"We were very comfortable with the Data Center environment," said Aregnaz Gayranyan, software engineer on Align Technology's IT team. "Our team knew the platform inside and out and could manage everything efficiently." Then Atlassian announced Data Center's support end-of-life, and the team began exploring the Cloud platform.
"When we first opened Cloud, the interface felt completely unfamiliar — it was a significant shift from what we were used to."
That's the real starting point of Align Technology's migration story. Not a project plan on a slide, but the moment a team's deep platform expertise met an entirely new environment, and the start of turning that into something even stronger — a feeling plenty of IT teams staring down their own Data Center deadline will recognize.
Align Technology is a global medical device company focused on orthodontic and restorative care, whose IT team runs Jira and Confluence for its engineering organization, with Aregnaz serving as one of the team's Jira and Confluence admins. Getting to Cloud meant reckoning with everything that team had built long before anyone was thinking about a migration.
A highly customized Jira and Confluence environment, years in the making
As new needs came up from teams across the business, Align Technology added new apps and custom configurations to keep pace. Each addition made sense on its own, even if the environment wasn't always managed as a whole.
That kind of organic growth is common for teams that move fast, and it's exactly the kind of complexity that leads a lot of teams to delay their migration while they assess their Data Center sprawl. By the time Align Technology looked seriously at Cloud, three separate workflow automation apps were quietly doing overlapping work in Jira. Instead of delaying the move, Align Technology used it as the moment to consolidate and simplify.
Running Data Center with a lean team came with its own overhead. "Every upgrade involved managing security risks, dependencies, and significant operational overhead," Aregnaz said. Moving to Cloud meant offloading much of that infrastructure maintenance to Atlassian, freeing the team to spend less time maintaining the platform and more time improving it for users. With Atlassian's Data Center end-of-life on the horizon, years of investment in the teams' Jira and Confluence setup needed to be evaluated and optimized before making the move.
Finding the right kind of migration support
Align Technology was already using six Appfire apps when the migration conversation began: Appfire Jira Misc Workflow Extensions (JMWE), an all-in-one workflow automation app for Jira, plus Appfire Scaffolding Forms & Templates, Appfire Advanced Tables, Appfire Numbered Headings, Appfire Page Approval for Confluence, and Appfire MultiExcerpt. Each had earned its place solving a real problem for a different part of the business.
Patricia Montenegro, Align Technology's Appfire customer success manager, had been checking in well before the migration became urgent. When the team needed more structured support for the move to Cloud, they reached out to formalize it.
"Having a dedicated customer success manager made a real difference — the level of engagement and support is incomparable to standard ticket-based assistance."
Aregnaz Gayranyan, Software Engineer, Align Technology
Align Technology chose not to bring in a third-party integrator. Instead, the team built its own support system, combining Appfire's product and engineering team for app expertise with Atlassian's FastShift program for the platform move. Align Technology credited the combination with helping accelerate its timeline to Cloud. Appfire offers that same hands-on support for migrating its apps at no additional cost, through planning, testing, and go-live, including weekend coverage around cutover. Any Appfire customer can take advantage of it by reserving migration support with Appfire's team.
Consolidating three workflow apps into one, by hand
The migration ran in two phases, Confluence in November 2025, then Jira in April 2026, each in a single instance. The Jira phase carried the heaviest lift. Align Technology consolidated three legacy workflow apps, Appfire JSU Automation Suite for Jira Workflows (JSU), Appfire Enhancer Plugin for Jira (JEP), and an earlier instance of JMWE, into a single JMWE deployment on Cloud, an app transition rather than a one-to-one swap.
Appfire's engineering team ran a mapping demo early on, showing how JMWE's functionality lined up with what the older apps had been doing, JSU and JEP included, even though folding them into one deployment meant fewer Appfire apps for Align Technology to license going forward. From there, the heaviest work fell to Aregnaz and the team. Groovy scripts had no automated path to Jira Cloud expressions at the time, so they converted them, by hand, one at a time. It's work Appfire is now looking to automate: an AI migration tool for JMWE is in testing and available through the JMWE Advanced early access program.
"For the more complex scripts, we reached out to Appfire's engineers for help with syntax and corrections. Knowing that we had their engineering team available on Slack for quick turnaround gave us a lot of confidence throughout the process."
Aregnaz Gayranyan, Software Engineer, Align Technology
It cost the team a few late nights before go-live, but the effort held up. "When we reviewed the ticket count afterward, the number of issues connected to workflows was very low," Aregnaz said.
And when an issue did surface, in the final sandbox test one week before go-live, the team and Appfire resolved it before it ever reached production. It's the kind of gap that derails a lot of migrations. Catching it early meant Align Technology's cutover happened without the fire drill so many teams brace for. It's a habit that stuck: every major plugin upgrade now gets the same sandbox test before it goes live.
The consolidation also changed how the team handles automation logic day to day. Appfire Live Fields, JMWE's field-level configuration interface, took over roughly half of what Align Technology had previously built in ScriptRunner Behaviors. Where ScriptRunner required writing a script for every behavior, Live Fields let the team configure that same logic through fields, opening automation work up to more of the team, since that logic no longer depended on scripting expertise.
From an unfamiliar interface to fully at home in Cloud
Getting the technical work done was one part of it. Feeling at home in the new environment took a little longer, and it wasn't only the admin team's learning curve — end users were on their mind too.
"If the transition is challenging for us as admins, how will end users adapt?" she said. "Once we got familiar with the platform, it became much more manageable," she said. "Now we can manage Cloud just as confidently as we managed Data Center."
That confidence shows up in how much JMWE has grown into Align Technology's daily operations, driving greater efficiency across the team.
"We realized JMWE offers a very broad range of functionality. It's become part of our daily workflow."
Aregnaz Gayranyan, Software Engineer, Align Technology
Aregnaz also pointed to JMWE's AI assistant for writing expressions, a capability not available in the Data Center environment, as one more example of how much further JMWE has grown into the team's daily work. Cloud also brought automatic minor updates, in place of the manual patching Align Technology used to handle on its own, one less thing for the team to manage.
What Align Technology does differently since migrating to Cloud
The migration changed more than infrastructure. Align Technology is building internal training on Atlassian plugin functionality for its users, and rethinking how it works with vendors overall. Looking back, Aregnaz said the team would do one thing differently: give itself more time for product demos before adopting new apps. That instinct, to look closer before committing, now shows up in how Align Technology works with vendors more broadly, a shift that traces back to what Appfire's own involvement looked like throughout the migration: hands-on from planning through go-live, not just when something broke.
"We're starting a new chapter of collecting product feedback: what's working well, what we want, and what's missing, and sharing that directly with vendors to drive continuous improvement," Aregnaz said.
"Engaging with dedicated success managers has become a key part of our vendor strategy. We're building those relationships across all our vendors, because we've seen firsthand how valuable it is to have a committed partner on the other side."
Aregnaz Gayranyan, Software Engineer, Align Technology
The bottom line for Align Technology
Asked to sum up her experience working with Appfire in one sentence, Aregnaz didn't hesitate.
"Wonderful team, wonderful product, wonderful support engineers."
Aregnaz Gayranyan, Software Engineer, Align Technology
"Cloud has opened up a new era for how we work," she said. "It's a completely different landscape."
The engineer who once found Cloud's interface completely unfamiliar now runs Align Technology's daily workflows through it without a second thought, backed by a consolidated Jira and Confluence environment, a vendor relationship the team is now building the same way across every partner, and apps that have only grown more useful since the move.
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