Atlassian Data Center stops multiyear license renewals

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Atlassian Data Center customers no longer have the option of multiyear license renewals as the company disclosed plans to add high-security Government Cloud and Isolated Cloud offerings by 2026.

Tiffany To, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise and platform at Atlassian, confirmed this week that the one-year limitation applies to all on-premises software editions. The confirmation comes after multiple users told Informa TechTarget that they'd encountered the limit over the last year.

Tiffany To

"We're working with partners to qualify why customers haven't moved to the cloud and how we can help them build the business case," To said. "That's partially why we have reduced the amount of years that they can renew, because if they do three years, then we don't end up in a conversation with them again for three more years. [Given] the speed at which we're unblocking the things that prevent them from moving to the cloud, we feel like the majority of them should be able to do it at this point."

The products, which include Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence, have received security, performance and scalability updates, along with a built-in connector to Rovo Search as of this week, but otherwise haven't been part of the many feature updates Atlassian has introduced for its cloud platform. Atlassian already stopped supporting the low-end, on-premises Server editions of its products in 2024 and hasn't made a secret of its cloud push, especially over the last two years.

[Given] the speed at which we're unblocking the things that prevent them from moving to the cloud, we feel like the majority of them should be able to do it at this point.

However, the company softened its cloud-first messaging in October, replacing it with "enterprise-first."

According to To, the shift to enterprise-first was a part of ongoing negotiations with Atlassian Data Center customers behind the scenes, as the company sought to sell on-premises holdouts on the business case for moving to the cloud.

"It shows a maturation in our growth as a technology vendor, where, yes, we've had these customers for a long time on Data Center, but to be their partner in the cloud takes another level of care," To said. "We're saying, 'We're not just shipping you bits. We're going to take care of your stuff in the cloud,' which means we have to fully understand their business needs and what we're building for them."

During these discussions in late 2024 and early 2025, Atlassian gauged interest in Government Cloud, based on its recent FedRAMP Moderate authorization, and Isolated Cloud, an Atlassian-managed virtual private cloud on dedicated infrastructure now slated for availability in 2026. Enough Atlassian Data Center customers indicated that they would invest that it led to this week's official launch, To said.

"There are all these segments where 100% public cloud isn't going to work, and we spent a lot of time thinking about how much we want to invest in Government and Isolated Cloud," she said. "If we're going to make those investments, we need to know that customers are going to adopt them."

Data Center users contemplate a move

With the addition of new cloud options and the new license renewal limit, rumors have swirled in recent months about an end-of-life date for Data Center within the next five years. To stopped short of confirming any end-of-life plans, but Data Center customers see the writing on the wall.

"With the two additional clouds, clearly all the signals are there," said Frederick Ros, head of digital workplace services at Amadeus IT Group, a global travel and tourism company headquartered in Madrid.

Amadeus already decided to move away from Bitbucket on-premises to Microsoft GitHub and from Jira Service Management Data Center to ServiceNow's IT service management platform based on a seven-year relationship with ServiceNow, which also offers agentic AI tools.

However, the company is exploring Confluence Cloud and Atlassian's Loom video conferencing app. Ros said the new Rovo AI features are compelling, especially now that they're built into all cloud products and have connectors to Data Center deployments.

"If Atlassian had developed all this two to three years earlier, our choice would have been simpler," he said. "We wanted to evaluate Rovo in some very specific use cases -- in knowledge management, for example, so we're buying a couple of licenses and giving them to one team to detect Confluence pages that are not used very often. Now that it's becoming part of the product, I think there will be quite an interest. It will probably also help us to better articulate the value of Confluence."

Another large-scale Atlassian Data Center customer, Charter Communications, plans to begin a transition to a hybrid cloud, and according to a presenter during a Q&A at the Team '25 conference, Atlassian's new Rovo AI features sealed the deal.

"There are a number of factors with cloud," said Andrew Morin, director of engineering for technology delivery and Agile management at the telecom. "One is infrastructure -- managing a data center is a lot of work. [But] a lot of the feature development available in the cloud, that they can't do in Data Center ... We'd like to take advantage of [it], and Rovo AI is a big piece of that."

One analyst predicted an "end state" for Atlassian that is primarily public cloud, some virtual private cloud and a few on-premises distributed cloud deployments, similar to AWS Outposts.

"There are two big issues: There's data sovereignty, and then there's the issue of capitalization [where] it comes down to some of the finances of who owns the stuff and who's taking the capital hit and amortization," said Charles Betz, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Amazon, I think, was very sensible, saying, 'Look, if you want to own the capital, amortize it, and manage the racks and stuff, do so to our specs.'"

Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.