Did Atlassian just kill Assets?

In the recent price increase blog post from Atlassian they not only announce another massive price increase, they also threw in even more restrictions to an already battered Assets product that has been slowly dying for a while now. Not only is it getting more and more restricted in terms of functionality, they now place a Consumption-Based Pricing for Assets and Virtual Service Agent. This is in itself a pretty bad idea as most companies do not like consumption based pricing because it makes budgeting almost impossible, but to add it based on asset objects will effectively remove any incentive to actually work with the product.

Why are Atlassian doing this?

I do not claim to know the reasons, but you do not have to be a genious to see the pattern of all the changes Atlassian are doing to Assets and other products. To me it seem clear that the Atlassian Cloud platform is lacking scalability and because scalability is not a part of the products non-fucntional requirements it is not top of mind when developing. As the services start to suffer from performance issues you can either rebuild for scale, or add limitations on the use of the product.

Atlassian seems to focus on limitations rather than fixing the underlying issues as we see a large number of restrictions like number of issues in a board, number of issues you can bulk change and now how many Asset objects you can have.

Does it make sense to limit Assets this way?

Limiting an Assets product with how many asset objects you can have makes no sense at all. The number of objects simply refers to how much space you occupy in a database. Nothing nore.

Having 10.000 objects or 100.000.000 objects is irrelevant in that regards because it is only storage and storage is very, very cheap.

What becomes taxing is when you need to query data and then the number of objects does not really matter, it is the relations that needs to be presented when you look at objects and work with objects that can cause issues. This is what requires processing power and what can cause databases to lock up if not designed properly.

As I know some of the people that built Insight back in the day and I have talked to them about the architecture, the original product that was built for Server and DC do not have these issues, so this seems to be a cloud product problem.

Atlassian claim this will allow funding to build a better product

Quote

These changes align with the value these capabilities have already brought to customers and will allow us to invest more resources into innovation and scale.

I call BS on this. Atlassian is trying to spin this as us paying more will allow Atlassian to invest more time and money to make assets a better product. The thing is that Assets is not sold separately and we already must pay for Jira Service Management premium to get access to Assets. So we are already paying extra to get Assets.

We are also getting the short end of the stick because Atlassian is failing to build at scale, or because they are getting greedy and try to milk us for more money anyway they can.

Either way they are #@!% the customer.

Should you use Assets in 2024?

Full disclosure here: I absolutely love Assets. I have loved it since I first saw it in Riadas office when it was just a newborn product and I use it every day with much delight. It is to me an amazing product that I love to use and that I would use privately as well if it was more affordable.

That being said I would not recommend anyone to use Assets today.

The number of restrictions imposed these last 12 months alone is enough to discourage anyone from investing in a tool that constantly deteriorate in functionality. I have never seen a product continously be reduced in value instead of having more value added to it. Assets is to me unique in that way.

Adding a ridiculously low limit like 50.000 asset objects tells me that Atlassian either don't understand Asset management at all, or they are going to reduce this number further in the future to make it fully consumption based. Either way it is cause for serious concern for anyone looking for a solid asset management tool.

The fact that there are upper limits of 2 million objects has already made some companies look elsewhere and this is going to make this situation even worse.

Is Assets dead, or is there hope?

Sadly I think this killed Assets.

Unless Atlassian announces a significant upgrade to Assets very quickly, I don't see any serious company investing in Assets as it is simply in decline functionality-wise and now they have to pay double for it. There are other solutions out there that are better alternatives long term as apps don't tend to loose functionality, unless imposed by Atlassian.

I think that for companies that see asset management as an important part of their business, which many do, they will look towards other tools like ServiceNow and then the question is where do Atlassian stand compared to ServiceNow in other areas such as incident management and product life cycle management...

I think that Assets only real place these days are on Data Center, at least for now. For cloud I would start looking at other options. Personally I am looking at Starhive as it is built by the creators of Insight, which is now assets. I talked to them recently and I think they will be interesting to follow as they have all the experience and expertise to build a far better product.

They also understand asset management so they build for scale and without BS limitations to hide a flawed product.