Who’s On Phirst

When you buy a software tool for your use, you aren’t just buying the application; you are buying the BENEFITS of what it does. Most often, you are really buying piano recitals, little league games and happy hours with your friends. You buy yourself time when you buy a good tool. Because with the right tools, you are in bed, fast asleep, instead of the datacenter at 3 a.m. pulling out your hair because of a deployment error or a server that won’t capture transactions, or whatever. With good system administration tools you get to tackle the hard problems and challenges that made you take your job in the first place instead of the mundane, boring and error-prone tasks.

Unfortunately, “quality of life” has never been a valuable selling point for IT managers and directors. They pay you to keep the network running, deploy applications and configure application servers. The manner in which you perform your job doesn’t matter to them; only the results.

If you aren’t using the right tools, then a huge proportion of your production failures are due to configuration errors. Thus, your entire management team should care about how you perform your job, just like you do.

Simply put, proving a fast ROI is the best way to make a business case for a software purchase and it is terribly simple. ROI, or Return On Investment, is a simple calculation that states the rate offered by an investment. So, if you invest $1000 that provides you a return of $500 per year, then you have a 50% ROI per year ($500/$1000 = 50% ROI). In other words, the “pay back” period for the investment is 2 years ($500 per year, for 2 years = $1000). The rule of thumb in IT spending is that investments need to have a “pay back” of 3 years or less. So to invest $1000, you need to show that you will get more than $333 back per year.

With many tools (could be OpsWare, Build Forge, Phurnace Deliver …), you are provided with a way to avoid costly mistakes and down time. But, determining the dollar amount of those mistakes and downtime can be difficult. Luckily, many vendors (us included) provide an online calculator to help determine those values. And, when you are done filling out the web form, you can create a PDF of your cost analysis to email to your boss.

Recently, one or our customers determined their deployment costs to be $68,365.38 per year and the cost of error resolution was $171,000 per year. That’s a total cost of $239,365.38 per year. To determine their ROI, they simply divided the money saved by our product’s cost. They arrived at a monster 3 digit ROI number and were very happy with their purchase.

Of course, you can always rely on your friendly local software sales rep (like the Phurnace Account Manager) to help you with the purchase process. We all want you to be successful and tackle the truly challenging aspects of your job. So, leave the mundane, boring error-prone stuff to the tool vendors.