Atlassian surprised and admittedly shocked its community when it published its new strategy Journey To Cloud which means significant changes to Atlassian’s self-hosted offerings.
To make a long story short, Atlassian thinks the best solution for its customers is the cloud. For those customers who need to stay with a self-hosted solutions, only Data Center will be continued. This obviously targets large enterprises, while the smaller ones are seen as cloud-only customers. The transformation is planned to happen within the next 3 years.
While we know that these assumptions are probably not right for users of S/Notify, we wanted to communicate our plans for S/Notify, so our customers know what to expect from us.
First of all, for all Server customers, I want to make clear that you have bought perpetual licenses. This means you can use Jira and Confluence forever, and the same applies to S/Notify. Your software won’t suddenly stop working.
The S/Notify for Jira and Confluence Server apps will continue to be available as long as Atlassian continues to sell server apps. Server customers who stay on Server will be able to continue purchasing S/Notify apps until February 2, 2023 PT from the Atlassian Marketplace. Renewals are expected to be prorated with an end date of February 2, 2024 PT to match your server products' end of support date.
We are evaluating options to provide licenses and maintenance options after these dates, so to enable you to continue using our apps.
For those of you who move to a Data Center license, S/Notify for Jira Data Center is already available, and S/Notify for Confluence Data Center is just being prepared for approval.
Open source and community customers will be able to request a free S/Notify license directly from us if Atlassian would not make them available through the Atlassian Marketplace.
What we cannot say yet is, will S/Notify become available for cloud instances?
Unfortunately, Jira and Confluence Cloud have significant limitations. That's the reasons why many apps are not available for cloud or, if they are, have less functionality than their self-hosted counterparts. We are currently evaluating options, but it is clear that we need Atlassian to provide necessary APIs, and it is difficult to estimate if and when they will become available.
If you consider switching to cloud, please let Atlassian know that you need S/Notify. That would definitely help to make them more aware.
We are also working on what we call a sidecar solution as our working title. That would be a separate application that integrates with Jira and Confluence and probably more applications. Our plans are to offer it as both, self-hosted or cloud solution. Stay tuned.
While said article has caused quite some commotion among Atlassian’s Server customers, we recommend our customers to wait a few weeks until they make decisions about their own reaction to it. We expect that Atlassian fine-tunes their new offerings, so we think it makes sense to wait until then to be able to evaluate all available options.
