Does the Vista View Include Real ROI?

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January 17, 2007 (Computerworld) -- With the official release of Microsoft Vista, many corporate IT departments will be getting requests from users to upgrade and then puzzling over whether it makes fiscal sense. The major question to be answered: Does Vista derive enough savings to make the case for near-term migration, or should the organization take a wait-and-see approach?

Frugal CIOs and CFOs want to understand how investing in the upgrade will yield immediate and direct benefits — particularly how it will help reduce IT costs, while at the same time improving user productivity, service levels and capability. With the most frugal buyers in mind, let us first look only at the direct impacts of implementing Vista — how the Vista investment can help lower ongoing IT costs.

Looking at the costs of PC ownership, IT labor for desktop management and support is the largest direct IT expense, consuming almost 60% of the total life-cycle costs.¹ PC support and administration costs on average equal one full-time equivalent for every 100 to 200 PCs, with an estimated eight to 12 service desk calls per PC per year. With this costing $400 to $700 annually per PC on labor or on outsourced equivalents, the most significant direct IT savings can be achieved by reducing administration and support staff tasks and improving their productivity.² By reducing the burden of PC management and support, organizations can help reallocate precious resources from mundane "keeping the lights on" operations, which today consume an average of 61% of current IT spending, to more innovative projects, which now represent to a scant 14% of annual spending. Such reallocation is one of the highest-priority goals for most IT organizations over the next three years.³

Vista As a Key to Infrastructure Optimization

In examining ways to achieve greater business value from IT, recent studies by IDC on infrastructure optimization strategies have demonstrated that implementing best practices can help to significantly reduce operating costs and boost service levels and agility. The study, conducted on almost 1,000 organizations, analyzed the impact of an organization maturing from a Basic practices level, where IT operations are uncoordinated and manual and IT is seen as a cost center, through Standardized, where there is a managed IT infrastructure with some automation and knowledge capture, and on to Rationalized, where IT is a business enabler, infrastructure is managed and consolidated, and there is extensive automation, knowledge captured and reused.⁴

As part of the infrastructure optimization, Windows Vista was indicated as a key catalyst and component, helping organizations achieve optimization more quickly, efficiently and effectively, as well as enabling them to better adopt and sustain these practices once implemented. With the optimization of desktop management from Basic to Rationalized, organizations surveyed have been found to achieve compelling IT labor savings and reallocation of up to $430 per PC per year, including the following specific improvement strategies:⁵

• Centrally managed PC settings and configuration (savings of $190/PC): Keeping deployed PCs standardized by preventing users from making changes that compromise security, reliability and the application portfolio.
• Standardized desktop strategy (savings of $110/PC): Deploying a standardized desktop by minimizing hardware and software configurations.
• Comprehensive PC security (savings of $130/PC): Proactively addressing security with antivirus, antispyware, patching and quarantine.

Centrally managed PC settings and configuration - $190

Standardized desktop strategy - $110

Comprehensive PC security - $130

Source: "Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop," IDC October 2006, #203482

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