One platform, zero friction: How Nextiva uses Atlassian cloud to scale and deliver

A wall-to-wall DevOps and ITSM solution

For the next four months, Josh worked diligently with his team to set up and onboard the entire organization to Atlassian. They began by consolidating documentation and knowledge sharing onto Confluence, and helping IT move from Rally to Jira Software for project management and issue tracking.

“The biggest challenges with Rally were that we didn’t have an admin, and there wasn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to how it was organized. We needed a better structure for spreading the work around, reporting, and tracking teams and progress,” Josh explains. To address these challenges, he worked with his department and Atlassian to bring Development and IT Operations’ systems and teams together.

Adopting DevOps practices and tools often leads to better collaboration, speed, savings, stability, and other significant benefits. It can also create new challenges, such as more meetings, manual updates, and context switching. To maximize the pros and minimize the cons, Nextiva integrated Bitbucket with Jira Software, so developers can not only store and deploy code, but also assign tickets to others and view comments without leaving Bitbucket. Senior DevOps Engineer Kyle Gengler says, “Being able to build out workflows in Jira and then see how those issues tie in to what’s happening in Bitbucket has been huge. One of the biggest benefits for me is having actual commits with the Jira issue in the commit message.”

Seeing the potential for Atlassian to benefit other teams, Josh partnered with Atlassian Solutions Specialist Catherine White and Senior Project Manager Jen Lang to combine Jira Software with Jira Service Management for more structured, streamlined incident and change management processes. Now, whenever an employee submits an incident to Support, the requestor must designate the severity of the incident and the components affected. Based on that information, Opsgenie automatically alerts the right IT Operations staff by cross-referencing the team’s schedule and notifying on-call employees. Team members can also escalate tickets to Management if a faster response is needed to ensure service level agreements are met.

On top of improving incident management, Jen and Catherine leveraged Jira Service Management with the Automation plugin (now a built-in feature) to make Nextiva’s change management process more efficient. Within a single workflow, employees can select an issue type and one of four change types. The change ticket is then automatically routed through different parts of the workflow based on specified requirements, validators, and conditions. Slack messages are also triggered to the right parties if a ticket exceeds the maximum change time so a team member can address it quickly. Josh calls Jen and Catherine’s solution “one of the most elegant workflows I’ve ever seen.”

A smooth cloud migration brings security and savings

As Atlassian usage expanded throughout Nextiva, Josh’s team started planning ahead to accommodate current growth and future scaling. “We knew that to virtually double our infrastructure and performance needs, we would also be doubling the cost and effort,” he recalls. “We were faced with a choice: Scale ourselves by moving to Data Center, which would incur higher costs and effort, or depend on Atlassian for all of our hosting needs and have peace of mind moving forward. We chose the latter.”

For the next few months, Josh, Catherine, and their teams prepared for the cloud migration by cleaning up their workspaces and plugins, rewriting scripts, and putting new processes in place to set themselves up for success post-launch. The transition also presented the perfect time to implement Atlassian Access and Okta for single sign-on, easier user provisioning, and enhanced security.

Thanks to their pre-migration cleanup and testing, the migration was completed in less than 24 hours. Josh says, “Our CTO, Phil Steitz, said, out of the four cloud migrations he’s seen, this one went the smoothest.”

Nextiva has been pleasantly surprised by the system performance improvements since consolidating technology and moving to the cloud. “There’s definitely more peace of mind around the stability and performance of all our tools,” Catherine says. “For example, we have some fairly complex EazyBI reports with significant resource-intensive calculations, which caused timeouts. We haven’t experienced a timeout since migrating.”

As they hoped, making the switch to Atlassian cloud has unleashed Nextiva’s ability to scale while saving time and money. DevOps Manager Chris Haley says,“One of the biggest wins for our team is that, by moving to Atlassian cloud, we don’t have to maintain our own servers anymore. That has freed up our time so that we can focus on improving our own software instead of babysitting on-premise infrastructure.” Josh adds that software costs are way down as well because they’re only paying for what they need. “We are saving at least $50,000-100,000 per year by moving to Atlassian cloud.”

One platform, zero friction

Now that Nextiva has consolidated from disparate tools on a variety of deployments to an end-to-end Atlassian cloud platform, the company has the same advantage they provide their customers: one platform, zero friction.

Their unified, stable ecosystem of Atlassian solutions has opened up new ways to track their work and progress, share knowledge, and collaborate across teams and departments. And with so much flexibility to customize the solutions to their exact needs, Nextiva has not only increased teamwork, transparency, security, and performance today, but also laid a foundation to scale with ease in the future.

Best of all, Nextiva has doubled their infrastructure and unlocked these improvements while freeing up time, budget, and brainpower to focus on their mission: delivering world-class communications solutions and amazing customer service. “One of Nextiva’s core values is ‘Simplicity.’ The Atlassian suite of products and their powerful integrations help us ensure we always adhere to that value,” Josh says. “We have no shortage of processes and procedures throughout Nextiva, and these tools allow us to maintain simplicity so the company can focus on delivering value for our customers instead of managing processes.”

Diverse teams unlock new efficiencies

After seeing the improvements that Development and IT experienced, departments across Nextiva started using Atlassian to unlock new efficiencies and deliver even better service within their own teams.

Confluence was one of the first solutions to spread across the organization. “Confluence went from a tool used just by the Technology organization to an enterprise tool used by the entire company. It’s given us a centralized place for all teams and departments to document, track, and collaborate within and across Nextiva,” says Catherine.

Jira Software serves as the unifying plane that provides overarching visibility. Teams are using it for everything from managing internal support and events, to employee travel, to education and training requests. Plus, all of Support (inside and outside of Technology), Operations, HR, Customer Solutions Engineering, Design, and Administration turn to Jira Service Management and its integrations with other Atlassian tools for quickly submitting, tracking, and resolving service requests.

“With Atlassian’s integrations and automation, our team spends less time switching back and forth between applications,” Information Technology Infrastructure Manager Max Hurst says. “It’s also nice that we’re able to share the same platform as the rest of the organization so that we can work more efficiently.” Catherine adds, “It’s been really helpful to have all of the integrations and have everything work together fairly seamlessly. It just makes everyone’s lives easier.”