Atlassian + Adacel
The reduction in downtime is a big achievement. Before moving to Atlassian cloud, we had approximately 10 downtime events per year…this has now dropped to effectively zero.
Sonia Mina
Software Engineering Manager
0
Downtime events on Atlassian cloud, down from 10 per year
40%+
Time saved on reporting with Marketplace app Epic Sum Up
About Adacel:
Established in 1987, Adacel plays a significant role in global air space safety. A world leader in its industry, Adacel applies cutting-edge technologies to develop advanced air traffic control simulation and training systems and state-of-the- art air traffic management solutions.
Industry
Aviation
Location
Australia, United States
Number of users
300
Company size
400
Atlassian Products
Apps Used
Solution Partner
Adacel flies to Atlassian cloud for cross-team collaboration, streamlined development, and zero downtime
Challenge: Air traffic management leader Adacel wanted to improve cross-team collaboration and uptime, as existing Jira and Confluence Server products neared end of support.
Solution: Adacel migrated Jira and Confluence to Atlassian Cloud Premium, and extended their tools to both technical and non-technical teams across the organization.
Impact: Migrating to Atlassian cloud significantly improved collaboration across global, cross-functional teams; eliminated downtime; and reduced reporting time by 40%.
A cloud-based collaboration solution helps an aviation technology company fly faster
They might look clear on a sunny day, but the world’s skies are proverbial superhighways – critical to the ongoing health of the global economy. Figures from flight-tracking company Flight Aware shows there are around ~8,000 flights in the air at any given time, with IATA data indicating an annual inventory of over 40 million flights in 2024.
Australian air traffic control (ATC) management and training company Adacel plays a key role in managing these complex flight networks, offering state-of-the-art software for customers in North and South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Uniting a global group of engineering experts to improve ways of working
With offices in Orlando, Montreal, Melbourne, and Estonia, Adacel has an incredible global team of industry-leading developers and subject matter experts, split across four business units. The organization used server versions of Jira and Confluence to manage software development for over a decade, starting with a single engineering team, before progressing to all software development functions across all business units.
Adacel’s strong understanding of Jira and Confluence, and experience in customizing the tools to suit their workflow, supported a recent shift to agile development practices with seamless integration of Scrum and Kanban boards.
Operating in a highly-regulated industry, engineering teams and the wider business require easy access to project status updates. To simplify this process, the organization integrated Jira Marketplace app Epic Sum Up from Aptis for deep insight into projects, with filters that show only the information that applies to who’s viewing it.
We’ve found that a combination of Scrum and Kanban boards work for us depending on the kinds of projects we’re working on...Jira gives us the flexibility to create issue types and workflows to suit the needs of different teams.
Sonia Mina
Software Engineering Manager, Adacel
“Directors, product marketing teams, and managers routinely ask for immediate reporting on project status, especially when it’s closer to release,” Sonia says. “Epic Sum Up allows us to generate reports instantly, providing everything they need in an intuitive and visually-appealing way.”
Confluence has also been a key tool to help Adacel’s teams manage documentation, discuss projects, and share knowledge. “Confluence is well-suited to our teams because we work so heavily in Jira, and everything resolves straight away across both solutions, helping with traceability,” Sonia adds.
Server shortcomings spark a need for change
As Adacel’s teams and workflows continued to develop, Sonia’s team noticed the downtime required for on-premise tool maintenance was becoming more disruptive and time-consuming. Plus, if the servers went down in Montreal, all Adacel team members around the world were affected. What’s more, existing integrations with the company’s wider software stack were starting to degrade, and new integrations were difficult, costly, and in some cases – not possible. They recognized it was time to shift to a more modern and robust cloud platform.
Adacel saw that migrating to the cloud would also increase collaboration across their global engineering teams, who all work with Jira and Confluence. Instead of collaboration being limited to users on the same server, teams could collaborate seamlessly across different geographies. Alongside day-to-day work in the platform, bringing Epic Sum Up into the cloud would enable the team to further extend and simplify reporting, ensuring everything is seamlessly tracked and future-ready.
Taking flight to the cloud
Adacel reached out to Atlassian Solution Partner Clearvision – now called Eficode – to help migrate their Jira and Confluence Server products to Atlassian cloud. The two companies worked together to develop an extensive pre-migration plan; with risk assessments, reports, and ongoing meetings to ensure the best migration path.
“We knew we were going to move to the cloud, but we did a lot of prep work to understand what that meant. We had a lot of questions about the best way forward,” Sonia explains. “I wrote a test plan documenting the important elements and worked with Clearvision – who had their own bug tracking tool – to make sure everything was prepared adequately. That helped a lot.”
After the preparation phase, Adacel did test runs over a weekend to ensure key functions would work as intended, before entering the production phase. Whenever challenges arose, such as broken links or compatibility issues, they worked with Clearvision and Atlassian for fast resolution.
Adacel then worked directly with Aptis to migrate Epic Sum Up to Atlassian cloud, which was an effortless process that offered immediate results.
“Aptis were excellent,” Sonia says. “The migration of Epic Sum Up was so easy, it barely blipped on my radar. We’ve worked with them since 2015, and they know our processes. It was seamless.”
The cloud version of Confluence is nice. It looks very modern, and it has some cool gadgets and templates available on the Marketplace. We use apps like flow.io to create visual diagrams and I can even extract Python scripts from Jira and throw snapshots into Confluence, which makes it easy to share that kind of work.
Sonia Mina
Software Engineering Manager, Adacel
Zero downtime and “new levels of efficiency” with Atlassian cloud
Adopting Atlassian cloud has helped Adacel’s team to collaborate more than ever before. With all global teams unified on one cloud platform, people can work together seamlessly, projects are easier to manage, data is more accessible internally (while maintaining strict security measures), and maintenance is done automatically – without requiring downtime or manual effort.
Atlassian cloud’s always-on uptime is also a significant improvement for business continuity and project management. “The reduction in downtime is a big achievement,” Sonia explains. “Before moving to Atlassian cloud, we had approximately ten downtime events per year, mostly related to server maintenance, version upgrades, or just issue-fixing. This has now dropped to effectively zero, which is great when we’ve got so many teams around the world, because it gives us the confidence that they can continue their work.”
With enhanced collaboration tools and more integrated workflows, the team is saving significant time, allowing engineers, project managers, and support staff to focus more on strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down by administrative overhead. Atlassian cloud’s subscription-based pricing has also helped Adacel reduce costs previously spent on server maintenance or ordering new equipment.
Sonia says Epic Sum Up’s streamlined reporting efficiencies and automated data extraction save the equivalent of two days' worth of time for each team that uses it, translating to 40% time savings. Moving the tool to the cloud has extended these benefits even further.
“We started using Epic Sum Up in 2015, and we’ve been learning how to adapt it to suit our needs since that time,” she says. “Moving it to the cloud opened even more possibilities, and we’ve now hit new levels of efficiency. The newer features make it even better and help ensure that we’re moving at the right pace.”
Confluence Cloud also offers new capabilities that further enhance collaboration and traceability, such as dynamic data links in change control boards to show how a project is tracking.
“The cloud version of Confluence is nice,” Sonia says. “It looks very modern, and it has some cool gadgets and templates available on the Marketplace. We use apps like draw.io to create visual diagrams, and I can even extract Python scripts from Jira and throw snapshots into Confluence, making it easy to share that kind of work.”
The sky's the limit, as non-technical teams join the platform
The benefits of migrating to Atlassian cloud have permeated throughout the organization. Departments beyond software engineering have also begun to leverage Jira and Confluence for their operations, improving overall efficiency and communication.
“HR is looking at creating Kanban boards for tracking tasks and documentation, which has already led to some great results,” Sonia says. “We've also used Jira to log training progress, which is important for compliance in Canada because there is a tax credit initiative that requires strict reporting on training spend. We’ve now put a structure together in Jira to make that process easier.”
As Adacel continues to innovate in air traffic management and simulation, their partnership with Atlassian remains a cornerstone of their IT strategy and business vision. This will help the organization improve outcomes and empower their incredible teams across the globe to spend more time ensuring seamless movement through the skies.
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