Business Solution Costs Comparison

Published Date 9/22/12 8:50 PM

We've continued to research available commercial and open source software pricing (see previous The Cost of Cloud or Not). For a full accounting of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it is necessary to compare full spectrum of hardware, software, and IT support costs that realistically support a business:

Portal / Collaboration
eCommerce
Customer Relationship Management
Enterprise Content Management
Business Intelligence (Reporting)
Office
Email
Testing
Source Code Management
Database
SW IT Support

Bottom line: having one vendor to supply everything a company needs is not only simpler, easier, and higher quality--it also has a huge costs savings.

Business Solution Costs Comparison (100 employees, monthly)

Commercial On-Premise	Commercial Cloud	Open Source Cloud	Constellation Cloud
Traditional commercial hardware and software acquisition, installation, customization, integration, maintenance, and support. Capital and labor intensive up-front and on-going.	Standard commercial software from multiple vendors provisioned onto separate clouds. Lower cost, but IT resources necessary to choose, integrate, manage, and support users across different providers.	Supported open source software from multiple vendors provisioned onto separate clouds. Lower cost, but IT resources necessary to choose, integrate, manage, and support users across different providers.	Complete integrated functionality for business solutions provisioned on a unified cloud. Extensively researched for best customer value, customized for common platform / database / security, and rigorously tested. Lowest cost through multi-tenant deployment, embedded IT support, open source software, and economies of scale.