Implementation Labor Costs Avoidance

Evidence and data. Red Hat Consulting helped the interviewees’ organizations implement Red Hat OpenShift much more quickly and effectively than if they had done it fully themselves. Consulting helped interviewees accelerate and streamline each phase: the initial pilot that validated capabilities and compared options; the design and planning phase which included architecture design, securing funding, and aligning resources; and the deployment and migration phase where the platform was stood up and all VM and container workloads were migrated from prior environments. Not only was each phase faster, but each required fewer internal resource hours as fewer internal employees needed to be involved than in a DIY implementation and some resources could dedicate fewer hours to the effort. This also meant the interviewees’ organizations avoided the significant upfront and long-term costs of hiring and training additional new employees that would have been needed otherwise and continued operations with less disruption. Overall, despite the costs of Red Hat Consulting, interviewees reported an 18.3% reduction in total implementation cost combined with much faster time to market.

• The CIO of a financial services company reported that, using Red Hat Consulting, they deployed OpenShift in three to four months at 20% to 30% less cost than the expected six to eight months for a DIY implementation. This efficiency avoided significant hiring expenses and long-term commitments. Red Hat Consulting streamlined the architecture development and best practices, completing 60% to 70% of the deployment work. The CIO noted their previous company deployed OpenShift without Red Hat Consulting over 10 months for 115 people; with Red Hat Consulting, they believed it could have taken half the time with their pilot achievable in six to seven weeks instead of three months.

• An interviewee from a different financial services company noted their firm accelerated its app and VM migration from one year to nine months due to Red Hat Consulting and found that the investment was also more affordable in time and material than using a third-party or only internal resources. Red Hat Consulting helped them overcome many technical challenges, which avoided delays and ensured they did it right without issues.

• One interviewee noted Red Hat Consulting helped their technology company successfully migrate its entire container environment in four months, beating their deadline by a month and enabling their organization to avoid renewal costs for their prior container platform. Red Hat Consulting helped with planning and architecture and kept the internal team accountable for their planned strategy and deadlines to ensure the desired outcome of the migration. They also provided critical insights, helped identity issues and bugs, and coordinated issue investigation, verification, and resolution.

• Another interviewee from a financial services company said they deployed approximately four months faster than projected due to an efficient process that avoided common pitfalls and quickly troubleshooted issues to accelerate adoption. The executive director of business unit technology shared: “If we had tried to do the same ourselves, two things could have happened. First, it would have taken longer because we lack experience and other similar organizations have also been unable to complete their journeys. Second, we would have been like a deer in the headlights and been running around in circles for a long time. We would have wasted time and resources, and it might have even resulted in cancellation because things might have gone nowhere. Instead, [with Red Hat Consulting], we were able to focus and count on experts who understood the architecture and how it should go. It was smoother and faster and ensured we followed all the rules. This was the only way to ensure we did it the correct way.” They elaborated, “We tend to be blindsided with technical transformations because we expect things to work in a certain way. We need expert opinions on the limitations, what we are doing wrong, and what we are doing right.”

• An interviewee at another financial services company brought in Red Hat Consulting after their proof of concept to help with implementation. They leveraged the expertise and experience of the Red Hat consultants to resolve issues and challenges faster than relying on support tickets. Despite the company’s preexisting skill from operating Kubernetes for six years, Red Hat’s experience and direct access to resources was still valuable. Though their company didn’t accelerate its timelines compared to doing it themselves, they still avoided critical delays. They were able to shift cost from internal to external resources and avoid long-term commitments and lag from hiring and training.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes that the composite organization needs to conduct a 13-month process to deploy OpenShift and migrate its workloads using only internal labor. By leveraging Red Hat Consulting, the composite organization avoids all this labor and instead incurs Red Hat Consulting fees (shown in cost Table H) and a smaller amount of internal labor (shown in cost Table I). With Red Hat Consulting, the total time elapsed is reduced by 46% from 13 to seven months. This financial model also assumes the following:

• The avoided DIY implementation would have required a three-month pilot phase including 12 FTEs worth of internal labor hours across a team of 20+ employees, some fully and some partially dedicated to the effort. This phase is done concurrently as teams investigate other application platforms and includes learning about OpenShift, standing up a sandbox environment, integrating with enterprise tooling and processes, and evaluating capabilities. With Red Hat Consulting, this is reduced by 50% to 1.5 months for four FTEs (see Table I).

• The avoided DIY implementation would have required a three-month design and migration preparation phase including six FTE worth of labor hours. Key steps of this phase include architecture planning, employee training, and the hiring of additional skilled resources as needed. With Red Hat Consulting, this phase is shortened by 67% to one month for three FTEs (see Table I).

• The avoided DIY implementation would have required a seven-month deployment phase and migration wave including 30 FTEs worth of labor hours to stand up OpenShift and migrate workloads in VMs and containers. At least 10 employees would have needed to be hired and trained during the prior design and preparation phase. With Red Hat Consulting, this phase is shortened by 36% to 4.5 months with 15 FTEs (see Table I).

• Roles involved include a mix of internal IT admins and DevOps engineers. The average fully burdened annual salary for these resources is $120,000.

Risks. This benefit was widely reported by interviewees with mostly consistent timeline impacts, though the relative sizes varied. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Variance in legacy architecture, on-premises and cloud infrastructure, application code, and technology dependencies in prior environments.

• Variance in number of employees, hours, and their salaries that are influenced by environment size, industry, and region.

• Existing skill level and availability of in-house resources with OpenShift and Kubernetes will affect the potential speed and success of a DIY implementation.

• Timing of the Red Hat Consulting engagement can affect outcomes. Interviewees’ organizations who engaged Consulting upfront during pilot and design phases achieved better time to market and cost savings benefits than those who only brought in Consulting for the deployment steps.

• Selected OpenShift deployment model and the potential additional alternatives considered versus this approach, such as third-party professional services and the relative cost and timeline for those approaches.

• Company- and industry-specific requirements, such as compliance and security.

• Strategic decisions or technical debt that could create unexpected delays.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.4 million.

Platform Technology Cost Optimization

Evidence and data. Red Hat Consulting helped the interviewees’ organizations architect their OpenShift environment following best practices and expert guidance, leading them to design their platform in a way that was more efficient and effective for their needs. As a result, interviewees shared that they projected that OpenShift costs would have been 10% to 30% higher if they had deployed it themselves due to overprovisioned environments with excess licenses as well as environments that would not have scaled as efficiently and would have otherwise needed increases in contract size.

Further, the faster deployment and migration was critical in helping the interviewees’ organizations sunset legacy solutions faster, reducing and eliminating redundant legacy costs and netting greater software cost savings initially. This was particularly important for those interviewees’ organizations with upcoming software renewal cycles that would have locked them into multiyear spending contracts which would not have been tenable as a redundant cost to their Red Hat costs. Speed and confidence in on-time migration was paramount.

• One interviewee noted Red Hat Consulting advised their financial services company to use a different architecture than expected, which led to significant licensing and infrastructure savings. The director of private cloud shared: “[Red Hat Consulting] guided us on what decisions to make, what to run, and how to combine VMs and microservices. They guided us to … run microservices and VMs in the same clusters to save capacity, and we have seen no issues or negative impact.”

• An interviewee from a technology company noted their organization reduced licensing costs by 10% to 15% versus their prior container platform despite gaining more features and supporting larger usage ad demand. Red Hat Consulting was key to deploying the environment and helping them optimize usage. The interviewee noted their company continues to optimize app design to minimize resource usage and reduce the number of clusters without sunsetting apps and even while increasing the output of its workloads. The interviewee expected further savings as they look to migrate their VM environments to OpenShift Virtualization and then begin the containerization process after the initial move is completed.

• An interviewee reported their financial services company leveraged Red Hat Consulting to quickly and effectively migrate off its legacy solutions to avoid expensive contract renewals. They secured a multiyear agreement for locked-in costs with OpenShift that were more cost-effective than the prior environment, whereas the costs for the legacy solutions had been increasing substantially and were expected to increase further even as they worked to reduce consumption. Deployment and migration speed was paramount to reigning in operating expenses.

• An interviewee from an additional financial services company reported that Red Hat Consulting helped their organization implement a better architecture, allowing it to utilize OpenShift more efficiently.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• OpenShift Platform Plus subscription costs are $2 million annually for the composite when implemented with Red Hat Consulting’s support and guidance. Without Red Hat Consulting, the architecture would be less optimal and OpenShift subscription costs would be 10% to 30% higher.

• Staying on the legacy VM and container platforms would have cost 20% to 60% more per year than OpenShift.

• Red Hat Consulting enables the composite organization to complete the entire migration process OpenShift in seven months instead of 13 months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with a DIY implementation.

• The benefit total includes only the incremental savings from avoiding six months of the legacy solution and the cost efficiencies gained from deploying Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat Consulting versus a DIY implementation.

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Variance in scale and costs for legacy architecture depending on specific tools, infrastructure, and negotiated contracts.

• Company-, industry-, and app-specific requirements for technology features, architecture, tool dependency, compliance, and security.

• Skill level and quality of strategic decisions and architecture design done by a hypothetical all in-house OpenShift deployment team.

• Actual differential in implementation speed between DIY and Consulting-led deployment approaches as discussed in Benefit A.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.8 million.

Infrastructure Cost Optimization From App Modernization

Evidence and data. Modernizing applications into containerized microservices with OpenShift allowed interviewees’ organizations to significantly reduce resource requirements for apps and avoid overprovisioning that was otherwise needed in legacy apps using VMs. Interviewees typically did a lift-and-shift of apps in containers and VMs to OpenShift, and then worked to modernize the apps in VMs over time.

Red Hat Consulting helped the interviewees’ organizations kickstart and accelerate the app modernization process while also helping them use optimal app and platform design that further reduced resource consumption. The faster migration of workloads also allowed their organizations to turn attention to modernization sooner. This higher velocity led to earlier and greater app modernization, leading to greater modernization savings immediately and higher rates and savings even three years into the investment.

Interviewees achieved greater infrastructure cost savings by engaging Red Hat Consulting to deploy OpenShift versus doing it by themselves:

• One interviewee noted their financial services company slashed resource consumption by 30% to 50% for application workloads by modernizing the apps from VMs to microservices. Further, OpenShift was less cost prohibitive for storage compared to the prior environment even without modernizing apps running in VMs.

• Another interviewee from a financial services company shared that Red Hat Consulting helped their organization achieve greater infrastructure utilization, attributing 20% cost savings on infrastructure over three years to Red Hat Consulting specifically.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• The composite spends $3.5 million per year on infrastructure for the VM and container environment (including additional provisioning, hardware refreshes, hardware operational costs, and cloud consumption costs).

• Before the migration, 75% of apps were monolithic and ran in on-premises data centers in an alternative VM environment while 25% were structured as containerized microservices in an alternative cloud container platform.

• After the migration, the composite begins modernizing monolithic apps by refactoring them into containerized microservices. In the DIY implementation, the composite modernizes 5% of apps in Year 1, another 15% in Year 2, and another 15% in Year 3, reaching 60% modernized. By comparison, with Red Hat Consulting, the composite modernizes 15% of apps in Year 1, 15% in Year 2, and 15% in Year 3, reaching 70% modernized.

• Refactoring apps into containerized microservices allows the composite to utilize infrastructure more efficiently by avoiding overprovisioning and scaling to use only what it needs. The composite improves utilization by 30% in Year 1, 35% in Year 2, and 40% in Year 3 for modernized apps with a DIY approach as it gains learnings on how to be most effective year over year. By comparison, with guidance from Red Hat Consulting, the composite immediately achieves the 40% target efficiency gain for modernized apps in Year 1.

• Red Hat Consulting enables the composite organization to complete the entire migration process OpenShift in seven months instead of 13 months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with a DIY implementation.

• The benefit total includes only the incremental savings from modernizing more apps, modernizing apps faster, and reaching better cost efficiencies earlier by deploying Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat Consulting versus a DIY implementation.

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Variance in scale and costs for legacy architecture depending on specific tools, infrastructure, and negotiated contracts.

• Company-, industry-, and app-specific requirements for technology features, architecture, tool dependency, compliance, and security that may impact their ability to be broken down into microservices and containerized and the actual reduction in resource requirements or overprovisioning for those apps.

• Actual differential in implementation speed and app modernization rates between DIY and Red Hat Consulting-led deployment approaches.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $354,000.

Operational Efficiency

Evidence and data. Red Hat Consulting helped interviewees’ organizations set up the management, reporting, automation, and orchestration capabilities more quickly and effectively. IT admins and DevOps teams expected to achieve significant productivity savings with the adoption of OpenShift as a centralized hybrid cloud platform, replacing multiple prior environments that required more manual work and automation and lacked valuable tooling and consolidated views and interfaces. By accelerating and improving this adoption process, those teams recognized the productivity savings much earlier, allowing them to pivot their time to perform more valuable, innovative work therefore driving business success versus keeping the lights on.

• An interviewee noted Red Hat Consulting helped their technology company deploy Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM), which automated and expedited deployment and management of clusters and workloads. Consulting helped their company use OpenShift’s Operator Hub to transform high-touch manual operations involving four to five runbooks to a low-touch mode. Their company reallocated day-two operations labor into accelerating the company’s modernization and innovation efforts to drive growth.

• An interviewee from a financial services company reported their organization significantly reduced operational overhead by migrating from a purely open-source Kubernetes environment to OpenShift. OpenShift was a more unified and scalable platform that enabled infrastructure as code (IaC) for better DevOps methodology. Savings came from the supported and certified control plane for OpenShift, which included service mesh, observability, monitoring, and role-based access control (RBAC) tools, along with templates and avoidance of upgrades and patching.
  The supported control plane with certified components and operators also reduced operational challenges and security risks of managing Kubernetes and its ecosystem. The DevOps architect explained: “Self-managed Kubernetes involved a lot more personnel. We treated OpenShift like a platform and rolled it out without a ton of time and research [thanks to Red Hat Consulting].” They continued: “We could use that additional time from those resources to do more productive work in other areas. We found time savings overall versus homegrown.”

• Interviewees noted savings could potentially extend to support personnel beyond the core IT and DevOps team. Another interviewee noted their financial services company ran a very large environment with mission-critical applications and needed an “army of production support” to do monitoring, problem-solving, maintenance, provisioning, and more. This made scaling impossible. With automation in OpenShift, the interviewee’s company reallocated a substantial portion of its production support team from 500 to 300 personnel while also accelerating incident resolution. Though Red Hat Consulting played a minor role in these automations, the adoption speed and success they achieved helped the company experience these significant savings sooner.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• The composite employs 40 DevOps engineers and IT admins that support the OpenShift environment of VMs and containers. The fully burdened hourly rate for IT admins and DevOps engineers is $58.

• Productivity improvements are expected from the OpenShift DIY implementation, starting at 30% and increasing to 50% by Year 3. Productivity improvements with Red Hat Consulting are assumed to be higher than DIY, starting at 40% and reaching 50% for the last two years.

• Red Hat Consulting also enables the composite organization to migrate all workloads to OpenShift in seven months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with an expected 13-month DIY implementation.

• The model computes the hours saved from OpenShift with a DIY implementation versus with Red Hat Consulting and only includes the incremental savings attributable to Red Hat Consulting in the benefit total.

• A productivity recapture rate of 50% is applied to the hours saved to reflect that not all hours are reclaimed and utilized for productive work.

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Team size, skill level, role makeup, and salary levels.

• Company-, industry-, and app-specific requirements that may impact the operations environment, automation, and DevOps processes.

• Actual differential in implementation speed between DIY and Red Hat Consulting-led deployment approaches as discussed in Benefit A.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

• Risk of additional operational overhead when utilizing virtualization.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $673,000.

Developer Efficiency

Evidence and data. Interviewees worked with Red Hat Consulting to learn and adopt best practices to modernize and streamline application delivery by using Red Hat OpenShift, containers, and microservices. By adopting modern tools and DevOps processes, they broke free of manual processes and aligned stakeholders to accelerate the time to market for applications in their organizations’ pipelines.

By aligning key stakeholders on a modern set of development tools and processes, the interviewees’ organizations could automate and expedite the development, testing, and deployment processes for bringing new applications to market and for modernizing and containerizing legacy applications.

Interviewees said the application delivery benefits extended beyond the initial build into the application development lifecycle. The adoption of Red Hat OpenShift and partnership with Red Hat Consulting aided the interviewees’ organizations in accelerating the time to market for new product features, updates, patches, and bug fixes. By harnessing the capability of containers to separate applications into granular microservices, these organizations accelerated release cycles by packaging, testing, and deploying components separately.

• The CIO for a financial services firm described how Red Hat Consulting helped their developers innovate faster, better, and more productively due to guidance and best practices. The DevOps structure, automation and pipelines, and other associated platform tools all enhanced these benefits. As a result, their company has already successfully conducted proof-of-concepts (PoCs) and stood up generative AI tools and models with the guidance of Red Hat Consulting that otherwise would have been much slower, less effective, or may not have occurred at all.

• Another interviewee noted that deploying OpenShift with the assistance of Red Hat Consulting helped their technology company automate and expedite the deployment and management of clusters and workloads through a GitOps approach and with the OpenShift Operator Hub. Developers achieved a significant improvement in productivity with their progress toward an instant-ready platform and with more features and functionality at the edge.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• The composite employs 300 developers that work on apps in the OpenShift environment, and 60% of developers’ time is spent on noncoding activities. The fully burdened hourly rate for developers is $65.

• Productivity improvements from OpenShift DIY implementation are anticipated to start at 5% and incrementally rise to 15% by Year 3. Productivity improvements with Red Hat Consulting are projected to be initially higher than DIY, starting at 10% and stabilizing at 15% for the last two years.

• Red Hat Consulting also enables the composite organization to migrate all workloads to OpenShift in seven months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with an expected 13-month DIY implementation.

• The model computes the hours saved from OpenShift with a DIY implementation versus with Red Hat Consulting and only includes the incremental savings attributable to Red Hat Consulting in the benefit total.

• A productivity recapture rate of 50% is applied to the hours saved to reflect that not all hours are reclaimed and utilized for productive work.

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Number of developers and their skill levels, responsibilities, existing processes and workflows, and average salaries.

• Company-, industry-, and app-specific requirements that may impact the development environment, automation, and DevOps processes.

• Actual differential in implementation speed between DIY and Red Hat Consulting-led deployment approaches as discussed in Benefit A.

• Change management to adapt developers to new processes, tools, and governance rules that may be more stringent.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.1 million.

Availability And Performance Improvements

Evidence and data. Interviewees noted that Red Hat OpenShift, as deployed by Red Hat Consulting, improved performance, increased availability, enhanced reliability, and streamlined operations. OpenShift’s automation and orchestration features optimized cloud workloads, resulting in better scalability and more efficient operations. This led to a reduction in incidents and downtime that prevented wasted labor, ensured uninterrupted service, and minimized the risk of revenue loss. Interviewees also noted that OpenShift’s deployment enhanced the overall stability and dependability of their IT infrastructure, improving customer satisfaction and enabling more productive developer workflows. OpenShift’s ability to ensure low latency in mission-critical applications, even in complex server environments, was highlighted as a valuable feature.

Red Hat Consulting helped the interviewees’ organizations maximize the performance and availability of the OpenShift environment by guiding on optimal architecture and capability usage. Further, by helping these organizations deploy OpenShift faster, Red Hat Consulting allowed interviewees’ organizations to begin recognizing the benefits of availability and performance sooner. Interviewees shared the following examples:

• An interviewee noted their financial services organization moved some workloads to the cloud as they adopted OpenShift and, though initially the cloud latency decreased performance, Red Hat Consulting worked with them to make adjustments. Performance actually improved and scaling became more efficient. Further, availability significantly improved: incidents dropped from 10 to three per month with total downtime down from 20 hours to under 3 hours per month. This 50% reduction in duration and 70% decrease in incidents was credited to OpenShift’s automation and orchestration features, which Red Hat Consulting helped to deploy. This improvement was crucial because previously, downtime of their mission-critical apps led to risky, blind decision-making or delays that could lead to loss of revenue. The implications could be catastrophic with possible losses that could threaten the entire business. With OpenShift, diagnosing issues was much faster as incident resolution reduced from 20 to 30 FTEs for 3 to 4 hours down to less than an hour for 10 or less people.

• Another interviewee noted OpenShift’s investment significantly boosted their financial services company’s performance and availability, raising the CIO’s rating of their satisfaction from 2/5 to 4/5 and achieving over 99.5% reliability, with no outages in nearly a year. This was a marked improvement from the legacy environment that had multiple outages per year, and it led to a more stable and dependable IT infrastructure.

• An interviewee from a technology company noted they markedly improved performance and availability by migrating to OpenShift. OpenShift offered greater reliability and eliminated frequent issues and outages that previously hindered developer productivity. With OpenShift, their company has experienced no downtime in the months since implementation, contrasting with the prior platform’s less than 99% availability and weekly disruptions that included a total of 33 days where the legacy platform was completely unavailable and incurred substantial remediation labor. The impact of past downtimes included significant business costs, lost revenue, and a negative employee experience, with engineers forced to use alternative pipelines, resulting in hours of lost work for all the company’s developers.

• Another interviewee from a financial services company needed to ensure extremely low latency for a mission-critical application despite having a large variety of different servers in their data center. By deploying OpenShift on bare metal across this environment, the interviewee’s company achieved platform adoption with the desired benefits and management tools without sacrificing essential performance.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• The composite faced 48 hours of unplanned downtime per year in the legacy environment (two outages lasting 2 hours each per month).

• A reduction in downtime is projected with OpenShift DIY implementation, starting at 65% and increasing to 85% by Year 3. The downtime reduction from OpenShift with Red Hat Consulting is higher, starting at 75% and remaining at 85% for the last two years.

• Though performance improvements are important and fundamentally related to availability, the incremental impact is not modeled for the composite in this table as the value cannot be accurately separated from the operational efficiency and developer productivity benefits modeled earlier in this study.

• Red Hat Consulting enables the composite organization to migrate all workloads to OpenShift in seven months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with an expected 13-month DIY implementation.

• The model computes the hours saved from OpenShift with a DIY implementation versus with Red Hat Consulting and only includes the incremental savings attributable to Red Hat Consulting in the benefit total.

• Developers cannot complete productive work during downtime, with 23.7% being online at a given time to be affected by an issue (assuming 2,080 hours worked per developer of 8,760 hours per year). The fully burdened hourly rate for developers is $65.

• A team of IT admins investigate, remediate, and report on issues incurring 50 labor hours for every one hour of downtime. The fully burdened hourly rate for IT admins is $58.

• A productivity recapture rate of 50% is applied to the hours saved to reflect that not all hours are reclaimed and utilized for productive work.

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Prior environment architecture, complexity, and stability.

• Number of developers and IT admins, their roles, and average salaries.

• Company-, industry-, and app-specific requirements that may impact architecture, resource demands, performance, and uptime.

• Actual differential in implementation speed between DIY and Red Hat Consulting-led deployment approaches as discussed in Benefit A.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $76,000.

Business Growth From Faster Time To Market

Evidence and data. Interviewees’ organizations utilized Red Hat OpenShift to drive significant business growth and reduce business risks. They connected disparate data and tools to create new products with enhanced services and results; gained the ability to quickly and cost-effectively scale to meet business demand they previously could not handle; attracted new customers, investors, and partners through better compliance and security; and reduced risks of lost business and missed business opportunities driven by failures to innovate, by downtime, or by security or compliance breaches that could have caused reputational damage.

Interviewees noted Red Hat Consulting helped their organizations use OpenShift to build these solutions quickly and optimally, accelerating the innovation and ensuring they met their goals. Importantly, by deploying OpenShift faster, interviewees’ organizations realized these business growth benefits sooner, which provided additional revenue and competitiveness in their marketplace while boosting shareholder value. Examples provided by interviewees included:

• One interviewee from a financial services company calculated that they cut the potential revenue loss from reputational risks by $600,000 to $700,000 with OpenShift. They also estimated that they were missing out on $800,000 in revenue due to their inability to scale up to meet transaction demands, leading to declined business with some customers. Improved scalability and speed was critical to mitigating financial risks and tapping into new financial possibilities.

• Another interviewee reported their financial services company connected systems to launch a new virtual product using OpenShift that increased volume of their primary analysis activity for customers, reduced the completion time from 21 to 10 days, and improved their margin of error from 5% down to 2%. The interviewee calculated that this OpenShift-enabled launch increased revenue by $10 million to $15 million per year while delivering better customer experience (CX), reducing COVID-19 exposure risks, and avoiding labor costs for sending staff to the field for analysis work.

• A third interviewee from a financial services company noted their organization connected critical data systems across business units with OpenShift and stood up a new, connected product offering that drove remarkable growth by attracting tens of thousands of new customers and hundreds of investors and making it possible to scale to meet that demand. They tapped into a greater portion of inactive funds for loans to bolster profits, whereas before, their inability to scale rendered significant capital dormant leading to missed opportunities. The company also gained critical financial partners by demonstrating compliance with Consumer Finance Protection Board standards. Finally, the accelerated product delivery built on OpenShift and enabled by Red Hat Consulting allowed them to hit a critical, short-term period of high demand that ensured market relevance and timeliness to boost sales without missing the rare market opportunity.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester’s financial model for the composite organization assumes the following:

• The composite organization anticipates additional annual revenue of $10 million per year driven by new and improved offerings running in OpenShift. This estimate will vary significantly based on specific company and use case but is based on real estimates provided by interviewees and scaled to the equivalent size for the composite organization. This growth is attributed to a mix of new and improved products, better compliance and security adherence, and improved scalability allowing them to meet greater demand.

• Red Hat Consulting enables the composite organization to migrate all workloads to OpenShift in seven months, allowing it to realize benefits six months earlier than with an expected 13-month DIY implementation.

• Fifty percent of this accelerated revenue is considered incremental, which would not have been earned without the faster time to market enabled by Red Hat Consulting. The remaining revenue would have been earned in either scenario but is earned six months earlier with Red Hat Consulting. Though the present value of this cash flow would be slightly higher, the differential is not large enough to be material to the model results and is excluded for simplicity.

• An operating profit margin of 11% is applied to this incremental revenue to determine its impact on business growth.⁵

Risks. The following variability and risk factors could alter or reduce the realization of this benefit for organizations:

• Company size, annual revenue, margin, product offerings, customer demands and expectations, and the competitive market environment.

• Specific use cases deployed and their relative revenue opportunities.

• Actual differential in implementation speed between DIY and Red Hat Consulting-led deployment approaches as discussed in Benefit A.

• Risk of technical debt, migration roadblocks, or other unexpected challenges.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $200,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees described the following benefits that their organizations experienced as a result of OpenShift and Red Hat Consulting but were not able to quantify financially:

• Improved employee experience (EX) and hiring ability. OpenShift provided employees with robust tools, automated drudgery, and allowed them to focus on more interesting and valuable work which improved job satisfaction. It also provided valuable skill-building opportunities that helped employees’ careers and allowed companies to more easily attract, hire, and retain employees. Red Hat Consulting influenced this benefit by accelerating realization, ensuring the system was set up optimally, and offering expert guidance. Red Hat Training and Certifications could potentially further help the interviewees’ organizations upskill and retain employees while accelerating employees’ careers.

  • The executive director of business unit technology noted their financial services company’s employees gained confidence and reduced frustration with OpenShift, improving employee experience. Their company also could more easily hire and retain employees: “People don’t want to work with old-fashioned technology. They need to be interested in the technology we are using and how they can upskill to keep them engaged and get them training to advance their careers.”
  • The CIO at another financial services company reported OpenShift’s adoption enhanced EX and user experience (UX), leading to new skill development, deeper work engagement, and improved job satisfaction and retention. The system’s robustness and seamlessness elevated UX, which the CIO rated as 5/5. The previous system’s clunkiness gave way to greater visibility and more robust functionality. Red Hat Consulting also helped employees gain practical learning and participate in projects end-to-end with support and guidance, upskilling employees and fostering engagement while providing them trusted backing. This contributed to a low turnover rate as employees valued the learning and innovation opportunities. The CIO shared: “Everybody looks for a growth pattern for their themselves, and OpenShift [with Red Hat Consulting] became a job retention thing for us. We had very few people leave the company, in part because they got to learn more things.”
  • The interviewees from a technology company found that Red Hat Consulting helped their company deploy OpenShift quickly and build valuable skills internally, helping employees upskill and improving their job satisfaction, which is expected to impact retention and their ability to hire.

• Improved customer experience (CX) and business growth. The increased frequency of updates and releases improved product quality for customers and generated greater revenue opportunities. OpenShift itself enabled additional sales as discussed in benefit G beyond the acceleration measured in this study, and Red Hat Consulting helped companies determine how to leverage OpenShift and accelerate value realization. The interviewees’ organizations reported increased revenues from $1 million to over $15 million per year due to their new innovation opportunities, faster speed, better security and compliance, and better analytics and data to power apps and decision-making.

• Improved business profit margins. Interviewees noted OpenShift’s accelerated app development may help drive end-user efficiencies or business cost savings in addition to revenue growth. For example, one interviewee’s financial services company was able to avoid sending field staff for appraisals and instead conducted work remotely, saving labor and travel costs. The interviewee’s organization further leveraged data joined via OpenShift from across environments to reduce the margin of error from 5% to 2% on appraisals and thus reduce risk and optimize margins.

• Improved software quality and reduced vulnerabilities. Having the ability to run code more frequently in small batches reduced the likelihood of deploying bugs, defects, and vulnerabilities to production.

• Improved ability to secure and monitor environments. OpenShift helped the interviewees’ organizations leverage visibility, automation, and notifications to discover, track, triage, and resolve incidents quicker and more effectively. Critically, these benefits helped protect the interviewees’ organizations during off-hours and holidays when security personnel were at minimal staffing levels. The platform security features and reputation also helped their companies prove their security posture in ways not possible with prior siloed tools and open-source options. Interviewees reported that Red Hat Consulting helped their organizations realize this value more fully by helping them stand up the environment and tools in a way that would optimize their security outcomes. It also accelerated the realization of these security benefits by achieving faster deployment time for the platform and capabilities.

  • A financial services company reported strengthening its risk management practices with OpenShift tools to allow for better tracking of incidents and system performance.
  • OpenShift streamlined security for another interviewee’s financial services company, enabling pattern recognition and alerts for unusual activities, which was particularly crucial during off-hours and holidays. Integration with a third-party security solution simplified notifications while covering the entire environment in a way not previously possible. These benefits enhanced security and thus protected brand reputation, which was key to attracting customers and investors and avoiding the risk of losses.
  • An interviewee from another financial services company stated their organization established a unified control plane with IaC using OpenShift that enabled it to ensure uniform security across data centers with better defense, notifications, reporting, and analysis.
  • The container platform product owner at a technology company shared: “Before, every customer had freedom to exercise their own cluster. We had like 150 different users working in 150 different ways. There was no way [to see] and control everything in an organized way. [Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM)] gave us a single pane of glass, which is a very important component of IT security, to enforce policies in all our tenant and multitenant clusters.”

• Improved ability to meet and show adherence to regulatory compliance requirements. OpenShift provided the critical opportunity to connect and centralize environments with automation, visibility, and consistent governance. This allowed creation and enforcement of standard policies across diverse apps and infrastructure, significantly improved monitoring and management, and streamlined audit processes while also adding higher-quality data. Red Hat Consulting helped the interviewees’ organizations realize this value more fully by helping them stand up the environment and tools in a way that would optimize their compliance outcomes and accelerated the realization of these compliance benefits by achieving faster deployment time for the platform and capabilities.

  • An interviewee’s financial services organization improved operational transparency within OpenShift, gaining clear visibility into system operations and facilitating easier identification and resolution of potential compliance issues. OpenShift’s logging and monitoring tools significantly improved the interviewee’s company’s audit capabilities, providing detailed records and insights that support regulatory compliance and risk management efforts with a streamlined process to demonstrate regulatory compliance and provide necessary documentation and evidence in audits.
  • Investing in OpenShift allowed another interviewee’s financial services company to meet stringent compliance and security requirements, which was crucial for gaining the confidence of investors and the Consumer Finance Protection Board. The platform provided robust data retention and auditability features, ensuring that personally identifiable information (PII) was securely managed throughout its lifecycle. This was particularly important given the sensitive nature of PII and the complexities involved in encrypting and decrypting data during transactions. The interviewee noted OpenShift’s comprehensive platform facilitated an integrated cycle from application to decision-making, underwriting, and payments, all within a single ecosystem. This was then integrated with a third-party tool for audits, which allowed the interviewee’s company to streamline data flow and enable precise tracking and reporting of actions.
  • The interviewees at a technology company stated they enhanced platform governance and security by applying policies and standards across multitenant clusters using OpenShift ACM while gaining a single point of visibility for the entire environment. This resulted in increased accountability and a stronger governance framework compared to the prior approach, which had approximately 150 individual use cases done in different ways with no centralized oversight or policy enforcement capabilities. The implementation of ACM enabled their company to enforce policies, manage both tenant and multitenant clusters through a unified interface, and create standalone clusters that operate independently of the main hub.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might leverage Red Hat Consulting to deploy OpenShift and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Expanding the usage of additional OpenShift capabilities and Red Hat offerings with guidance from Red Hat. There are a myriad of Red Hat services and technologies that the interviewees’ organizations could adopt to drive further value. Other OpenShift capabilities and other technologies from Red Hat could expand capabilities and benefits, while Consulting could help drive more value for those other technologies as could Red Hat Training and Certification and Red Hat Technical Account Managers. The director of information systems engineering at a technology company shared: “We will use more features and services as we modernize our whole lifecycle. We will expand [the OpenShift environment] to more sites and make sure everything is available at the edge where our engineers actually are, so it is easier for them. We are going to focus on modernizing dated tools in our platform and using the full [Red Hat] platform as we work to containerize our entire application lifecycle and make an ‘instant ready’ platform for developers.” Examples include but are not limited to:

  • Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAM) to provide ongoing support and expertise that is customized to customers’ environments.⁶
  • Red Hat Training and Certification to provide formal training and learning to internal teams, helping them upskill and maximize impact.
  • Red Hat OpenShift cloud services, which offer the platform in a hosted, managed environment by Red Hat and public cloud providers, which could allow the interviewees’ organizations to further focus on shifting left, accelerating innovation, and streamlining operations.⁷
  • Other tools within Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, which includes a suite of toolsets such as Red Hat Quay, Advanced Cluster Management (ACM), and Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes (ACS).⁸

• Testing and adopting AI, including generative AI, using native and third-party solutions. Implementing OpenShift helped position the interviewees’ organizations with a suitable tech environment to test and adopt AI, while Red Hat Consulting could provide critical guidance and support to help test and build AI use cases. Interviewees’ organizations could gain access to tools such as OpenShift AI, Red Hat Podman AI Lab, or RHEL AI directly from Red Hat.⁹ These potential AI use cases with OpenShift could also be handled either in the cloud or on-premises, which could help control for spikes in cloud billing.¹⁰ OpenShift also enabled the interviewees’ organizations to connect data and apps across environments in a way that could feed AI solutions from a variety of vendors.

  • The CIO from a financial services firm noted their organization connected an on-premises environment from one business unit to data in two other cloud environments and a variety of tools using OpenShift with Red Hat Consulting’s help. This data connectedness made it possible to test third-party generative AI technologies leveraging the data connected by the OpenShift environment. The interviewee’s company has since deployed AI use cases that automate a variety of fundamental financial business processes and is working to build more. To achieve this goal, the CIO brought in Red Hat Consulting to provide guidance and best practices, and the services even helped do the work of standing up PoCs for three different generative AI models from third parties. They then selected and began deploying production use cases of AI that automated key financial business processes. The CIO reported that Red Hat Consulting was critical to helping them create ideas, build the right teams to execute, and execute efficiently with augmented resources. Not only did this enable leading-edge innovation, but it also enabled staff to upskill on this emerging technology that will be critical to their careers and helped them be highly engaged in their jobs.
  • The executive director of business unit technology at a financial services company explained that OpenShift with the guidance of Red Hat Consulting set the groundwork for their organization to test AI. They explained: “We are now in world where AI plays a big role. Our expectations are high … to use AI and generative AI capabilities in an automated way for optimizing workloads and understanding activity. IBM is no stranger to generative AI … so though the competition is high, Red Hat with the backing of IBM gives us confidence [in our future AI plans].”

• Leveraging the ability to scale, innovate, and adopt cloud services with infrastructure portability to adapt based on future business needs. Investing in OpenShift with the guidance of Red Hat Consulting provided the interviewees’ organizations with a scalable, agile platform that offered flexibility to develop apps and run them on-premises or in the cloud. Innovation could be done faster and more efficiently, governance could be enforced consistently, and innovation could be done without locking in to one type of infrastructure.

  • The executive director of business unit technology at a financial services company shared: “We are moving to distributed computing … for scalability and moving our workloads to the cloud. OpenShift is the biggest [part of this strategy]. Red Hat helps us on this path and makes our processes more dynamic.”
  • One interviewee from a financial services company used OpenShift in a hybrid environment of their on-premises data centers and clouds from two providers. The interviewee’s organization leveraged the infrastructure portability to shift workloads based on regulatory, business, and cost needs without fear of lock-in.
  • Another interviewee noted their financial services company leveraged OpenShift to use the GitOps methodology and IaC, which improved the automation and scalability of their platform compared to their prior open-source Kubernetes instance.

• Building or refactoring a larger portion of applications using Red Hat OpenShift to gain further benefits from containerization. Cloud-native or more agile companies may be comfortable adopting containers at a higher rate than modeled in this study, which could accelerate the recognition of benefits. As organizations modernize an increasing amount of their application stack they may find further gains in speed, efficiency, performance, cost, and CX.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).