Forrester finds VCE provides lower TCO

At SAP’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference last week in Orlando, we had the chance to talk with a lot of people about their SAP Big Data and Private Cloud Journey. And, while many of us are still humming “It’s My Life” after Jon Bon Jovi’s concert, another thing that has really stuck with us was the positive feedback from customers about their business transformation experiences with converged infrastructure. We also noticed a big increase in the receptiveness of those not yet using converged infrastructure to learn more about how they can take advantage of its benefits. As what we believe to be further validation that converged infrastructure is the best solution available for virtualizing SAP, Forrester Consulting shows the true economic impact of Vblock™ Systems in the March 2014 commissioned study entitled “The Total Economic Impact™ Of Converging SAP Landscapes On Vblock™ Systems,” which was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of VCE.

Enterprises are always looking to do more with less – especially when it comes to IT resources.

I had the special opportunity to meet with a number of chief systems architects, all discussing (to use SAP’s ASAP terminology) their current Business Blueprint and plans for Realization, including SAP HANA® on the SAP roadmap. A common theme was the amount of time and attention needed to get optimal performance out of their current hardware investments in HP, IBM and NetApp.

Many were happily surprised to learn that SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) program allows SAP HANA customers to leverage existing hardware and infrastructure components for their SAP HANA environment. We discussed how VCE, through SAP’s TDI program, enables customers to introduce a Vblock System as part of an infrastructure upgrade or consolidation to ensure the line of business has everything it needs to get started with the Realization step in the SAP roadmap, including the correct number of virtual machines and a SAP HANA system within the confines of a single Vblock System.

In the study mentioned above, Forrester Consulting interviewed a number of our customers running virtualized SAP to determine if, in fact, the Vblock System is the most cost-effective option. The Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, commissioned by VCE, spoke with large SAP footprint organizations (more than five million SAPs on a single Vblock System) to get data about costs, benefits and risk.

Click to Tweet: Learn why @VCE is a cost-effective option for SAP HANA from @Forrester bit.ly/1lcKOLn more in VCE’s blog bit.ly/1quzMBz

The findings were impressive and really captured the value of true converged infrastructure. To start, implementation costs were dramatically reduced. VCE was able to implement a full solution in half the time with two-thirds as many internal resources. Once the Vblock System was in place, productivity increased up to 20 percent due to more responsive systems, faster provisioning times and automatic updating.

While these savings are impressive, Forrester found the biggest benefits to be on the operational side. In one instance, a company was able to save $20 million in annual outsourcing contracts. In the first year of operation, the team was able to reallocate 30 percent of its resources to other value add IT activities. By year two, the benefit increased to 40 percent. In another instance, a company in the midst of a hiring freeze, and had reduced staff by 5 percent, saw its remaining IT team members able to keep productivity levels up with the help of the high performance system.

Following interviews with VCE customers, Forrester used its findings to predict what an organization of 15,000 employees and 5,000 SAP users would experience if it were to move its SAP operations onto a Vblock System. According to Forrester, benefits would include:

  • A payback period of less than a year
  • Net present value (NPV) of $5.7 million ($1,135 per user)
  • 40 percent productivity improvement in IT operations and 20 percent improvement in SAP developer output
  • A risk-adjusted ROI of 85 percent, and IRR of 122 percent
  • Benefits worth $14.4 million

These types of savings reaffirm that the simplified way to consume IT through VCE will be less costly for your organization and less worrisome for a customer’s IT department.

Check out the full study – The Total Economic Impact™ Of Converging SAP Landscapes On Vblock™ Systems – to learn more about virtualizing SAP on VCE Vblock Systems.

About the Author: Micheal Tovish