Business case: calculate the return on investment of working with Easy Software Deployment
Here at Easy Software Deployment, we regularly talk about the convenience of automatically deploying software and updates. And we’ve mentioned it before but not really emphasised it: you can actually save on IT management costs by automating deployment. It’s time for a calculation example.
A calculation of a business case like this cannot be done without assumptions. If your figures are different, don’t worry – you can easily replace them in our calculation tool. Want to calculate your own situation right now? Click here and go directly to our calculation tool.
These are the amounts we used for our business case:
Average hourly rate IT professional: €55
Number of workstations: 50
Average number of applications: 20
So let’s see what it costs, in time and therefore money, to roll out and implement these 20 apps!
Average deployment time per application in minutes
Without Easy Software Deployment: 10
With Easy Software Deployment: 3
Figuring out the installation commands
Without Easy Software Deployment: 10
With Easy Software Deployment: Not needed
Total time (in minutes)
Without Easy Software Deployment: 20,000
With Easy Software Deployment: 3,000
Total time (in hours)
Without Easy Software Deployment: 333.33
With Easy Software Deployment: 50
Total cost
Without Easy Software Deployment: €18,333.33
With Easy Software Deployment: €2,750.00
You can see that the roll-out costs using Easy Software Deployment is smaller by a factor of 10. In other words, the savings are €18,333.33 − €2,750.00 = €15,583.33 per year. But of course our tool costs money too, so we have to include that in our calculation. The cost for Easy Software Deployment is a modest €18 per workstation per year. For our business case, that comes to €900 per year. You could simply add that to the costs, but a better method – and a better indication – is to calculate your ‘return on investment’ (ROI), in this case in Easy Software Deployment.
You can get the ROI of our business case from the ratio of revenues (in this case savings) to costs:
ROI = €15,583.33 / €900.00 x 100 = 1,731.84%
Roughly speaking, this means that for every euro invested, you get 17 euros back compared to manual deployment.
Package Store
There is one more thing we need to discuss, which we deliberately left out of the business case: packaging. It’s not always possible to automate the installer of purchased software on the command line. And if you can, you can’t always put the right options in there. For example, changing shortcuts and settings within the application. This means you have to script and package yourself, which wastes a lot of time. Plus you also have to test your package. At Easy Software Deployment, we have many well-known standard apps available ready-to-use in the Package Store. We also keep these apps up-to-date at all times.
So that saves even more time and money. You may also have non-standard apps. If so, we can include them in our Package Store for you, so you can easily roll them out as well. But because this will be very different for each company, we have left this out of our calculation.
Schedule a demo appointment with us, and we can let you know exactly what the investment and returns will be for you.
In the meantime, you can play around with our calculation tool, where you can enter the figures for your specific situation. That will give you a good idea of what’s possible!