Integrator Highlights Cloud Savings With ROI Calculator

By Andrew R Hickey, CRN
August 18, 2010 3:01 PM ET

One of the main draws of cloud computing is the supposed dramatic cost savings over on-premise solutions. And for cloud integrator Astadia, the proof is in the pudding.

The Addison, Texas-based pure-play cloud integrator on Wednesday officially released its Cloud IT Transformation (ITX) ROI Calculator, a free online tool that shows in both U.S. dollars and British Pounds how much CIOs stand to save in the cloud, versus on-premise.

Astadia said the ITX ROI Calculator delivers a swift estimate of which pieces of an IT infrastructure and application portfolio will cost less and perform better when migrated over to the cloud, specifically on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. The program takes into account software applications, servers, data centers and back office functions and determines which would be cheaper with Web-based software applications and how long it would take to achieve ROI.

"This new tool shows how much money IT departments could be leaving on the table," said Cory Vander Jagt, vice president of Astadia ITX. "Premise based IT solutions leak money at three different inflection points whenever a company gets bigger or smaller. Standardizing an application environment in the cloud consistently provides elasticity at all three points."

For example, the ROI calculator shows that an IT environment for 250 users would run $883,000 for on-premise, while in the cloud it would cost $515,875, a massive savings of $367,125. That savings figure takes into account infrastructure migration costs; IT services costs; software licenses; project and platform costs; and IT development. At that rate, the calculator illustrates that the return on investment of the cloud project would be roughly 2 1/2 years.

The ROI Calculator can compute cloud implementations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Force.com. Google also offers its own cloud calculator that illustrates the cost savings of leveraging Google Apps versus comparable on-premise solutions.

"The cloud increases the efficiency of IT infrastructure," Astadia said. "Economies of scale reduce costs exponentially, while improving the security, reliability, and functionality of most application environments and architectures."

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