Improved operational efficiency is certainly a compelling motivation for deploying a dynamic on-demand private cloud infrastructure. In fact, the automated service delivery capabilities of VMware’s cloud automation software have improved VMware customer’s operational efficiency by an average of 80% or more by utilizing resources on more strategic initiatives. However, if you were to ask our customers with a year or more of deployment experience what their biggest benefit was, the response would likely be improved service delivery times that enable greater productivity or allow the business to address new opportunities quicker than the competition. Business agility is much harder to quantify than opex or capex savings. For this reason, it is not typically included in a lot of private cloud business justifications. The good news is that opex and capex savings alone are typically more than enough to justify deploying a private cloud. Keep up with your accelerated business pace Getting compute resources into the hands of business enables companies to access new
business opportunities. For companies who rely on IT systems to differentiate their business, vCloud Automation Center allows companies to dramatically shorten the delivery time of initial provisioning and ongoing changes from days to hours and minutes.
productivity is a key benefit. For example, one company with a stalled virtual desktop deployment project confided in me that 3-4 days to provision a new machine was not uncommon for them. Yet the real challenge they faced was that the request for new machines was so high they often sat in the queue for multiple weeks before they had any resources to start the process. Consequently, new employees were waiting an average of three days before they could get a new virtual desktop with the software required to perform their jobs. With the implementation of vCloud Automation Center, the time to get a new desktop into the hands of their users was reduced to just a few hours. In fact, every day of improved productivity represented $350 per person. And with tens of thousands of employees and a 10% annual turnover rate, this company saved almost $700,000 per year in improved productivity for every 1,000 new employees they provisioned. So even if you can’t quantify the improvement in productivity per user, you can be sure to include the numerous qualitative benefits for your company in your business justification.
Enable New Business Opportunities
Your ability to rapidly provide or reconfigure compute resources can directly translate to the bottom line success of your company. IT systems not only enable business, they can also be fundamental to the delivery of products or services.
In challenging economic times, the struggles of some companies represent opportunities for others, provided they have the compute capacity to address increased business. In the case of one of our customers, their private cloud infrastructure not only allowed them to provision systems faster, it also allowed them to rapidly repurpose compute resources to handle the increase computing demands of the additional business. While improved business agility was not part of their initial Private Cloud ROI justification, it was the primary reason for the company’s expansion of its private cloud initiative to other business units within the company.
Justifying an increase in business due to a more flexible infrastructure is a difficult thing to do, because the gains can be subjective. Examining how shortening provisioning times has allowed your company to expand in the business in the past can be very useful. If you don’t have a private cloud pilot to draw upon, look back at how virtualization may have enabled new business opportunities. Virtualization has allowed most companies to shorten their provisioning times from weeks to days. Private Cloud automation, governance and control further reduce provisioning times to hours and even minutes.
What impact can this have on your business? More importantly what is the risk of ignoring private cloud infrastructures and have more agile competitors take business from you?
Get started developing your Private Cloud ROI and build your business case to deploying your Cloud Service Provisioning solution. Also, check out what some of our customers are saying in the customer case studies on our web site. Learn more:
- Watch Building the Cloud Automation Business Case
- Read about the new Cloud Operating Model and how Aberdeen sees a 12% combined annual cost savings for private clouds.
- Find out how VMWare IT is saving $6MM by transforming to a software defined data center.
- See how VMware IT saved 90% of time spent and 30% of costs through automated provisioning.
- Learn about capacity management in the cloud era.
- Check out a short review and 3 videos on how apps will be deployed in the future.
Need help deploying your private cloud infrastructure or developing your business justification? Contact us and our experts can help your team build the business case and the solution that will maximize your IT productivity.
