Double Team: Hermes Einrichtungs Service migrates Jira and Confluence to the Atlassian Cloud

Challenge:

The end of support for Atlassian server licenses represented an opportunity for Hermes Einrichtungs Service to refocus their strategy.

Solution:

With license management and implementation support from Solution Partner Jodocus (now part of Eficode), Hermes Einrichtungs Service migrated both Jira and Confluence to the Atlassian Cloud.

Impact:

Thanks to efficient license management and guaranteed data protection, Hermes Einrichtungs Service and Jodocus are implementing the migration successfully and creating more efficient processes.

Hermes Einrichtungs Service gets things right – and not just when delivering furniture, large electrical appliances and other large or bulky goods. The logistics firm also has a hands-on mentality when it comes to IT: a double migration of Jira and Confluence has seen their digital processes and communication relocated to the cloud.

As part of the Hermes Group, which in turn is part of the Otto Group, Hermes Einrichtungs Service GmbH & Co. KG is the Group's 2-man-handling provider. Their logistics teams deliver large, bulky items to around five million households every year.

Hermes Einrichtungs Service's headquarters and largest logistics center is situated in Löhne, Westphalia. This is where all their logistics processes are managed from. Goods are distributed to 100 depots in German and Poland via 3 logistics centers in Germany and its neighbor. With a total of 8,000 employees across their entire partner network, Hermes Einrichtungs Service ensures their goods delivery and service processes run smoothly every single day. Meaning processes have to remain transparent and error-free. The logistics firm can't afford any delays during their day-to-day work. That includes delays in cross-team and cross-department communication and collaboration. Key to this is a range of different solutions. These solutions have to be perfectly coordinated with all their business processes and link up all the different processes so that all their employees can benefit from simple, secure and limitless teamwork.

Challenge accepted: End of support for server licenses

Hermes Einrichtungs Service has been a loyal Atlassian customer for a full 18 years, relying on Jira and Confluence to run their operations smoothly. The company first put its faith in Jira back in 2006 as a reliable way of managing all their IT service management processes and workflows – including mapping and optimization. In 2009, they added Confluence as a digital knowledge bank hosted on the company intranet. Both systems have grown with the company – most recently during the pandemic when demand increased astronomically as a result of the online shopping boom. At the same time, the number of processes and the volume of communication on the IT and Service teams rose dramatically. Atlassian solutions proved to be indispensable tools, especially with employees largely working from home and needing to communicate both within and across their teams.

However, at the end of 2021/start of 2022, the company faced an important decision: Its server licenses for Jira and Confluence were expiring. Taking into account the fact that Atlassian had announced that support for server licenses as a whole would be terminated at the start of 2024, Hermes Einrichtungs Service took the strategic decision to migrate fully to the cloud.

For Florian Schmidt, Application Service Manager at Hermes Einrichtungs Service, one thing was clear from the very get-go: Just because their server licenses were expiring, didn't mean their journey with Atlassian had to come to an end. "We've been incredibly happy with Jira and Confluence from the beginning. We didn't want to lose them going forward, we wanted to use them to build further. For us, refocusing our strategy using cloud solutions from Atlassian was the logical and most promising next step."

This move was also in line with the Otto Group strategy. The Otto Group opted for Atlassian's Cloud Enterprise Plan back in March 2021 as a way of securely migrating their Atlassian solutions to the cloud. What's more, this particular Enterprise Plan guarantees compliance with EBA and BaFin regulations for outsourcing to a cloud provider and with current GDPR Compliance Standards. While it may have been the parent company, the Otto Group, which originally purchased the license, subsidiaries like Hermes Einrichtungs Service can also benefit from comprehensive data protection when transferring their licenses.

The right partner for a cloud-based future

With that, there was nothing more standing in the way of migration to the Atlassian Cloud. "We were fortunate that we were able to procure GDPR-compliant Cloud Enterprise licenses directly via the Otto Group," explains Florian Schmidt. "Because of that, we were able to focus our efforts on the technical migration of Jira and Confluence. Not to mention that we are 100% satisfied with the security of all our data on the cloud."

When it came to choosing the solution partner who would be supporting the logistics firm on tasks such as configuration, customization and implementation, Hermes Einrichtungs Service again fell back on the experience of the Otto Group. "We knew that the Otto Group had already worked with Jodocus and that the collaboration was a success. With their recommendation, choosing our cloud experts was a pretty quick decision," adds Schmidt.

Now, not only has Jodocus provided efficient license management, they have also put together a team that moved our data from the Jira server to the cloud in the space of just two months. The collaboration began with preparations for the migration, starting at the end of September 2021 – with Jira having to be up and running on the cloud by the end of November. Comprehensive testing was a must for the team if they were going to actually pull off such a large-scale cloud migration.

"The better you prepare for and test the migration, the better the end result when the cloud tool ultimately goes live," emphasizes Tim Bossen, Migration Manager at Jodocus. "We ran a User Acceptance Test (UAT), for example, which gave us important preliminary feedback from application testers at Hermes Einrichtungs Service which we then took into account during the actual Jira migration."

The experts at Jodocus ran into a particular challenge here. Familiar customer management workflows needed to still be available in Jira on the cloud. While Hermes Einrichtungs Service uses Jira to map its IT service management processes, it has relied on the Jira marketplace app "E-mail This issue" for sending issues for a long time. The experts at Jodocus set up all app configurations on the cloud by hand. Even though they were unable to test these in advance, the entire migration went off without a hitch. Florian Schmidt is particularly happy: "By and large, everything was where it was supposed to be, the timing was all good and we were able to continue operations without any issues or downtime."

Roughly half a year later – in spring 2022 – Confluence was also migrated to the cloud. By now, the team knew exactly what they were doing, with the work they had previously done coming in more than handy. During the Jira migration, the cloud experts conducted effective data optimization, making the transfer of Confluence significantly easier. During the move, Jodocus took care of issues like filtering out inactive accounts, storing email addresses and assigning administrator accounts. The service provider also set up an archive for all old pages and sorted datasets.

A further plus was the fact that Jodocus also set up a new, user-friendly Confluence homepage as part of the migration. This homepage gives employees access to the intranet and the company wiki, making their day-to-day work that much easier. "With the help and support of Jodocus, we were able to also migrate Confluence to the cloud quickly and smoothly. And we can immediately reap the countless benefits the cloud offers when working with Jira and Confluence," says a satisfied Florian Schmidt. Now, teams can collaborate more effectively and with more agility.

A migration project that pays dividends

From license management to implementation: The cloud migrations of Jira and Confluence were a resounding success, thanks above all to open, honest and trust-based collaboration between the logistics firm's developer team and the experts at Jodocus. Hermes Einrichtungs Service is benefiting from this partnership in a variety of ways: Switching from a server to Cloud Enterprise is proving to be a boon for the business in more than just security and data protection. Their general maintenance costs are now also significantly lower. On top of that, tools and add-ons on the cloud are automatically updated and test environments are quick and easy to set up.

Florian already knows exactly how his team will make good use of this new-found time: "With this new foundation, we can adapt the system to us and our processes even better. With the server version, for example, it wasn't previously possible to develop and roll out automated mechanisms, like automated add-on updates, in Jira. With the cloud, all that's changed."

Workflows and processes can now be scaled even better on the cloud and can be targeted toward company growth. Another advantage is that thanks to a special security layer, Hermes Einrichtungs Service can work with third-provider tools securely and hassle-free. The logistics company is currently working with third-party providers on developing a successor to its depot logistics system, for example – all directly in Jira itself. With the server version, that would not have been feasible without a complex demilitarized zone that separates the internal and external network using firewalls or the like. 

Hermes Einrichtungs Service already has concrete plans for the future. The logistics firm wants to optimize its solutions even further and is considering switching to Jira Service Management, for example, as a way of making customer management even more technologically agile.

One thing is clear: Thanks to Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner Jodocus, Hermes Einrichtungs Service has managed to migrate its Atlassian tools to the cloud and in turn contribute to more efficient operations and better communication, meaning all furniture and large appliances get to customer homes on time as well.