Following a historic merger, two leading insurers come together on Atlassian’s Cloud Platform to accelerate collaboration
Future-thinking German insurer BarmeniaGothaer brings together thousands of employees on Atlassian’s tools to deliver even more value for policyholders
There’s enormous untapped potential in optimizing the way employees work. The Atlassian Cloud Platform—especially with Rovo—is like a Swiss Army knife for unlocking that potential. It empowers our teams with the right tools to collaborate, access knowledge and work efficiently .. translating directly into better service, faster delivery, and more innovation for our clients.
– Barış Yorgancı, Head of Workplace and Collaboration, BarmeniaGothaer
BarmeniaGothaer is one of the heavyweights of Germany’s insurance landscape, proudly serving over 7 million individual and corporate policyholders with a wide array of insurance offerings.
Its 2024 formation through the merger of Barmenia and Gothaer was closely followed in Europe due to the scale of this merger: two respected brands coming together to create an insurance powerhouse with a vision of becoming an even more responsive, efficient and innovative partner for its policyholders.
Deeply committed to this vision is Barış Yorgancı, Head of Workplace and Collaboration at BarmeniaGothaer. Overseeing a team charged with integrating the IT infrastructures of the two organizations, Barış understood that success would hinge on empowering employees with a single, modern workplace platform where they could align work, fast. Says Bariş, “we needed a collaboration platform that would work seamlessly across both organizations from day one.”
The Atlassian Cloud platform was the clear choice. A long-time customer of Jira and Confluence on data center, Baris recognized that Atlassian Cloud would offer the kind of collaboration experience and AI capabilities needed at BarmeniaGothaer to drive work forward and deliver for their clients.
Discarding legacy ticketing systems, manual processes and occasional “museum quality” tools, the team embarked on an Atlassian Cloud transformation – and the results are already stacking up. “Moving to Atlassian Cloud allowed us to harmonize toolsets, reduce maintenance effort, and focus on delivering business value,” says Baris. “We’re already seeing tangible benefits: not only has our tool spend been reduced by €1.5M over three years, in some cases processes that took two weeks are down to an hour.”
Hear how Barış approached the migration below, and the positive results already being delivered.
Tell us about yourself and your role at BarmeniaGothaer.
I’m Barış Yorgancı, Head of Workplace and Collaboration at BarmeniaGothaer. My team and I are responsible for delivering modern, efficient, and secure workplace solutions to all employees across the group. We focus on enabling productivity, managing IT assets, and ensuring smooth digital collaboration across business units.
How do you and your company think about teamwork and collaboration?
BarmeniaGothaer is one of Germany’s largest insurance groups, formed through the recent merger of Barmenia and Gothaer. We offer a broad spectrum of insurance products ranging from health and life to property and casualty. With over 7,500 employees and a nationwide presence, we are a strong and future-oriented player in the insurance market.
Collaboration is a central pillar of our digital strategy. We aim to break silos and foster cross-functional teamwork. Especially after the merger, it was crucial to create unified digital workspaces and transparent communication channels to integrate teams and align goals. Tools that support seamless collaboration and visibility are essential for our success.
How long have you used Atlassian, with what value?
We’ve been using Atlassian products for over five years. We use Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence across several departments. After consolidating the two companies, we now support over 11,000 active users—including independent sales units.
Atlassian has helped us standardize our workflows and improve transparency across IT and business teams. We’ve been able to manage projects more effectively, track incidents and changes efficiently, and foster knowledge sharing in a structured way. It plays a key role in enabling agility and alignment in our daily operations. In fact, Atlassian tools are among the most frequently used across our employees, highlighting their central role in our digital work environment.
Were there other tools before Atlassian? Why did you consolidate?
Yes, before consolidating on Atlassian, different teams used a mix of legacy ticketing systems and manual processes. Some of them had already been retired by the time I joined Barmenia, while others I actively helped transition into the Atlassian toolchain. My personal favorite was a file system–based wiki that quietly lived on a lonely Linux server—some parts of it are practically museum-worthy today. From early on, the Atlassian toolchain played a vital role in reducing shadow IT within our organization.
What were your main reasons for moving to the cloud?
Our cloud migration was driven by the need to scale fast. Managing on-prem systems post-merger would have meant significant overhead. Moving to Atlassian Cloud allowed us to harmonize toolsets, reduce maintenance effort, and focus on delivering business value. We’re already seeing tangible benefits: 80% of our post-merger projects are now running in the cloud, and more are being added daily. I honestly can’t remember a project that attracted so many enthusiastic volunteers—proof that our teams truly see the value of working in the new environment.
Baris’ advice for customers considering Atlassian Cloud:
“Start small, prove value, and scale fast. Involve all relevant stakeholders early and don’t underestimate change management. Also, leverage Atlassian’s migration support and partner ecosystem—they can save you time and effort. And to quote Michael Jackson: “You are not alone.”There’s a strong community and plenty of guidance to support you throughout the journey.”
Were there specific features of the Atlassian Cloud Platform that got you excited?
Absolutely. Features like advanced automation, smart search, seamless integrations with tools like Microsoft Teams, and robust analytics capabilities were key differentiators. The reduced administrative overhead was also a major win for our IT team. And when I think about the possibilities with AI—especially Rovo—I get genuinely excited, like unwrapping a new gift at Christmas. I still have a strong sense of playfulness and refuse to grow up in that regard!
We’re now looking into integrating Rovo and expanding Jira Service Management into our HR department. We’re also exploring AI-driven insights to enhance our service operations and automation use cases further.
Walk us through the preparation and decision process of the migration.
Honestly, the decision itself wasn’t dramatic or overly complex—it was quite straightforward due to the facts at hand. We realized early on that integrating the IT infrastructures of Barmenia and Gothaer would take a lot of time and effort. So we needed a collaboration platform that would work seamlessly across both organizations from day one. Atlassian tools turned out to be the perfect fit.
Once we looked at the costs, we were positively surprised. Many third-party products that had been licensed separately in both on-prem environments could be eliminated. This simplification brought clear cost and maintenance advantages.
And finally, the incredible support from Atlassian—both in technical and strategic aspects—helped us confidently decide to move to the cloud.
What benefits are you hoping to pass on to clients post-migration?
Our clients are already seeing the benefits of the BarmeniaGothaer merger—a point emphasized multiple times by our executive board. By combining our strengths, we can deliver faster, more personalized, and more consistent service. The cloud migration was a key enabler here: it allowed us to streamline our tool landscape, eliminate duplicate systems, and reduce manual effort across teams.
According to our leadership, this merger wasn’t just about scale—it was about becoming more responsive and innovative for our policyholders. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a future-ready, digitally empowered insurance experience and our migration to cloud is totally in line with that goal.
You have also seen early impact with Loom, tell us about the potential you are seeing.
We’re really excited to explore Loom with more of our teams. In our IT team, we make a lot of training sessions for our internal customers. These trainings are time-intensive for my team: One training alone can take around 2 weeks to make, schedule and deliver.
Developing and broadcasting new training tutorials is one thing our team has immediately used Loom for. One of my team members was able to turn around a finished tutorial – a 2 week process – in just an hour. We’re now thinking of how we can scale this to other “one to many” communications at our company – for example company announcements.
You’re excited about incorporating Atlassian’s Rovo – AI-powered search, chat, studio and agents – into your workplace. What challenges do you hope AI can help solve?
Knowledge discovery and context aware decision-making are big challenges in a distributed organization like ours. With Rovo, we hope to empower employees to find relevant information quickly through various platforms and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, and we are excited about how to use agents across business processes. AI can help us make smarter, faster decisions.
How does Atlassian help BarmeniaGothaer achieve its mission?
Companies often focus on how to create more value for customers and improve external processes. Personally, I believe that there’s enormous untapped potential in optimizing the way employees work. The Atlassian Cloud Platform—especially with Rovo—is like a Swiss Army knife for unlocking that potential. It empowers our teams with the right tools to collaborate, access knowledge, and work efficiently. This internal optimization translates directly into better service, faster delivery, and more innovation for our clients.