Increasing developer velocity and operational efficiency: Findings from the Forrester TEI study for OpenShift cloud services

Modernizing and transforming the way your organization builds, deploys and manages applications can unlock new possibilities for your business. However, taking on initiatives to transform your applications brings up a few considerations. Not only do you need to invest in the technology to take on such initiatives, but also in your team’s time and resources. So then the question arises: what are the measurable, tangible business benefits of investing in technologies that will help me transform and modernize my applications? Let’s take a look.

Study conducted by Forrester Consulting examines financial and business impact

Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic  Impact™ (TEI) study, commissioned by Red Hat, by interviewing 8 organizations across various industries to capture their experiences and realized business impact of using Red Hat OpenShift cloud services. The study provides an analysis of the financial impact of using Red Hat OpenShift cloud services by aggregating data from 8 organizations into a single composite organization, and provides insights including return on investment (ROI) and other quantified benefits.

Although the interviewed organizations had different backgrounds prior to using OpenShift cloud services - varying in environments from on-premises to the cloud and in architectures from monolithic and microservices-based - they shared similar challenges including:

• Critical time and resources allocated to managing infrastructure rather than application development and deployment
• Slower release cycles, limited agility to react to business demands, and delayed time to market
• Rising costs associated with maintaining and upgrading monolithic applications

Based on these challenges, interviewed organizations considered these factors when deciding on a final solution:

• Key tools and services integrated into the solution.
• A managed service solution to offload infrastructure management.
• Vendor agnostic solution to prevent lock-in and ensure future flexibility.
• Cost-effective solution to decrease operational costs.

Shortened development cycle by up to 70%

Many of the interviewees indicated that they were transitioning from a monolithic architecture to a microservices-based architecture. During this transitional period of modernizing applications, interviewees stated that using the intuitive user interface and tools built into Red Hat OpenShift cloud services accelerated the timeline for application development and reduced complexity in onboarding as well. Forrester Consulting analyzed that the composite organization shortened the application development cycle by up to 70%.

“Previously, we were only able to release every two weeks. Now, we do thousands of releases a day. We now do very fast releases of very small changes. Additionally, in the previous environment, the average developer would have had to wait two to three weeks just to get developers set up with workspaces. This would happen every two weeks.”

• Director, Telecommunications company

By using an application platform with built-in tools (with the flexibility to use preferred native tools from AWS or Azure) organizations were able to spin-up environments faster and were therefore able to focus on higher priority activities, such as responding to customer needs.

Less time spent on infrastructure management, more time to focus on application delivery

Interviewees indicated that before adopting OpenShift cloud services, their developers were spending a significant amount of time on manually procuring new environments due to their monolithic architecture. By adopting a managed service solution, interviewed organizations were able to offload infrastructure management and were no longer hard pressed to find talent with specialized Kubernetes skills and expertise, which previously slowed development.

“From a company perspective, to find people who are firm with Kubernetes or OpenShift is not easy where we are. [With Red Hat OpenShift,] we can transfer some responsibility to get the cluster up and running to the vendor. In the future, we might not have the knowledge in house, but we can spin-up more clusters in more countries without having to hire experts in those geographical locations. It allows us the ability to scale without adding hard to find resources to our team.

• Product owner of container platforms, Financial organization

As a result, Forrester Consulting analyzed that the composite organization recaptured 20% of developer time due to reduced infrastructure maintenance requirements. With more of developers’ time allocated towards application innovation, organizations could more easily move internal resources to other areas across the business without hiring additional talent.

50% improvement in operational efficiency

Because OpenShift cloud services automates the management of OpenShift clusters, DevOps teams could move away from maintenance work and spend more time addressing customer needs and differentiating the business. DevOps teams also benefited from access to integrated operational tools for security and governance without having to integrate and maintain those tools themselves. Therefore, the composite organization was able to realize a benefit of improving operational efficiency by 50%.

“With Red Hat OpenShift cloud services, we don’t have to create new servers or install anything. We can focus on other things. The workload shifted from doing infrastructure maintenance to supporting application development.”

• IT innovation manager, Nonprofit Education

Key Takeaways

In addition to the quantified benefits of improved development velocity, reduced infrastructure management and increased operational efficiency, the composite organization realized benefits valued at $4.95 million over three years with a 468% return on investment. Interviewed organizations also mentioned other unquantified benefits such as:

• Developer satisfaction and retention: Less fire drills and the flexibility to use both built-in or preferred cloud-native tools developers were already familiar with
• Improved security and reduced risk: Automated features and security updates without the need for manual maintenance
• Improved elasticity: Ability to scale up and down in response to demand
• Reduced total cost of ownership: Less time and resources spent learning new tools and managing the platform
• Performance reliability: Fewer outages with a more reliable platform

Learn more

Interested in learning more about the TEI study or the results? You can read the full TEI study for OpenShift cloud services or watch the webinar exploring the results featuring a Forrester analyst.

You can also get started with Red Hat OpenShift cloud services today and use your cloud committed spend from AWS, Azure or Google to purchase.

Resources for you to check out:

• Read the TEI study
• Watch the webinar
• Learn about Red Hat OpenShift cloud services

This article is a summary of The Total Economic Impact™ of Red Hat OpenShift cloud services, a study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Red Hat, published in February 2024.