In 2022, software development company Splunk migrated 11,000 users to Atlassian Cloud to reduce hardware costs and leverage CI/CD-powered automated infrastructure deployments. This year, Splunk presented at Atlassian’s tech symposium, Team ‘24, to share two years of insights into their team’s experience working on Cloud.
Read on to learn more about how Splunk saved over $500,000 and increased productivity across the organization through strategic platform management and enablement.
Background on Splunk’s migration
In 2020, Splunk implemented a company-wide strategy to reduce its physical Data Center footprint. After realizing that Atlassian Cloud provides enterprises with the ability to maintain a competitive advantage by promoting productivity and expanding bandwidth for innovation, it became clear that migrating was inevitable.
When Greg Warner, Senior Manager of Collaboration and Productivity Platforms at Splunk, began to brainstorm how to best approach such a shift, he worked with his CIO while leveraging past Atlassian solutions experience to create 3 migration musts:
- On day 1 the core features of Jira and Confluence must be seamless to use
- Zero downtime or disruptions during the migration
- Be flexible and allow space for different approaches as problems arise
With over 10 years of history on Atlassian Server and Data Center, Splunk had a large inventory of data to migrate:
- 2 million issues
- 3.5 million attachments
- 3 million confluence pages
- 6.4 million comments
- 40 apps
One off-the-bat win for Splunk was an approximate 35% time reallocation towards higher-value work by freeing technical teams from on-premise maintenance and obligations while offering more effective tools. That said, Splunk sees Cloud as not just a move for instant gain but for long-term success as well. According to Greg Warner, Senior Manager of Collaboration and Productivity Platforms at Splunk, “Cloud is a platform not just a collection of products.”
In the next section, we’ll delve into insights Warner assembled two years after migrating that he considers critical to platform realization.
Essential foundations of platform realization
By achieving platform realization users can experience the full value of what Atlassian Cloud has to offer. According to Warner, platform realization means approaching Atlassian Cloud as a platform with a unified set of integrable tools and collaborative capabilities rather than “just a set of tools.” Warner lists platform management, data accessibility, and expansion as three key areas of platform realization.
Platform management
Getting the most out of Atlassian Cloud means approaching the platform with the intent to connect all teams across departments on a unified data set with interconnected tools that also allow teams to work in their own preferred ways. Warner identifies three main pillars of platform management: strategy, governance, and maturity.
Strategy
The Atlassian Cloud platform offers a diverse set of features tailored to the proprietary needs of various teams. By strategizing how to manage the platform and its various use cases rather than focusing on siloed tools, enterprises can get the most value from Cloud through integrable tools across teams.
If we only have a collection of products, it’s often very hard to have a strategy that makes sense for all of these separate products. But since it’s a platform, we need to have a strategy to manage the platform so that we can focus our effort and get the best value from those use cases that we were putting on it.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Governance
Managing a platform requires governance to ensure stability and predictability for your stakeholders. When handling any changes on the platform, make sure to include all stakeholders, from engineering to HR to finance and everyone in between. Keeping users in the loop early prevents emergencies later.
The teams that you are working with are looking for scaled opportunities across the platform. So any time you make what you think is even the smallest of changes can have massive effects across the business.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Maturity
By offloading repetitive tasks, developer teams have the opportunity to work on higher-value projects. Since all the products and data are connected, developers can implement changes in a single batch and increase automation across the system. Team members with expertise in handling the backend can now train others or offer deeper insight to leads while also focusing on more impactful work day-to-day.
A member of my team who used to write the scripts that built the servers now focuses his efforts on working within our developer community to build their automations.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Data accessibility
Moving your enterprise’s data from behind the firewall and onto the Cloud platform makes data and assets more accessible across teams. According to Warner, by making a wider set of data easier to access across your company, “you no longer have those piecemeal bits that are preventing you from connecting other services to it.”
Enablement
Provide enablement resources to your most technical teams. Technical teams will be the first to integrate and will seek access to APIs while also exploring opportunities for automation.
Scale
Consider scale at every opportunity and make sure that your actions will be feasible long-term. According to Warner, leaders need to ask themselves, “Are we solving this for 1, or are we solving this for 10,000?”
In 2024, Atlassian scaled support for up to 50,000 Jira Cloud users and 150,000 Confluence users all while optimizing performance on Atlassian Cloud to support larger teams on Cloud per instance.
Question
Leaders have to ask themselves, “Are we just moving the way we worked on Server to Cloud?” To get the full value out of Cloud, it has to be treated as a platform. Migrating to the Cloud means rethinking all of your workflows to see what can be expedited by new Cloud-powered abilities. If your teams are just replicating their old Server instances, full value is not being realized.
Expansion
Increasing daily active users will help you get the most out of your platform investment. However, leading them there can be a challenge. Warner highlights three stages of action to help them consistently leverage your platform features: strategizing, measuring, and questioning.
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Strategy
Ensure that each new use case aligns with the platform strategy.
Measure
Check to make sure that your current use cases are thriving. Look at quantitative metrics, such as cost savings, as well as qualitative feedback from your users.
Question
Ask yourself and your team which use cases make sense to continue.
You also need to measure that your core use cases are thriving. Are you giving your developers everything they need? Are they getting the right integrations?”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Splunk’s post-migration experience
1-4 weeks after migrating
During Splunk’s first four weeks on Atlassian Cloud, Warner’s team was already seeing positive growth across the organization. At this point, still allied with an Atlassian solution partner, Splunk experienced three notable changes:
Quick wins
The migration resulted in immediate wins, including $500,000 in annual savings through tool consolidation.
There was an immediate $500,000 savings through some tool consolidation, and we could do that because we had the momentum. We had the buy-in from people around us.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Productivity
Existing use cases were now better served. Warner sought to ensure that the day-one unboxing experience went smoothly for teams across the organization. Luckily, the stack upgrade was seamless, and teams began to operate more efficiently.
There were productivity improvements straight off the bat. Productivity for our developer software engineering side of things was better served”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Company Alignment
Splunk achieved direct alignment with strategic goals. Splunk had two initiatives with this transformation, the first being to prevent data and asset silos, and the second to lower tool costs.
Those were really easy wins for us to have to bring those into the platform who previously weren’t there.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
1-6 months after migrating
After the fourth week on Cloud, Splunk’s solution partner ramped off, leaving Warner’s team to operate on Cloud without training wheels.
Technical Teams
During this time frame, technical teams started to build for and expand the platform.
We now saw teams that wanted to start to extend the platform. We had teams who were asking about writing Forge-based apps and how we would be able to scale those across multiple sites.”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Non-technical teams
Teams like procurement, HR, finance, and other non-technical teams, began to feel more comfortable operating within the new environment of tools and processes and also embraced automation.
We started to see that it wasn’t just the developer teams, it was teams outside of our core use cases who supported us to add more over time.
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
Adoption
Teams on the platform gradually began to support a future flywheel of adoption.
What I saw there was, ‘if we get this right, we’re going to have this ongoing flywheel of adoption throughout the platform.’”
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
“The Sticky Note Team”
In 2020, teams around the world were expected to shut down onsite operations and embrace remote work instantaneously. Prior to the pandemic, one of Splunk’s teams had been using sticky notes to replicate traditional scrum-style boards.
In the midst of the rush out of the office one team member took a picture of how the sticky notes were laid out before packing them up and bringing them home. The team member recreated the boards on their home wall and continued to work using the process they adhered to with the sticky notes.
In 2023, finance flagged that team for high Post-It Note spending. Realizing that Splunk had migrated to Atlassian Cloud, they asked their IT team if they could replicate their Kanban-related sticky note system with one of the tools offered on Cloud.
Warner realized that if that team had been operating with that sticky note system while Cloud tools were being offered, he needed to do more to communicate across the organization of the solutions offered through Atlassian.
Warner flags that it’s important to check in with teams that could be susceptible to being “sticky note teams” through enablement processes such as brown bag talks, office hours, referencing internal teams to sales teams to learn Atlassian features, and offering documentation.
To further enablement at Splunk, Warner leverages:
- Servicedesk opportunities to discover Cloud solutions
- Accountable OKRs
- Internal support and community channels connecting SMEs for searchers
- Documentation at scale
Splunk’s takeaways
How to pivot when expansion goes wrong
Sometimes, leading transformation means building incorrect use cases. While it’s critical to continue building compelling use cases to be on the platform, sometimes, specific tools just don’t fit certain teams.
If you fail to introduce new capabilities, you have to pivot to make them more successful. This means getting more in touch with teams to build better use cases while also offering multiple channels of education and enablement.
For example, Warner saw the benefit of Jira Product Discovery early on in the transformation process, but when Splunk gained licensing, it didn’t catch on as quickly as he hoped:
We didn’t have the documentation. We didn’t have really compelling use cases. It was a case of ‘if we really are passionate about this, we need to follow our principles about how we’ve done this successfully before.’
–Greg Warner, Senior Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Platforms, Splunk
And that was, getting back to scaling our licensing, self-service documentation, and making sure the teams were healthy.”
The Flywheel Effect
Each new use case within your environment drives a flywheel of platform adoption. These should be compelling enough to encourage employees such as “The Sticky Note” team to not only join the platform, but to dive deeper into solutions that could accelerate their productivity.
When they join the platform and leverage its solutions, these teams will enrich the data and enhance visibility for leadership. No matter the department, these teams help contribute a more robust set of data to the platform to make it more valuable when the next team joins, making it a better experience as each new user adopts the platform.
Data becomes more actionable across the enterprise through easy-to-self-serve dashboards and deeper reporting built upon a wider collection of data and context.
Actionable insights
So now that you have an enriched set of data, how are you going to use it?
Once Splunk adopted the Atlassian Cloud platform, Warner used Atlassian Analytics to observe:
- The difference in the number of issues created between months
- How capacity changes affected overloaded assignees on respective issues
- Lead times and cycle times of development teams
- Issue statuses and priorities across the matrix
- Regression checks on bugs as well as issues and defects across developer teams
- What they were actually delivering through the combination of work that was logged in Jira
By giving their most technical teams early access to Atlassian Data Lake and queries, they were able to write dashboards to handle more complex data observations that were observed in out-of-the-box templates. This enabled less technical teams to handle actions like headcount requests or issues in review in a much faster manner.
Splunk’s final thoughts
Warner concludes that there are three key areas that made his transformation successful:
- Strategy – This focuses and guides your next steps post-migration. Through their strategy, Warner was able to explain to his stakeholders what was going to happen next. His strategy of increasing the security posture, getting value from the platform, driving monthly active users, and driving adoption was both clear and accessible to further enablement while also offering their CFO visibility.
- Increase business value – By driving his use cases to the platform while decreasing spending in other areas, he was able to prove the platform’s value across the company while enriching the data on the platform.
- Take action – This means making your enriched data more actionable. Let teams know that this enriched data can help drive work forward.
Enhance productivity at your enterprise
Now that you’ve seen the long-term effects of migrating with Atlassian Cloud, what’s holding your company back from digital transformation? Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise operating in a heavily regulated industry, Cloud is more accessible than ever.
Visit the Atlassian Cloud Migration Program to figure out the best road to modernization for your teams.