ESRF is a European research center for X-rays, consisting of 700 staff members and around 7000 visitors per year. It is a collaboration of 31 countries, with the biggest contributors being France (27.5%), Germany (24%), Italy (13.2%), and UK (10.5%).
The majority of staff are there to help visitors, who are well-ranked by a committee of experts in their scientific field, submit proposals for experiments.
Having mostly used Jira Software and licensing add-ons, ESRF needed assistance testing trial software and choosing the most useful add-ons for them. The products that required testing included Tempo Planner, Jira Service Desk (now Jira Service Management), and Confluence.
ESRF chose Clearvision’s (now part of Eficode) proactive approach to keep the licensing costs down. Whenever ESRF required testing a new product, such as Jira Service Desk or Tempo Planner, Clearvision assisted them in obtaining trial licenses.
“They listened to us, and figured out that if we put Jira Service Desk on a separate instance, we could have Jira add-ons with one pricing and Jira Service Desk add-ons with another. All of the contacts I’ve had at Clearvision showed an extreme devotion to me as a client. I have not seen this from any other company during my 22 years at ESRF when purchasing licenses for other products.
They’ve tailored invoices to make sure we kept costs down before any foreseen price hikes by Atlassian. This effort meant that we could spend more on science, and less on Jira licensing.
They even managed to convince one add-on vendor to sell via Clearvision, at a reduced price, making sure I only had one order for the Jira installation per year!”
Staffan Ohlsson, Support Engineer, ESRF, France
Thanks to having the right tools, policies, processes and people in place, the program has seen a number of tangible benefits.