Cost increases have made the need for efficient licence management a top priority for managers and budget holders. Critical savings in licensing costs, including Atlassian Marketplace Apps, can be achieved with Intelligent User Management (IUM).
Intelligent User Management is an app developed by Accxia that ensures that all active users can use Atlassian tools, while inactive users are temporarily moved to the so-called "disabled" area with no licence usage until they become active again. IUM manages this process seamlessly in the background, unnoticed by users. IUM can manage any number of "surplus" users, be it hundreds of users or even dozens of users for smaller instances.

Accxia has installed IUM in a number of large companies, ensuring significant savings and a reduction in administrative burden and costs.

IUM allows companies to optimise licences and thereby remain at a lower licence level (in some cases even two licence levels below the actual number of registered users). This can occur when an instance has, for example, 1,300 registered users, but no more than 400 users are active at any given time of day.

IUM is compatible with server and data centre installations at all user levels. Versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket are available.

IUM complies with all publicly available data processes and interfaces as provided by Atlassian applications without affecting the normal functioning of the tools.


Operating principle
This diagram illustrates the principle behind IUM. It shows an example of a 100-user licence faced with a new requirement to start new users, which without IUM would mean upgrading to the next server tier of 250 users. It is worth noting that IUM works for any user count and licence tier, whether it is 100, 1000 or 2000+ server or data centre licences.

The central operating principle is that users are assigned an "Enabled" or "Disabled" status based on usage and inactivity time, which can be set as a variable in the management interface. There is a third status, "Heavy" users, which are users who are assigned neither the status "Activated" nor the status "Deactivated", but who are activated at all times. The number of heavy users can be determined by the administrator by means of a usage analysis (see figure 2).

Diagram 1: IUM principle


Diagram 2 below shows the usage patterns on a per-user basis in Jira retrieved using Accxia's Log Analyzer app, which can be installed to determine parameters such as frequent users, inactivity time, etc.

This particular client has 128 licensed users, but only 42 concurrent users are active at peak times (around 15:00), which were analysed over a 5-day period between 11 December and 16 December.

70 different users use the system throughout the day.

Diagram 2: Usage patterns