Funding Circle is a lending platform for small business borrowers. Established in the UK in 2010, and now a leading lending platform to small-to-medium-sized enterprises, Funding Circle has provided £16.9 billion in loans to around 150,000 businesses globally.
A Jira server in need of attention
Like many leading businesses, Funding Circle relies on Atlassian’s Jira issue-tracking software to manage IT projects and investigate and resolve bugs in the system. The server-based software was invaluable, but when support for it was due to end this year Funding Circle needed advice on what to do next.
Funding Circle did not have to look far, as it was already taking advantage of a business-as-usual support service Sustain from Sourcesense.
A move to the cloud with Jira Software
We recommended a move to Jira Cloud, to save on administration effort and hosting costs, and used Atlassian Access to integrate Funding Circle’s Okta authentication for trouble-free identity management. Then we set about making Jira more efficient for the lender.
A key concern was the amount of money that Funding Circle was spending on Jira Service Management agent licences for non-helpdesk applications.
Working with Funding Circle’s IT project managers, we discovered that 22 of the company’s service management functions could run on Jira Software instead, saving agent licences.
We analysed functions including customer portal usage, request participants functionality, service level agreement configuration, queues, legacy automation, comment visibility, permissions, email integration, notifications and Slack integration and found ways to run them on Jira Software in the cloud.
A trouble-free migration and more efficient operations
The migration was not without its challenges, with existing applications and automations proving complex to migrate the data and at times requiring manual intervention in the plan. And of course, everything had to be validated before user acceptance testing.
Doing the work in-house would have been time-consuming for Funding Circle and led to individuals specialising away from their skill sets - particularly with the company’s many workflow automations, as they had to be carefully mapped and tested on the cloud before and after entering production.
However, we were able to complete the task without problems, carrying out as much preparatory work as possible within our business-as-usual service to minimise the cost for Funding Circle. By the end of the assignment, we had migrated 71 Jira projects and archived a further 41.
The successful migration means Funding Circle no longer needs to worry about the Jira server having no formal support cover from Atlassian and has a much more efficient and cost-effective environment for IT service management. The high availability of the Atlassian cloud platform has also brought benefits to the business.
The (migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud) went extremely smoothly, with very little noise following. It’s been very much recognised as a great success by the business. The preparedness, professionalism, and responsiveness of the team at Sourcesense was superb.”
Clayton Howe, Head of Engineering @ Funding Circle
This is key for a company that began life as an online peer-to-peer lending venture and has since grown to be a £162 million-plus turnover listed entity that prides itself in delivering an amazing experience for small businesses—powered by data and technology.
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