Guest commentary: Martin Gee, CTO, ICSynergy
“How much does it cost to implement?”
One of the critical decision factors in purchasing a software solution for your business today is not just the cost of the software itself, but the total cost of ownership (TCO) of that solution, including the cost of implementation.
Back in the day, we could guesstimate enterprise software implementation costs using the following rudimentary formula:
Implementation Cost = Software Licenses * Complexity factor
What does that mean for the average company evaluating a given solution? Complexity factors of 3-5 are typical in most “traditional” enterprises solutions. For example an enterprise Web Access Management (WAM) solution might be:
~$1.0M = $350k * 3
In our experience this isn’t a stretch.
Now today… the adoption of Cloud / SAAS models are not only changing the horizon for business applications e.g. SalesForce, Taleo, SuccessFactors etc but are changing the way we might approach WAM solutions.
New disruptive technologies still require you to support your decision-making process in choosing a proper software solution using TCO as the benchmark. Our partnering with and becoming an established Symplified sales / implementation partner has given us a new insight.
We are observing a dramatic reduction in implementation cost (and the timeframe). Remember our formula? To be consistent I’ll leave the license costs the same (although in our experience that is also likely to be a much more favorable number).
~ $175k = $350k * .5
There are a number of factors that contribute to the reduced implementation costs. Take it from 10 year vet in this space. This is worth looking at.