I’m happy to report that today Atlassian launched Confluence Hosted, an exciting new way for more people to use the world’s most popular enterprise wiki. Confluence Hosted allows companies to sign-up and immediately begin using the service, without need for the lengthy deployment cycles demanded by most internal IT organizations; bypass the installation, testing, distribution, and other implementation processes and go straight to using the product. Upgrades are performed automatically and invisibly, so our customers will always be running on the latest version and have the benefit of the latest enhancements and bug fixes.
One of the greatest promises of software as a service (SaaS) is flexibility – flexibility to start small and grow as you add users or groups; flexibility to pay for only what you’re using; flexibility to access the software from anywhere. Wikis by nature spread virally; often a single group will begin using Confluence, and other departments catch on and quickly the wiki becomes the default collaborative platform for the company. While developing Confluence Hosted, we focused on flexibility with more user tiers (starting at 15 users) and very affordable pricing ($49/month for the 15-user version). Grow beyond 15 users? Move to the 25-user version for $89/month. Confluence Hosted grows with you.
We’ve worked hard to ensure that many of the enterprise features available in our traditional install version are also included in the hosted version. Unlimited pages and spaces, file uploads and versioning, enterprise-level permissioning, it’s all there. We don’t charge more for additional features; the 15-user version shares the same feature set as the 500-user version. And if at any time you decide you want to move your Confluence spaces behind the corporate firewall, we make migrating your data easy.
Enterprise features are important, but just as important is the dependability of the hardware and network that are hosting the application. For this reason we chose Contegix as our partner. We’ve been working with Contegix for years, and are consistently amazed by their level of service and dependability.
This is only the beginning for Atlassian hosted services, both for Confluence and for our other products. Of all our applications, the wiki is the most natural and easily adaptable to the hosted model, and while others have argued that we are late to market with this delivery model, I think now is the right time. You’ll be seeing more changes on our website and blogs over the next days and weeks as we further develop and market Confluence Hosted. It will be very interesting to receive feedback from our hosted customers, and to continue to develop Confluence Hosted in response; we’ve already made a number of changes and improvements based on feedback from our hosted evaluation.