Celonis + Atlassian
What I think others don't understand is with Atlassian Cloud tools, you get state-of-the-art technology, easy updates, and centralized governance, with the same security measures – or better."
Michael Götz
Technical Program Management Lead
0
TBD
Annual cost savings by moving to Atlassian Cloud
Industry
Internet & Software
Location
Headquarters in Munich, Germany and New York City
Number of Users
800
Solutions Partner
Celonis scales with a migration to Jira Software Cloud
The pioneer and market leader in process mining, Celonis is one of only a few dozen companies with a “decacorn” valuation (over $10 billion). It’s already one of the largest startups in both the city of New York and all of Germany, but the team has even bigger dreams. Facing the pains of managing their own infrastructure amid hypergrowth and the EU’s strict data regulations, Celonis partnered with venITure on a migration from their on-premise deployment of Jira Software to Jira Software Cloud so they could free up resources and scale with speed and security.
While startups around the world vie for “unicorn” status (meaning a valuation of over $1 billion), Celonis, the pioneer and market leader in process mining, has scaled to a new stratosphere of success as a rare “decacorn” (over $10 billion valuation) and become the largest startup in Germany and New York.
In 2011, Celonis’ three founders introduced a relatively new method of scanning IT log data, which gives visibility into how business processes are actually running versus the way they have been designed to run. This transparency enables companies to identify bottlenecks and deviations, with the goal of removing those inefficiencies. The Engineering Department began using an on-premise deployment of Jira Software for project and product management in the firm’s early days, but as Celonis grew and adopted a cloud-first approach, they eyed a migration to Jira Software Cloud.
Since officially making the move in 2022, supported by their Solution Partner veniture, the Celonis Product & Engineering Department is able to deploy faster and collaborate more efficiently, yielding higher confidence in system security, and the ability to offload maintenance to focus on innovation.
We like to focus our people on what they’re good at. They want to develop things and innovate. They don’t want to make updates, restart servers, and be frustrated when something isn’t working. All of the pain and frustration of administration goes away on the cloud.”
Michael Götz
Technical Program Management Lead
The harrows of hypergrowth in a highly regulated region
Many startups deal with scaling challenges over time, but Celonis faced even more complexity due to the speed of their growth and the EU’s extensive data regulations.
The company went from zero to 60 employees in its first five years and up to 3,000+ in the next five, including hiring over 1,000 people from 2020 to 2021 alone. The team also expanded around the world to locations across Europe, Asia, and the US. European regulation authorities are particularly stringent about data security and compliance, so from the beginning Celonis had several measures in place, including VPNs and data residency protocols. These practices fulfilled requirements but put a heavier load on their infrastructure. Ambitious performance goals required more and more maintenance at a time when Engineering wanted to double down on innovation.
“We wanted to focus on helping the Product & Engineering Team to use Jira effectively so they can get more out of it and improve their productivity by integrating with their other tools,” says Rajesh Rama, Application Manager of Jira Cloud Migrations.
Celonis – experts at identifying bottlenecks and resolving inefficiencies – analyzed their own opportunities for process improvements and pinpointed a clear solution for all of these challenges and more: migrating to the cloud.
Jira Cloud has transformed collaboration for the Engineering Team and helps us organize and plan the work more effectively.”
Rajesh Rama
Application Manager of Jira Cloud Migrations
Three months of planning, ten hours of migrating, years of successful scaling
veniture was already supporting Engineering in other areas, so the team reached out for help with migration planning and implementation. Together, they consulted with Atlassian on the different migration strategies, ultimately deciding on a lift and shift approach for the fastest migration. venITure agreed to provide support with additional testing and cleanup to ensure success with this method.
The teams kicked off the process in February 2022. After the initial assessment and planning phase, they completed a test migration that surfaced several problems, including an issue with their mission-critical X-Ray Test Management App and errors with backend data. They received helpful support from both Atlassian and veniture: “Atlassian guided us in every phase, from strategy to tactics; for example, assisting in app migration support and SSO setup,” Rama says. Technical Program Management Lead Michael Götz adds, “veniture was helpful with cloud setup, understanding licensing, and correcting data issues, and Atlassian support exceeded our expectations.”
By May 2022, Celonis had resolved the test migration issues and felt confident in moving forward. Although they had over 180 projects and almost 300 workflows, the entire Jira Software system migrated seamlessly in just ten hours.
“The overall migration went smoothly,” Rama said. “Now that we’ve completed the migration, we want to focus even more on improving productivity: simplifying projects, structuring them better, using Plans in Jira Software, and integrating with other tools we use.”
We realized that maintaining Jira and keeping availability up was not the right focus. We wanted to focus on how we structure the work in Jira, automations, and integration with other tools. This improved productivity and collaboration between teams in Engineering.”
Rajesh Rama
Application Manager of Jira Cloud Migrations
“All the pain and frustration of administration goes away on the cloud.”
In just the first few months post-migration, Celonis is already seeing higher productivity and more innovation. Increased availability means engineers can work without interruption, while the built-in scale, reliability, and infrastructure in Jira Software Cloud has improved collaboration and accelerated deployment.
“Jira Cloud has transformed collaboration for the Engineering Team and helps us organize and plan the work more effectively,” Rama says. Michael adds, “It has improved structure, alignment, and knowledge sharing between Product and Engineering.”
Security can be perceived as a tradeoff of the openness and collaboration that comes with working on the cloud, but Celonis says the opposite is true thanks to Atlassian Cloud products’ automatic updates and advanced features. “What I think others don't understand is with Atlassian Cloud tools, you get state-of-the-art technology, easy updates, and centralized governance, with the same security measures – or better,” Michael explains.
Getting maintenance support from Atlassian and receiving ongoing, automatic updates also means Engineering can spend their time and energy on more valuable work. “We like to focus our people on what they’re good at. They want to develop things and innovate. They don’t want to make updates, restart servers, and be frustrated when something isn’t working,” Michael says. “All the pain and frustration of administration goes away on the cloud.”