The Business Benefits of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated: A 3x return on investment

Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study¹ to examine the value that customers could achieve by deploying Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated. Forrester interviewed OpenShift Dedicated customers about the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility they experienced using the platform. The companies interviewed had annual revenues of over $1 billion and used Red Hat for over three years. 

A composite organization representative of these real-world customers experienced a 343% return on investment (ROI), realized benefits with a net present value (NPV) of $3.4 million, and recouped its initial investment in fewer than six months.

Before OpenShift Dedicated, these companies that Forrester interviewed struggled with several development platform challenges: aging technology with limited scalability, single points of failure in their application architectures, and a lack of internal DevOps experts. To gain a competitive advantage and accelerate digital transformation, these companies sought an improved container-based development experience, one that used Kubernetes to orchestrate microservices, and provided fully managed cluster installation and maintenance to help drive automation across the application development and delivery lifecycle.

As a result of investing in OpenShift Dedicated, these companies dramatically increased developer productivity. 

• OpenShift Dedicated saved developers 144 hours that they were previously dedicating to building images, testing, and maintaining apps in their legacy environments. These savings were driven by the templated images in OpenShift Dedicated that make application creation workflows more efficient. 

• OpenShift Dedicated’s automated environment creation saved developers 80 hours annually, which is 98% less time than previous approaches. With OpenShift Dedicated, spinning up new development environments is faster than developers can spin up manually or from using other legacy solutions.

• By automating the cluster monitoring, availability tracking, and auto-scaling the pods/services needed in their Kubernetes clusters, customers reported savings of 416 hours per year, resulting in approximately $690,000 in savings for their DevOps teams.

• Customers’ security teams also benefited from the automation managed by OpenShift Dedicated, as they reduced the need to dedicate time and resources to security patches — OpenShift Dedicated is automatically updated with necessary patches. This increased automation saved security teams 100 hours per major update and an additional 60 hours in maintenance and coordination associated with these security efforts. 

• Finally, OpenShift Dedicated allowed customers to migrate and modernize existing applications into containers and halt the expansion of outdated, legacy deployment strategies. This slowly reduced the number of full-time engineers dedicated to the daily operations of app clusters and reduced the amount of operational task time by 50%.

Costs associated with the OpenShift Dedicated platform include Red Hat fees, 24 hours of training, and a dedicated program lead for OpenShift Dedicated. The present value of these costs over three years is just under $1 million.

Methodology: To create an accurate representation of the business impact of OpenShift Dedicated, Forrester factored certain risks into the business benefits and costs. These risks include variances in the existing DevOps and infrastructure teams, the number of new environments created annually, the time needed to create them, and the number of legacy applications the company modernized.

For more information on the full July 2019 case study, please visit the download page or connect with a Red Hatter.