The Total Economic Impact™ Of Red Hat OpenShift

Reduction Or Elimination Of Infrastructure Software

Evidence and data. Several of the interviewees said their organizations significantly reduced infrastructure software spend by eliminating middleware and cutting virtualization software costs. These annual savings ranged from a few hundred thousand dollars per year to more than $3 million. Interviewees noted that components of Red Hat OpenShift performed security and infrastructure management tasks as well as or better than the tools they replaced, enabling those reductions in middleware spending.

• The team leader, DevSecOps, in government said their organization fully eliminated $3 million per year in licensing and support costs for proprietary middleware and Kubernetes platform components by moving to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus.

• The private cloud engineer at a bank said: “[We saw an] approximately $3 million cost avoidance just by moving to an existing license [for virtualization software] that we already had with Red Hat, eliminating a need to renew that license.” Another interviewee said their organization reduced its virtualization license costs by about half with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus.

• The same interviewee explained that using Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which is included with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, enabled their bank to eliminate its Kubernetes data management and storage platform. They said, “That was about $1 million per year saved by consolidating those tools with our existing OpenShift license.”

• The digital project manager, container platforms, in manufacturing said their organization generated annual savings of $700,000 by replacing a cybersecurity tool that provided vulnerability management and access control for its software containers with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, which is also included with OpenShift Platform Plus.

• Interviewees cited infrastructure savings in both their organizations’ Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and Red Hat OpenShift cloud services environments. Some commented that savings increased as Red Hat OpenShift became further embedded in their organizations. The head of cloud and platform DevOps services at a financial services organization said: “It’s a good bundle because as you grow, you need PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) for the centralized registry, you need [Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security] for security, you want to have a centralized manager for lots of clusters, and you need good, reliable storage. So, it’s an evolution of maturity in terms of how you’re using containers. As you get more applications running on OpenShift … you start needing those additional products [in OpenShift Platform Plus], which makes sense.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite eliminates various middleware products (e.g., container management tools, container security tools, CI/CD workflow tools), saving $2 million in annual license costs.

• The composite reduces its annual virtualization software spend by 50%, totaling $1.2 million per year.

• The composite eliminates its container data management and storage tool, saving $480,000 in Year 1. These savings increase each year as more clusters are added.

• The composite eliminates its container security software, saving $100,000 per cluster ($800,000 total) in Year 1. These savings increase to $1.3 million by Year 3 as the composite migrates additional applications and workloads to Red Hat OpenShift and retires legacy infrastructure software.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The extent to which the organization uses containers prior to Red Hat OpenShift.

• The types and license amounts of infrastructure and virtualization software prior to Red Hat OpenShift.

• The organization’s mix of on-premises and cloud-based applications.

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 $8 million.

Accelerated Deployment Velocity

Evidence and data. The most commonly cited benefit across the interviews was accelerated deployment velocity for application development teams driven by containerization, standardized pipelines, and self-service developer environments. For this study, application deployment is defined as the process of planning, designing, implementing, and releasing a software application or application update into a target environment (e.g., production, staging, or cloud) so that it can be available to end users or downstream systems.

• Interviewees reported that application teams deployed new workloads significantly faster with Red Hat OpenShift than on traditional VM-based platforms, primarily through reusable templates and automated pipelines. The digital project manager, container platforms, in manufacturing noted their organization shifted from quarterly releases before Red Hat OpenShift to about two releases per month for mature applications with Red Hat OpenShift.

• Interviewees said that CI/CD automation and standardized container platforms removed many of the manual handoffs between infrastructure and application teams, directly accelerating deployment timelines. They explained that developers gained greater control over deployment activities, which reduced these delays. Before OpenShift, developers depended on operations teams for deployments, networking, certificates, etc. With OpenShift, developers gained the ability to manage pipelines and deployments themselves. According to the digital project manager, container platforms at the manufacturing organization, “Application teams are developing much faster. … New features are delivered in the next sprint versus months of planning.”

• Interviewees said rapid environment provisioning with Red Hat OpenShift contributed to faster time to deployment, with time savings of several days to a few weeks. Developers became able to provision their own environments through CI/CD pipelines, thereby eliminating any involvement of infrastructure support teams.

• Interviewees shared that Red Hat OpenShift helped their organizations accelerate time to value by providing a unified platform where virtual machines, containers, and AI applications operate side by side. They said developers gained productivity from an integrated set of DevOps services and tooling, such as integrated development environments (IDEs), CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring, allowing teams to maintain a consistent workflow.

• Several interviewees reported accelerated development and deployment cycles. The private cloud engineer in banking said their organization’s deployment time was reduced from three months to two to four weeks for containerized applications. The senior product manager, cloud infrastructure, in transportation said their organization’s application release cadence increased from four to six releases per year to 20 to 25 releases per year after standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift and CI/CD pipelines. The owner and architect for container services in IT professional services said their organization accelerated to daily deployments: “We see a lot of applications being deployed many times during the day. [Previously,] updates would probably come once or twice every month.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Previously, the composite’s average time between deployments was 10 weeks.

• With Red Hat OpenShift and CI/CD automation practices, the average time between deployments is 2.5 weeks.

• An average of 2.5 developers work on each deployment.

• The fully burdened weekly salary for a developer is $4,270.

• The composite executes 40 new deployments in Red Hat OpenShift in Year 1, followed by 60 new deployments in both Years 2 and 3.

• Forrester applied a 75% productivity recapture rate because not all of the saved time is used productively.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The number of applications developed and managed in Red Hat OpenShift.

• The complexity of the applications developed.

• The number of developers per application.

• Average salaries and benefits for application developers.

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 $6.7 million.

Increased Productivity From Reduced Downtime

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported significant reductions in performance incidents under Red Hat OpenShift that could lead to application downtime. These incidents included change failures, configuration discrepancies across development, test, and production environments, and other platform runtime incidents. As a result, business users experienced fewer service interruptions and outages.

• The team leader, DevSecOps, in government reported their organization’s change failure rate dropped from 20% to 30% on legacy platforms to 5% to 10% after moving applications to Red Hat OpenShift. They said fewer change failures directly reduced performance degradation and service interruptions, leading to improved application uptime and stability that allowed their organization to increase its annual application updates from six to more than 20.

• The DevOps manager at the defense organization also reported a reduction in outages: “With our legacy environment, we were down about four days a year, which took down [each of our 300] applications. In the new Kubernetes environment, we expect that [downtime] to be much less than a day for [all] applications.”

• The team leader, DevSecOps, in government reported their organization reduced its average annual downtime per application from 20 hours per containerized application to 5 minutes each. They said standardized CI/CD and GitOps workflows led to fewer production incidents, which improved application performance for internal and external services.

• The container platforms solution architect in the oil and gas industry noted that Red Hat OpenShift improved platform and application performance, leading to reduced downtime. They stated, “We are now avoiding a couple incidents a year that would impact either internal employees or external customers.”

• The head of cloud-native transformation/technologist in the investment services industry said: “Incidents happen. The time to fix these things is shorter with OpenShift. We can do hotfixes to production faster than we could do before.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Red Hat OpenShift reduces the composite’s downtime per application by 90%, decreasing from 20 hours per year to 2 hours per year.

• The composite has 60 Red Hat OpenShift application deployments at the beginning of Year 1, increasing to 100 in Year 2 and 160 in Year 3.

• The number of end users per application is 50.

• The average fully burdened hourly salary for a business application user is $40.

• Forrester applied a 50% productivity recapture rate because not all saved time is used productively.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The number of applications developed and managed in Red Hat OpenShift.

• The complexity of the applications developed and managed.

• The number of end users for all Red Hat OpenShift applications.

• Average salaries and benefits for various roles.

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 $3.9 million.

Infrastructure Operational Efficiency

Evidence and data. Interviewees across many organizations reported efficiency gains for infrastructure management teams. In some cases, staff sizes were reduced and team members reallocated to other IT areas. Interviewees said some of these reductions were due to both Red Hat OpenShift cloud services and OpenShift Platform Plus.

• The digital project manager, container platforms, in manufacturing said their organization ran 230 applications with 7,000 workloads on both OpenShift Platform Plus and OpenShift cloud services using a team of six infrastructure engineers: “I would [estimate that without OpenShift], we would need a 50% larger team, or nine people versus six, to support a platform that can host 230 applications and 7,000 services.”

• The senior product manager, cloud infrastructure, at a transportation organization said their middleware team decreased from 15 to four people over six years and that the company’s infrastructure support issues were almost entirely eliminated because applications ran in a more stable environment.

• The infrastructure engineer in banking said OpenShift Platform Plus simplified the Kubernetes control plane and offloaded it entirely with OpenShift cloud services: “OpenShift is the best option to work on-premises … because of the ability to work with the control plane. [With OpenShift Service on AWS,] we don’t have a control plane to administer. It’s easier because Red Hat has a responsibility to care for it.”

• OpenShift cloud services customers reported staff reallocations in support and operations teams due to the platform being a managed service. These employees now focus on higher-value work. A container platform solution architect in the oil and gas industry indicated that their organization reallocated five FTEs away from operational activities. The solutions architect in higher education added, “We reassigned 25% [of] people out of operations and into development.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Prior to Red Hat OpenShift, 12 infrastructure engineers supported the composite’s application environments for both on-premises and cloud apps.

• Red Hat OpenShift decreases the number of engineers required for this to six in Year 1, five in Year 2, four in Year 3.

• The fully loaded annual salary for an infrastructure engineer is $141,250.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The number of applications developed and managed in Red Hat OpenShift.

• The complexity of the applications deployed and their environments.

• Average salaries and benefits for infrastructure engineers.

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 $2.1 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Strategic deployment flexibility. Interviewees’ organizations chose Red Hat OpenShift, including OpenShift Platform Plus, and OpenShift cloud services, for different strategic reasons. Some in industries such as healthcare and finance said their organizations used the hybrid capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift to manage workloads that were too sensitive for the cloud alone. The team leader, DevSecOps, at the government institution in EMEA said Red Hat OpenShift helped their organization meet regulatory requirements for data residency and risk that required certain applications to remain on-premises. Another interviewee said Red Hat OpenShift reduced latency between factory locations that are far from cloud data centers. Another interviewee noted their organization migrated Cloud Pak for Data workloads to Red Hat OpenShift on AWS to be closer to the data warehouse, which improved architecture and performance.

• Enterprisewide platform standardization. Interviewees said their organizations were expanding Red Hat OpenShift into a centralized enterprise platform that supports application development and deployment, and that this enabled them to standardize tools, improving governance, security, and operational control. Interviewees said Red Hat OpenShift simplified migration decisions for developers because applications include components that run both on-prem and in the cloud while maintaining a common technology stack. The team leader, DevSecOps, at the government institution remarked: “The mutual benefit is that now we can standardize the whole [method] of deployment. For the developers, it doesn’t matter where it runs. They just focus on one way.” The same interviewee also said their organization standardized CI/CD practices enabled by GitOps: “We are responsible for CI/CD pipelines and tools. With OpenShift, it is possible to use the GitOps method.” The interviewee added that this approach supports digital sovereignty and workload portability: “We have a possibility to have digital sovereignty, so we can move our applications one way or the other.”

• Enhanced developer satisfaction and improved talent retention. Interviewees emphasized that Red Hat OpenShift enabled modern development practices that helped retain talent. One noted that developers typically seek experience with technologies aligned with industry standards and said that using Red Hat OpenShift to adopt modern container platforms allowed their organization to meet developer expectations and avoid attrition. Interviewees also said the platform positioned their organizations to evolve their workforce capabilities and maintain competitiveness when hiring critical technical talent while developers reported higher satisfaction and confidence when deploying changes. The digital project manager, container platforms, in the manufacturing industry commented: “[My organization’s] developers are happy with OpenShift. They find it easy to use, and [it helps them work] faster than [they] were working before.” Interviewees said teams became more willing to make frequent updates, which reduced delays and improved productivity.

• Faster developer onboarding. The solutions architect at the higher education institution reported that their organization reduced its developer onboarding time from approximately two weeks to just a few days with Red Hat OpenShift, citing automation, templated pipelines, and simplified access. They explained: “One of the advantages of OpenShift is that it comes with a user interface, whereas [typical] Kubernetes does not. So, [developers] can go into their applications, go into the logs, and see what is happening. They don’t need to have specific knowledge of how to operate within OpenShift in order to develop the applications they’re working on.”

• Enhanced security and compliance. Interviewees said Red Hat OpenShift provided out-of-the-box security features, such as standardized baselines, easier audits, and embedded security tooling, across environments. This enabled the organizations to adapt their governance and development models without additional tools while reducing developer burden. The product owner, container platforms, at the insurance organization said: “If you look at how [OpenShift] is designed and implemented, you get some security features … in the platform that you do not have to [address] as a developer today. Even though we are on the cloud, we are much more secure than in the past when all the stuff was on-prem.”

Flexibility

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

• Future deployment flexibility. Interviewees consistently described Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for future hybrid and multicloud strategies. They said their organizations can use it to make future applications portable across cloud and on‑prem clusters and between public cloud providers. For example, the infrastructure architect in the healthcare industry said regulatory constraints are making their organization evolve toward a balanced hybrid architecture and that Red Hat OpenShift will help enable this by providing a consistent application platform across environments. Interviewees also said the consistent Kubernetes layer can reduce refactoring when moving workloads.

• Hybrid computing use cases. Some interviewees stated that their organizations are planning to extend Red Hat OpenShift to edge deployments across small, geographically distributed environments (e.g., deploying clusters in regional offices or near data sources to support latency-sensitive workloads). This suggests their organizations can deploy Red Hat OpenShift not only as a cloud platform but also as a distributed application platform that supports diverse infrastructure footprints.

• Future adoption of advanced platform capabilities. Interviewees explained that as their organizations expand their Red Hat OpenShift footprints, they plan to adopt additional platform capabilities such as multicluster management to centralize governance and visibility, integrated security and compliance enforcement, internal developer self-service platforms, and automated CI/CD pipelines with application templates. Multiple interviewees indicated their organizations have not fully implemented these capabilities but plan to as the number of clusters, users, and applications grow.

• AI capabilities and future AI initiatives. Interviewees said Red Hat OpenShift helps their organizations support both current AI use cases and future AI initiatives. The team leader, DevSecOps, in government, said their organization developed a large-scale internal application with Red Hat OpenShift AI on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS that allows its employees to search internal data stores and individual knowledge bases to summarize ad hoc queries using a variety of large language models when fulfilling customer requests. An interviewee at a banking organization said improving elasticity enabled their organization to adopt newer technologies and workloads, and that the bank intends to include AI in its workloads for the complex computations that it builds and runs to support the analyses provided through its consultancy services with more data.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).