Frequently asked questions.

An Atlassian Solution Partner is a company vetted and authorized by Atlassian to deliver consulting, implementation, training, and licensing services for the Atlassian product family — Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Atlassian Assets, Bitbucket, and others. Solution Partners go through a formal accreditation process and maintain direct support escalation paths into Atlassian. Avaratak staffs senior-only consultants — 5+ years each — and is an accredited Atlassian Solution Partner and Training Partner, so your engagement is backed by Atlassian's partner ecosystem rather than an unaffiliated freelancer or general IT firm.

We are a boutique firm with deep, narrow expertise: Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Atlassian Assets. We don't dabble in twelve other platforms. Our typical work includes net-new implementations, Atlassian Cloud migrations, JSM rollouts for IT and non-IT teams (HR, Legal, Operations), Assets/CMDB design, custom workflows and automations, ScriptRunner solutions, governance frameworks, training delivery, and licensing. If your problem lives in the Atlassian stack, it lives in our wheelhouse.

Three differences. First, every engagement is led by senior practitioners — you do not get sold to by a partner and then handed off to a junior. Second, we publish upfront pricing and won't pad hours; we'd rather lose a deal than win one we can't deliver cleanly. Third, we are obsessively focused on the Atlassian stack, which means we know the corners, edge cases, and sharp edges that generalists tend to discover the expensive way.

Our headquarters is in Plover, Wisconsin, but we deliver client engagements remotely across the United States. Most of our work is delivered through video conferencing, collaborative whiteboarding, and direct work in your Atlassian instance. We can travel for kickoffs, executive briefings, or on-site training when the engagement justifies it.

Yes. As an authorized Atlassian Solution Partner, we can quote, sell, and renew licenses for the entire Atlassian product family — Cloud, Data Center, and Marketplace apps. Our pricing matches what you'd pay direct to Atlassian, and you get a partner relationship layered on top: renewal forecasting, true-up planning, sizing recommendations, and direct partner-channel escalation paths into Atlassian support when something needs to move faster than the normal queue.

Atlassian Cloud is Atlassian-hosted, automatically updated, and licensed per user with tiered Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans. Data Center is self-hosted, licensed annually based on user tier, and gives you more direct control over performance, backups, and integrations. Atlassian has fully retired Server, so the practical decision today is Cloud versus Data Center. Most organizations are migrating to Cloud; Data Center remains relevant for regulated industries, large enterprises with specific data residency or compliance requirements, or environments with deep custom integration needs.

No. Partner pricing matches Atlassian's published pricing — Atlassian compensates partners through the channel rather than by marking you up, so the number on your quote is the number you would see buying direct. What changes is everything around it: someone tracking renewal dates before they ambush you, modeling the cost of a tier change before you cross it, consolidating scattered product and app renewals onto a single quote, and escalating through partner channels when a support ticket stalls. You also do not have to buy consulting from us in order to buy licensing through us.

Access, not activity. Atlassian bills for every user granted product access — whether assigned directly or inherited through a group — regardless of whether they have logged in this year. The person who left in 2024 but still sits in a jira-software-users group is a paid seat. Deactivating the account frees it; inactivity alone does not. Jira Service Management is the exception worth knowing: you license agents, while portal customers raising and tracking requests are unlimited and free. A group-membership audit before renewal is the single most reliable place we find money.

Yes, and it surprises almost everyone. Atlassian requires each Marketplace app to be licensed at the same user tier as the product it runs on. If Jira is licensed for 250 users, every app is licensed for 250 users — including the one four people actually open. It also means crossing a tier boundary reprices your entire app portfolio at once, not just the host product. That is why app rationalization is part of every licensing review we run: which apps earn their tier-wide price, and which have quietly been replaced by native functionality.

Usually, yes. Atlassian supports co-terming, so products and Marketplace apps bought at different times can be aligned to one renewal date, with the difference prorated at the point of alignment. The payoff is mostly administrative: one renewal conversation, one purchase order, one budget line, and no trickle of unexpected invoices across the year. It also makes tier planning coherent, because you are sizing the whole estate at a single moment instead of guessing product by product. As your partner of record we handle the mechanics and hand you the calendar.

Guard Standard (formerly Atlassian Access) adds organization-wide identity and security controls across every Atlassian Cloud product you own: SAML single sign-on, enforced two-step verification, SCIM provisioning and deprovisioning from your identity provider, API token controls, and data security policies. You probably need it if you have compliance obligations, an existing identity provider like Okta or Entra ID, meaningful staff turnover, or an auditor who asks how access gets revoked. You probably do not if you are small, low-risk, and comfortable managing access by hand. It bills per unique user across your organization, so cost tracks your identity footprint rather than your product count.

It depends on what is actually hurting. Premium's differentiators are operational: a 99.9% uptime SLA, unlimited storage, sandbox and release-track environments for testing changes before they reach production, deeper admin controls, and higher automation limits — plus product-specific additions like Assets in Jira Service Management and analytics in Confluence. If you change configuration frequently, run regulated workloads, or keep bumping into automation limits, Premium usually pays for itself in avoided incidents. If your instance is stable and lightly customized, Standard is often the honest answer, and we will say so.

It depends on size and complexity, but a useful range: a small organization (under 100 users, low customization, no Marketplace app sprawl) can be migrated in 4 to 6 weeks. A mid-market migration (500 to 2,000 users with custom workflows, Marketplace apps, and Confluence content) typically runs 3 to 6 months. Enterprise migrations with significant customization, multiple instances to merge, or strict compliance windows can extend to 9 to 12 months. The longest pole is almost never the data move itself — it is workflow rationalization, app remediation, and user acceptance testing.

Migration services are typically priced as a fixed-fee scope-of-work or as hourly time-and-materials, depending on the level of unknowns going in. As a rough order of magnitude, our smaller engagements have started in the low five figures, and our larger enterprise migrations have been six-figure programs spread across multiple phases. The ROI conversation is more important than the sticker price: most of our migration clients see meaningful TCO reduction within 12 months because Cloud eliminates infrastructure, reduces administrative load, and delivers Atlassian's newest features without upgrade cycles.

Most popular Marketplace apps have Cloud equivalents, but not all of them, and not all features carry over one-for-one. The first concrete deliverable in any migration we run is a Marketplace app inventory and remediation plan: which apps have Cloud versions, which have feature gaps, which can be replaced by native Cloud functionality, and which require migration tooling or rebuild. We surface this early so your team isn't surprised mid-migration by a missing capability.

Yes — JSM implementations for IT operations and ITSM teams are one of our core engagement types. A typical IT JSM build includes service portal design, request types and forms, queues and SLAs, approval workflows, knowledge base structure, integration with email and chat, change management, problem management, incident management, and operations-level visibility. We can deliver this as a phased rollout or a single end-to-end implementation depending on your operational tolerance for change.

Absolutely. JSM is increasingly the platform organizations use for any internal service team that takes structured requests — HR for onboarding and employee tickets, Legal for contract intake, Facilities for workplace requests, Operations for procurement, Finance for expense exceptions. We design these "enterprise service management" instances with templates, request type taxonomies, approval routing, and reporting that fit non-IT workflows without forcing those teams to think like IT.

Atlassian Assets (formerly Insight) is a flexible asset and configuration management database that ships with JSM Premium and Enterprise. You should care about Assets if you need to track and relate things — laptops, servers, applications, vendors, licenses, contracts, employees, locations — and reference them from inside Jira issues. Assets is most valuable for IT teams running ITSM, but we have built useful Assets schemas for HR (employee equipment lifecycle), procurement (vendor catalogs), and security (application inventories with risk scoring).

Yes. Avaratak is an accredited Atlassian Training Partner. We deliver role-based training for end users, project administrators, Jira administrators, JSM agents, and Confluence space admins. Training can be standalone, bundled into an implementation engagement as a knowledge-transfer phase, or delivered as a recurring program for organizations that want to keep their internal team continuously up-skilled as Atlassian evolves the platform.

Yes. Workflow design, native Jira automation rules, and ScriptRunner-based extensions are routine work for us. Common asks include cross-issue automation, scheduled actions, complex approval routing, JQL-driven dashboards, and Groovy-scripted listeners for behavior that goes beyond the native automation engine. We are equally comfortable building it for you or training your administrators to build and maintain it themselves.

The senior consultant who scopes your work is the senior consultant who delivers it. Every Avaratak consultant is a senior practitioner with 5+ years of hands-on Atlassian experience — we do not staff juniors, we do not keep a bench that needs filling, and we do not use client engagements as on-the-job training. You will know who is assigned before you sign anything, and you will work with that person directly rather than through an account manager relaying messages. If we do not have the right specialist free for your timeline, we will tell you that instead of improvising.

The least that gets the job done. Assessment and advisory work often needs no more than read access plus a look at your admin configuration. Implementation, migration, and automation work generally needs product or site admin. We work within your onboarding requirements — NDAs, background checks, access reviews — use named accounts rather than shared credentials so every change is attributable in the audit log, and expect access to be revoked when the engagement closes. If your security team wants a written access justification, ask for it; we would rather document it than debate it.

That describes most of our engagements. Internal admins rarely need replacing — they need air cover for a decision, a second opinion on an architecture, or a specialist for the thing they have never done before: an instance merge, a Cloud migration, an Assets schema, a workflow scheme that has quietly become load-bearing. We transfer knowledge as we go and document what we build, because an admin who can maintain the work is a client who calls us about interesting problems rather than ones we created.

Yes. Changing your partner of record is an administrative step taken at renewal — your licenses, data, and instance are untouched, and no migration is involved. If you are mid-term, we can plan the change for your next renewal cycle. We will also say the unglamorous thing: if your current partner is serving you well, staying put is the right call, and we would rather tell you that than win an account we cannot meaningfully improve. Switching should be about the service you are getting, not the logo on the invoice.

Yes. Not every problem needs a program. Common short engagements include a Jira or Confluence instance health check, a licensing and app-spend review ahead of a renewal, an architecture review of something another firm built, or a few focused hours to unblock an automation that is misbehaving. Small work gets the same treatment as large work — written scope, fixed fee wherever we can define one, senior consultant. Sometimes the deliverable is a short memo telling you to change three things and leave the rest alone.

Most engagements start with a no-cost discovery call to understand your environment, goals, and constraints. We follow that with a written scope of work that defines deliverables, hours, fixed fees or rate, and timelines. Engagements run as fixed-fee for well-defined work (migrations, implementations, training programs) or as time-and-materials for advisory and ongoing optimization. Every engagement has a named senior consultant and a clear escalation path — you will know who is accountable, every day.

Yes, and we recommend it. Atlassian environments are living systems — features ship, teams evolve, processes drift. We offer monthly retainer arrangements that bundle a fixed number of advisory and tactical hours per month, giving your internal team a senior partner to call when something breaks, when Atlassian releases something interesting, or when a new department wants to onboard onto Jira or Confluence.

You hear about it before it happens, not on the invoice. Fixed-fee engagements carry a written scope, and when something outside it surfaces — an undocumented integration, a Marketplace app with no Cloud path, a stakeholder group nobody mentioned in discovery — we stop, quantify the impact, and put the options in front of you in writing. You can approve a change order, defer the work to a later phase, or decline it entirely. Surprise invoices are how consulting firms lose clients; we would rather keep ours.

The fastest path is to book a 30-minute discovery call directly through our scheduling link or to reach out through our contact page. Bring whatever you have — a vague idea, a detailed RFP, an inherited mess, an upcoming renewal date. We'll listen, ask hard questions, and either propose an engagement or tell you honestly that you don't need one. Our goal is for the first conversation to be useful even if you never hire us.