New Information has Come to Light!

-- Tony Markel

TL; DR: We're staying with Zendesk by moving down to Zendesk Plus from Zendesk Enterprise.

Back when I started this project I did a ton of analysis to determine what we needed from Zendesk should we transition away.  I also asked what we wanted from a ticketing system.  What I didn't ask was: Is there something we could do to keep Zendesk and save money?

It took a discussion over ticketing APIs to find out, that, yes, we can keep Zendesk, and, save money.  More money than by switching this year, and, to boot, we did a little more analysis, and found even more money we could save by moving our Atlassian products to our new cloud infrastructure platform.  So, we decided, with data and analysis, to stay with Zendesk.

What will we lose?  Not much.  Our procurement process will need a minor tweak, and we won't be seeing much in the way of swag and invitations to exotic locations in the near future.  As Enterprise customers, we've had tremendous influence on the shaping of Zendesk in its current form.  As the platform has grown however, our influence has decreased proportionately.

We still have some work to do, so this isn't the last you'll hear on this subject.  If you'd like to review our analysis, and our conclusions, please feel free to contact myself, Erik Zempel, or Vince Chmielewski.