Optimize Desktop TCO

The Costs of Physical and Virtual Desktops

The high penetration of desktops in most organizations, combined with the fact that many companies also provide employees with both a laptop and a desktop, have driven PC costs to become a very significant portion of the IT budget. Even though initial acquisition costs have plummeted, the cost to provision, license additional productivity software, and support a desktop over the life of the PC can easily outstrip the upfront capital expenditure.

Additionally many companies today use or are exploring alternatives to the traditional desktop configuration for some or all of their workforce. Many vendors provide solutions to enable either application virtualization or complete desktop virtualization. While both offer tremendous value and bring down costs at the desktop, they also introduce servers sitting in a data center and the cost of that infrastructure needs to be considered when doing a financial comparison between traditional and virtualized desktop alternatives.

Reducing Desktop Costs and Analyzing Alternatives

Using Apptio’s IT Cost Transparency solution, IT managers can quickly upload their desktop cost data including hardware depreciation, OS fees, application and management software licenses, provisioning costs, support and break/fix labor expenses to drive a fully-loaded cost of providing desktop services to the business. These costs can be compared across the organization, against virtualization strategies or against industry benchmarks to help identify opportunities for cutting cost and improving efficiencies.

In addition, users can analyze the true costs of different desktop products (HP laptop vs. Dell Desktop), consumption patterns by business unit, application utilization rates and their desktop inventory by support costs, depreciation ages, or other parameters in order to provide insight into how to optimize desktop support and IT costs.

Apptio’s “What If” analysis can be applied to help quantify cost reduction proposals associated with the desktop environment by providing answers to such questions as: “What is the optimal refresh period for my desktops? What is the impact on costs and SLAs when moving from insourced to outsourced support? What is the cost impact of allowing each employee to have more than one laptop or desktop? What are the cost differences between physical and virtual desktop environments?” Each proposal can be separately modeled with actual cost information and used to quantify the ROI and justify projects.

With Apptio, you can:

• Accurately model IT unit costs obtain a total cost of deploying a desktop
• Analyze cost drivers, usage and utilization to identify areas for cost reduction
• Create “What If” scenario models to analyze the ROI on new projects
• Quickly and easily update the models to maintain an up-to-date and consistent cost report
• Optimize IT operational efficiency by addressing high-cost, low-value services or functions and monitoring the cost and performance of IT at a service or line of business level

A Case Study: Reducing Desktop Costs in Healthcare and Retail

An Apptio customer in the Healthcare industry initially applied the IT Cost Transparency solution to get better visibility into the costs of their desktops and look for ways to reduce those costs. In their initial analysis they compared their unit costs to industry benchmarks and quickly realized that their software licensing costs were much higher than industry average for the healthcare space. Drilling in further they realized that they had licensed some end user productivity software for many users who weren’t using the software (patient room PC’s). The insight Apptio provided on the cost and usage of software licenses allowed this company to save 25% of their annual software licenses costs.

Another customer from the retail vertical also applied the Apptio solution initially to their desktop environment to understand TCO. Their analysis quickly identified that in many instances they had been paying twice for an image to be applied to their desktops – once from the vendor and another time from their systems integration partner. Additionally they were able to leverage the What If analysis to identify the optimal refresh rate for desktops – effectively telling them when the cost of support outstripped the provisioning of a new one. Both decisions resulted in significant savings for the IT organization.

Getting Started with IT Cost Transparency

In today’s tough economic climate it has become even more important to reduce IT costs and improve operational efficiency. Many companies such as Alaska Airlines, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City and NYK Systems Research Institute are turning to Apptio to optimize cost reduction in IT. To get started today contact us for a Free Demo and on-site Proof of Concept. Or to learn more download our solution whitepaper or one of our customer case studies.