 years after adopting Confluence.
Traditional document creation and knowledge sharing tools are limited in their abilities foster streamlined collaboration, especially across large organizations and in a distributed-first working world. The reality today is that work done within different departments often remains siloed, making necessary information difficult to find. This can lead to frequent context switching, searching for and verifying information, and jumping back and forth between multiple tools, which disrupts workflows, stifles productivity, and limits innovation.
Confluence provides a single source of truth that’s scalable. It’s a connected workspace for content collaboration where teams can easily create, organize, and share knowledge across their entire organization, resulting in more productive teams, efficient workflows, and improved business results.
In The Total Economic ImpactTM Of Atlassian Confluence, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Atlassian, Forrester interviewed real Confluence customers to examine the costs, benefits, and time savings enterprise-sized companies obtained by deploying Confluence across their organizations. The results were combined to form a single composite organization.
Forrester’s findings: Key benefits for organization-wide adoption of Confluence
Productivity boosts with one shared source of truth
Interviewed customers expressed that crucial company knowledge was siloed and difficult to access without a central place to store, manage, update, and share documents and information. Teams often dug through multiple databases and file storage to find the information they needed to get work done. This led to lowered productivity due to disconnected teams, frequent interruptions, context switching between platforms, and room for error if documents were not kept up to date.
After deploying Confluence, those same organizations not only achieved a single source of truth for information that everyone could easily access and search, but also saw average productivity boosts of 12% across all knowledge workers in the organization in 3 years after adopting Confluence.
Standardizing content, workflows, and processes allowed all teams to share and find information easily across all teams and stages of work. This improvement enabled additional product quality and feature improvements, along with $9.2 million present value of productivity gains by a company’s knowledge workers in 3 years, including a 7.8% average boost in productivity for managers and executives.
I needed a template to manage my relationship with my Vice President; here are our goals, here are our one-on-ones. The ability to have Smart Links within Confluence to display dashboards and track KPIs kept everything in one place. I used to meet with him for an hour each week. Now, I’m easily saving 20 to 25 minutes each meeting.”
Director of Agile Transformation, Communications Services company
Forrester found that standardizing all work on Confluence led to $9.2 million present value of productivity gains and a 7.8% average boost in productivity for managers and executives.
With the deployment of Confluence, employees leveraged AI-powered search and page suggestion capabilities to easily find or connect relevant information to the right person across all knowledge and work being created in the company. As a result, teams had greater visibility across all levels and parts of a project, required less time for onboarding or passing work between stakeholders, and shortened project durations.
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 company
The primary goal is to collaborate. Before, we didn’t work well with other teams. Today, we use Confluence to collaborate and track all our work. I can go to Confluence and search and find the information I need. It is all readily available.”
Head of Collaboration, Luxury Fashion company
The multiplier effect of enterprise-grade scalability
Multiple customers interviews by Forrester expressed frustrations with legacy collaboration platforms being able to hold up as their organizations scaled. These tools would restrict the number of users that could be supported, lacked essential features, and/or had limited integration capabilities. As organizations grew, teams were spending increased time and energy managing multiple tools and disjointed platforms.
Confluence allowed customers to create shared spaces for enhanced collaboration and alignment as teams and projects grew. After implementation, they noted the cumulative impact on organization-wide collaboration and productivity as their businesses scaled.
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 company
Within three years of deploying Confluence across the organization, customers saw a 428% return on investment (ROI) on average, equating to $21.1 million in total benefits.
An unexpected benefit interviewees found was the multiplier effect on innovation and results — and therefore competitiveness — of deploying Confluence wall-to-wall across the organization.
Enabling seamless collaboration throughout the entire company empowered their teams to take on more complex projects and broke down skepticism towards cross-functional teamwork, which led to improved quality of outcomes and time-to-market. Within three years of deploying Confluence across the organization, customers saw an average return on investment (ROI) of 428%, equating to $21.1 million in total benefits.
We tracked the progress of a particular team. [With Confluence,] they were generating 25% more capabilities and then were able to close those capabilities efficiently, getting up to an 80% completion rate.”
Director of Agile Transformation, Communications Services company
Eliminated alternative tools and reduced admin expenses
Most customers interviewed reported that the time and effort required to administer their piecemeal legacy collaboration solutions were cumbersome. In contrast, Confluence whiteboards were brought up as an enabler to reduce or eliminate similar tooling.
We have a tool proliferation problem and that goes back to our many mergers. We made a conscious decision to not renew our [legacy whiteboard tool] licenses, saving $90,000 in annual subscription costs.”
Director of Agile Transformation, Communications Services company
Other responses cited the meaningfully lower administrative effort required to support the Confluence platform compared to their legacy collaboration and knowledge management solutions.
Overall, Forrester noticed significant time and cost savings for organizations, totaling $9.1 million saved in just 3 years. This included an 18% reduction in onboarding time on average for newly-hired knowledge workers, and $415k in savings from eliminating alternative tools and lower administrative expenses alone.
Faster revenue gains
With the deployment of Confluence, Forrester found boosts in project-level collaboration and efficiency that shortened project lifecycles and delivered faster business outcomes even as the number of collaborators increased.
Forrester reported $9.1 million in savings over 3 years for customers who adopted Confluence across the organization. This included $415k in savings from eliminating alternative tools and lower administrative expenses alone.
Shorter project completion times not only led to faster time-to-market, but also had direct impact on revenue and profit. Forrester found that the improved effectiveness of revenue-generating teams (product development, sales, marketing, etc.) added over $11.6 million in net profit over 3 years after adopting Confluence.
In four years we have gone from 4,000 users to 20,000 users. In the past, we used to have a deployment of 50 projects with 200 to 250 associated features. After the deployment of both Atlassian tools, with agility services, we are tracking approximately 100 projects deployed by year and 1,000 associated features. We significantly increased our capabilities with both Confluence and Jira.“
Head of Collaboration, Luxury Fashion company
Forrester found that the improved effectiveness of revenue-generating teams added over $11.6 million in net profit over 3 years after adopting Confluence.
Read the full study
Check out the Total Economic ImpactTM of Confluence study below for more findings from Forrester about the benefits of adopting Confluence across all teams.
Use the calculator within the study to customize these stats based on your company’s demographics, and learn how Confluence can boost revenue and savings for your entire organization.