The Total Economic Impact™ Of VMware Cloud Foundation Automation

Business Benefits Enabled By VMware Cloud Foundation Automation (Formerly VMware Aria Automation)

A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study Commissioned By Broadcom, July 2024

Infrastructure automation is crucial to a firm’s success, and yet it can be complex and continually evolving. Since IT resources, budgets, and time are limited, effective infrastructure automation hinges on having tools that are flexible, integrated, and intelligent. Organizations that leverage automation to support their digital initiatives and modern applications, such as generative AI, can go to market faster, improve productivity, and ensure large-scale compliance.1

As a component of VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation Automation (formerly called VMware Aria Automation) is a cloud infrastructure automation solution that delivers a self-service private cloud. The solution empowers users with self-service consumption of Kubernetes and modernized cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities, allowing organizations to harness the power of a private cloud-native ecosystem. VMware Cloud Foundation Automation supports organizations that are looking to new technologies such as Kubernetes, open-source software, multiple clouds, and different operating models and practices like DevOps and platform engineering.

Broadcom, which acquired VMware in November 2023, commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential benefits and financial impacts enterprises may realize by deploying VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.2 The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of VMware Cloud Foundation Automation on their organizations.

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Benefits PV

$2.4M $2.4M

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Reduction in time to deploy new virtual machines

50%

To better understand the benefits and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four customers with experience using VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.

Prior to using VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, interviewees said that their organizations had sprawling prior technology environments prone to frequent outages due to noncompliant and unenforceable systems and technologies. Manual processes — both proactive and reactive — were prone to error and led to high volumes of infrastructure support tickets. As a result, interviewees’ organizations suffered from bloated IT management costs and were limited in their abilities to scale to meet business needs.

After the investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, the interviewees’ organizations digitally centralized and transformed their infrastructure and services in support of business growth. This mitigated the burden of technology management through a single, streamlined, and unified ecosystem. In addition to avoiding capital outlays for hardware investments, interviewees pointed out significant internal labor cost savings related to legacy technology management. System administrators accelerated and amplified their provisioning capacity as VMware Cloud Foundation Automation helped stabilize system availability, further contributing productivity improvements across technical and nontechnical teams.

For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a global enterprise based in the United States with revenue of $10 billion per year.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include the following (see Supplemental Material for further information on VMware product-related cost savings and business benefits):

  • Reduced one-off technology hardware and software savings in technology management costs post-cloud adoption by 5%. As the composite organization implements a self-service private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, it experiences one-off technology hardware and software savings attributed to the transition process. When virtualized infrastructure is then automated with end-to-end, bidirectional integrations, the composite organization further reduces friction previously created by manual processes and optimizes the vendor solutions and workflows used to connect them across the stack. The value of this additional, post-transition optimization of technology management costs totals nearly $774,000.

For , this benefit might be worth over three years.

  • Reduced unplanned downtime by 73% due to VMware Cloud Foundation Automation. With VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, the composite organization improves uptime and availability, reducing the number of hours that critical systems were left offline. This prevented costly revenue leakage, thereby improving profitability. The value of improved uptime to the composite organization totals more than $676,000.

For , this benefit might be worth over three years.

  • Recaptured 7,900 hours of end-user productivity from improved availability and developer time to value. By reducing outages, the composite organization has a direct impact on the number of hours in which employees can work productively. In addition, efficiencies gained in the provisioning process help to effectively democratize infrastructure as code (IaC), empowering more developers to deliver and consume infrastructure in a private cloud with existing skill sets. By leveraging IaC, the composite’s developers reduce the amount of time spent waiting for services to be provisioned, while also eliminating several configuration steps that were needed in the prior environment. This further lends developers valuable efficiency and flexibility, helping speed their time to value. For the composite organization, these end-user and developer productivity improvements are worth more than $500,000.

For , this benefit might be worth over three years.

  • Reduced time to deploy new virtual machines (VMs) by 50% and increased annual deployment capacity by 60%. The VMware Cloud Foundation Automation solution allows the composite organization to decrease the time required for infrastructure resources to manage the entire VM lifecycle. These automations also increase the number of deployments that the composite organization can handle, allowing teams to better serve their internal customers, including developers. Combined, this optimized deployment agility is worth more than $436,000.

For , this benefit might be worth over three years.

  • Avoided 60% of infrastructure-related IT tickets with automated, self-service provisioning. Although a small portion of the IT budget, an organization’s help desk operations can have an outsized impact on organizational productivity and agility. The VMware Cloud Foundation Automation self-service private cloud environment transforms the composite’s formerly manual processes to request and provision new instances. As a result, thousands of provisioning requests are completed without the assistance of a live agent. In total, the infrastructure support optimization benefit is worth over $52,000.

For , this benefit might be worth over three years.

Unquantified benefits. Qualitative benefits that provide value for the composite include time savings that are attributed to higher-value activities, improved compliance and governance, and additional VMware ecosystem benefits.

Cost considerations. VMware Cloud Foundation Automation is a component included in VMware Cloud Foundation, so no product costs are quantified for this study. Interviewees discussed several cost considerations that contributed to their value assessment. These included internal and external costs related to deployment and administration activities and timelines for achieving a mature automation environment.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $2.44 million over three years (see Supplemental Material for further information).

might experience benefits of over three years.

“We used to take up to three or four days to [deliver] services, but now customers can provision them directly from the VMware Cloud Foundation Automation catalog in about a half hour. That’s it. We have gone from days to minutes.”

Cloud and system administrator, oil and gas

Key Statistics

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    Benefits Present Value [PV]

    $2.4M $2.4M
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    Improvement in network availability

    73%
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    Increase in deployment capacity

    60%
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    Reduction in time to deploy new VMs

    50%
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Benefits (Three-Year)

Optimized technology management Improved availability Optimized deployment agility Improved organizationwide productivity Optimized infracture support

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.

The objective of the framework is to identify the benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that VMware Cloud Foundation Automation can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed Broadcom stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed four representatives at organizations using VMware Cloud Foundation Automation to obtain data about benefits and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. Financial Model Framework

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. Case Study

    Employed fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Broadcom and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation. For the interactive functionality using Configure Data/Custom Data, the intent is for the questions to solicit inputs specific to a prospect's business. Forrester believes that this analysis is representative of what companies may achieve with VMware Cloud Foundation Automation based on the inputs provided and any assumptions made. Forrester does not endorse Broadcom or its offerings. Although great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this model, Broadcom and Forrester Research are unable to accept any legal responsibility for any actions taken on the basis of the information contained herein. The interactive tool is provided ‘AS IS,’ and Forrester and Broadcom make no warranties of any kind.

Broadcom reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Broadcom provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Courtenay O’Connor

M
K

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