By Steve Kaplan

Organizations across the globe are increasingly looking to public cloud – not to reduce infrastructure costs because analyses show cloud is expensive, but to enhance the ability of the business to react more quickly and effectively to the increasingly dynamic marketplace. A recent study by IDC shows that while deploying Nutanix does enable significant infrastructure and other savings over traditional 3-tier infrastructure ((Centralized Storage + Storage Network + Compute), the biggest opportunity was squarely in the bucket of improved business agility.

Nutanix and the IDC Study

Nutanix commissioned an August 2015 report from IDC (you can download the report here) detailing the benefits of deploying hyperconverged infrastructure. While Nutanix paid for the study, it was an independent analysis of 13 customers (ranging from hundreds of employees up to 18,000) running either Nutanix XCP or Dell XC web-scale appliances.

As you can see in the chart above, Nutanix solutions were shown to provide significant infrastructure savings along with increased IT staff and user productivity. Business productivity (i.e. business agility) savings accounted for nearly 43% of the overall total benefits.

Cloud-Like Agility with Lower Cost and More Control

Watch any AWS webinar and you’ll see how often the company talks about the increased speed and agility that the public cloud brings. From AWS’s website (https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/):

In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only ever a click away, which means you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

Nutanix enables customers to marry the benefits of public cloud-like agility and productivity with the low cost and control of an on-premises environment. These benefits allow a company’s IT team to shift to projects that are value additive to the business instead of just relegating those teams to simply “keeping the lights on.”

In a Nutanix customer’s’ words:

“Instead of spending 65% of our time running things, we’re spending 65% working on the business….we’ve become an enabler rather than a hindrance.”

“…with Nutanix…80% of my time is proactive; before, it was like 40%. We’re doing projects and other work with this saved time and creating business value.”

IDC says that the business productivity/increased agility savings result from three areas: less downtime, increased performance and higher revenues.

Less Downtime: By running important business applications on Nutanix, the organizations interviewed for the study averaged a 99.7% decrease in unplanned downtime and a 100% decrease in planned downtime,. IDC puts the average value of increased user productivity due to reduced downtime at $206,483 over five years – or $8,786 per 100 users.

Increased Performance: IDC puts the average improvement in application performance on Nutanix at 50.6%. The IT Manager at Langs Building Supplies, for example, said that Nutanix reduced their batch processing from eight hours down to a little over an hour.

Higher Revenues: Better application scaling and performance with Nutanix results in both higher employee productivity and higher revenue. One customer credited Nutanix with the ability to onboard 2,000 employees in a matter of days to support a business objective, versus at least three weeks with other solutions, “There would be no way to achieve what we did.” The IT Manager at Protected Trust told IDC that their use of Nutanix drove an estimated $1-$2 million of incremental yearly revenue for their company due to “improved performance of the services it provides, which translates to higher customer satisfaction and ultimately more revenue.”

IDC projects an average increase in revenues per year due to operational efficiencies of $499,560 and an additional increase of $190,863 due to reduced downtime.

IT Staff Productivity Gains

An important contributor to agility and faster time-to-market are enhancements in IT staff productivity. IDC says that the average reduction in managing an environment utilizing Nutanix was 71.4%.

“My staff sings the praises of Nutanix all day long. A box will show up, and they can have it up and running before lunch time, and then it pretty much self-manages.” -IT Manager at County of San Mateo

Calculating Your Savings from Deploying Nutanix

The IDC study shows that the average total annual benefits from deploying Nutanix come to $2.22 million. This savings is comes from four areas:

IT Infrastructure Cost Reductions and Avoidances: $203,204 from storage optimization, reduced datacenter footprint, and enabling ease of scalability.

IT Staff Productivity Benefits: $863,568 from reducing management time by 71.4%, as well as reductions in deployment time and in application related tasks.

Risk Mitigation: User Productivity Benefits: $466,328 from slashing downtime.

Business Productivity Benefits: $690,423 from improving application performance, reducing time to release new applications, reducing time to provision and upgrade storage/servers/VMs, improving user productivity, and increasing revenues.

You can calculate your annual savings per 100 IT users based upon the following categories:

Alternatively, Nutanix has created a intuitive tool that you can use to estimate your savings from deploying Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure with web-scale architecture.

Thanks to Nikita Maheshwari (@nikitamah) for suggestions and edits.

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