ROI in 30 Days

While discussing the benefits of training employees how to make proper usage of graphics and email with Chris, it seemed to me that this has been going on since day one of email systems.

Wait till you see this picture, all 1.5MB of it.

What if that 1.5MB picture was sent out to everyone in your contacts list because it was your latest PR release? And what if you send this type of information regularly, like once a week?

If you have a list like mine, of over 5,000 people, one can start to see some serious numbers and dollars, being wasted.

Simple math(not including the size of the email for simplicity sake):
1.5MB x 5,000 = 6,500 MB or 6.5GB per weekly email sent is going out of my network.

That's a lot of bandwidth!

Plus the time involved to send each email, let's be really nice and say it takes 1 second per email to create and send from your server.

1 x 5,000 = 5,000 seconds or 84 minutes or 1 hour and 24 minutes
(Servers are multithreaded these days so this is purely theoretical # which is probably 4-5 times as large as it should be)

You think you just sent out a little email, but what you do not understand is you have now probably prevented others from sending perhaps for as long as an hour or more. Not to mention incur the wrath of your Administrator.

Now imagine if you did this inside your company with a new HR manual or employee time sheet or price guide? This gets a bit nastier.

6.5GB x 4 weeks = 26GB a month in new storage on your SAN or hard drives and email accounts. In theory. Why? Because presumably everyone will detach the attachment and store it locally and delete the email. Or at worst keep it until next week's version comes out.

Sadly I wish I was joking when I say that more than 75% will not delete the emails.

So you have now increased the daily, weekly and monthly backups(which includes tape, SAN, clustered servers, offsite storage, etc..) and over the year this would be 312GB or 234GB based on my 75% rule.

Big deal disk space is cheap, right?

Bandwidth? Internally? We have 1GB or more who cares?\
Your telecom people do if you need to keep that Quality of service up and running for that great VOIP system you have connected to Lotus Sametime. Every time you flood the network, you create a potential dam that blocks other traffic, important traffic, that needs to run efficiently so your CEO doesn't drop his calls every Monday morning.

Dollar value of this? Being nice and presuming $1-$5(real number is between $27 and $40 per month so based on this Forrester post from June 2009) a person to cover all expenses related to the bandwidth, backups, virus checker, mail system, disk space we could end up with $5,000-$25,000 lost or spent EVERYTIME this message goes out.

So monthly that's $20,000 - $100,000
Annually, $240,000 - $1.2 Million
3 years - $720,000 - $3.6 Million

OUCH!

Or, you could run Lotus Domino (8.5.1 is the latest) with it's DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) which provides a one stop save for the attachment and sends a link to everyone else in your company.

So if you have DAOS setup to manage any attachment over 1MB(default is 4mb) you would only see a small blip of 1.5MB plus the text size of emails every week which even at 5,000 users is not more than 25MB per week.

A reduction in disk space of 99%! And all other costs as well.

Now, on top of this, use Lotus Quickr with it's built-in places for special groups or projects, with auto emails (links only no attachments)and group calendars to keep everyone involved and up to date and you can see some amazing ROI.

This is why we can promise a 30 day ROI to most companies.

Even if the licensing and consulting fees equals $100,000 it's still an ROI of one month at the higher end or 5 months at the low end. And this is on the low end and very generic.

If you or your company resembles even part of what was discussed, please allow us to provide more specific details to you.

Fud Buster Friday #26 - You Can't Measure ROI

Really? Did Google say that because free is the best ROI?
Did Microsoft suggest it because well, we all know the ROI from anything Microsoft is staggering....in their pocket, not yours.
Maybe your university professor wants to get the point across about ROI. And really it is a good point, but if you don't understand and know your customers environment you can't really produce a decent ROI proposal.

2 different clients this week have inquired about Lotus Quickr. I love them for it.
What they both want is a quantifiable ROI to justify the corporate wide installation, licensing and services fees.

So where can you find ROI? It is everywhere, but you have to know what you are looking for to start.

In both cases the easiest way was to explain that the postal service would lose a lot of revenue. Both clients mail out cd's, usb drives and other documents to their sales force around the world. At least 4 times a year if not monthly in some cases. Imagine the costs saved after 1 shipping is no longer needed. Now multiply it all year. Plus reduce the cost and time of packing, labeling, shipping, etc... not to mention the trees and waste saved by going digital.

Sounds ancient, almost hard to believe in this day and age companies still don't put more money and time into their online projects. Yet it's all true and it happens everywhere. Go find new clients and ask them.

Or in a different light, we removed about 500 pounds of computer equipment from a law office and they in turn got back much needed space and piece of mind. The cost was much cheaper than if they removed it themselves and faster too. Yet few companies see it that way. They would rather find the cheapest solution, spend months figuring it out and in the mean time waste prime real estate or warehouse space of theirs.

A third direction is telecommunication costs. Sending links, instead of full 50MB attachments reduces stress on your bandwidth, networks, disk space, backups and of course time. Not everyone or every place has T1, cable or DSL lines, modem speed is still average in many places. Remember that next time you try to rollout some beefy application with your client.

And thanks to everyone for the Birthday wishes and I am happy to say the move to the new office is finally completed. Look for this blog to be moved sometime in the not so distant future.

Circles of Hell indeed

Today's post comes from a company which boasts to move your Domino apps to a Microsoft environment.

Souds great when you read the website(I will NOT tell you where to find it) but if you ask or figure it out....

However, at the bottom of the page is this graphic(sorry if it does not appear very clearly).

Note the following:

1 Domino Server or 1,000's of mail and applications server makes no difference since in theory you would need at least as many Exchange boxes, right?

Now let's say there is 1 Domino Server and it handles 200 people's email and 6 applications.

According to this MS business partner, in order to migrate your apps and email, you need the following based on their graphic:

1 Exchange server (note they use 2007 which requires a 64 bit architecture, thus a VERY NEW and expensive server to buy)

1 Active Directory (of course this comes with Server 2003/7 but you need a new box, again)

1 Visual Studio client, server maybe?

1 Sharepoint server 2007(again a new server)

1 .Net server

1 ASP .NET server(not sure if these can be combined)

1 SQL server (another server)

and Web Services

So now you want to go from 1 server doing everything to 6+ servers or one giant monster server with VM partitions.

And you need to buy all the software and licenses for 200 clients.

Now, what kind of ROI or TCO is this I ask you?

Anyone with pricing that wants to help me nail down the monetary side please advise.

Evangelism requires little work when you look at this graphic and review the steps, pieces.