Get the best of both worlds: the flexibility of a cloud infrastructure and the same level of control as your on-premises environments.

In the dark ages of BC (before cloud), virtual machine (VM) environments would be run on-prem in an organization’s own data center, in a colocation or on private cloud. This could give you a sense of control, but it also saddled you with the extra headaches of running the data center. An on-prem infrastructure was not very flexible for scaling up or down and could cost a ton for the equipment, maintenance, floor space, power and cooling. And once you owned it, you owned it. With fluctuations in business, you might have too much capacity at times — or too little at others.

Many organizations consider the transformational move to hybrid cloud as a way to gain more flexibility and cut costs, but have worries that it might end up being more expensive or add another layer of complexity.

To investigate and quantify the potential benefits and challenges of moving to a hybrid cloud, IBM asked Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and determine the return on investment (ROI) enterprises might be able to realize if they deployed IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions. Interviews were conducted with several customers with years of experience using it.

The benefits you can count on

Forrester found many benefits — quantifiable (e.g., costs) and unquantifiable (e.g., performance, latency, high availability, customer satisfaction) — but we’ll just introduce a few here:

• Increased operational efficiencies totaling $1.2 million: Employees could focus on new initiatives and other value-added tasks when freed up from managing on-premises hardware supporting legacy solutions.
• Increased compliance and security efficiency totaling $654,000: Compliance and security features in IBM Cloud-enabled organizations to reduce internal efforts in these areas, providing an opportunity to work on other projects and productive assignments.
• Increase productivity: Simplified administrative, compliance and security tasks and a shift to containers through Red Hat® OpenShift® enabled developers to increase productivity valued at $1.5 million.
• Cut data center costs: Organizations reduced their data center costs by $731,000 over three years. The move to cloud provided them with the flexibility to reduce CapEx and other associated costs with maintaining an on-prem data center.
• Reduced downtime: Organizations reported reduced downtime worth $217,000. The reliability and performance gains organizations observe after deploying this solution reduce downtime and disruptions compared to the prior environment.

In addition to the measured benefits listed above, Forrester also found multiple unquantified benefits and specific cost savings.

Analyzing all of these improvements working in combination, Forrester has concluded that organizations that have deployed IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions have seen a significant financial impact and increase in ROI. Direct from the study: “The decision-maker interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $4.3 million over three years versus costs of $1.4 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $2.9 million and an ROI of 209%.”

Take the next step

We hope by now you want to download and read The Total Economic Impact™ of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions study from Forrester. Get all of the details about the cost savings, flexibility, added data protection, performance and added productivity you can gain — all of which can help deliver an impressive ROI.

Once you know that IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions can make a real difference for your enterprise, have a look at what’s under the hood — how it works, a variety of use cases that help demonstrate the benefits and reviews from our customers on TrustRadius. Learn how IBM can help you, straight from the folks who are using IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions today.