A Simple ROI formula for Docker Datacenter

by Tim Hohman | Wednesday, Oct 26, 2016 | Docker

At BoxBoat, our Docker Datacenter conversations generally start with incredible excitement about the technology, transition to “where’s the best place to start”?, and finish with “to justify this internally, what is the return on investment?”

Return on investment, business case, cost justification – the nomenclature is varied but the objective is the same….spend the corporate resources ($$$) wisely.  Read on to understand how Docker Datacenter provides cost reduction opportunities and to learn a simple formula for calculating those savings.  

The use of Docker Datacenter provides these clear process improvement and cost savings opportunities:

For a simple, quick cost justification, consider the immediate impact of:

The savings are modeled in this way:

Here’s one hypothetical example, a corporate web site including its development, test, and production environments running on a total of 20 servers:

This quick cost reduction formula for Docker Datacenter shows an annual savings of $112,800/year.

There are certainly costs associated with inserting new technology into your organization, however you can easily see how the savings can add up significantly as you extend the numbers from this small example to larger enterprise environments.   

Lastly, there are many additional scenarios where the use of Docker Datacenter will drive even greater ROI than reflected in this formula.  Docker Datacenter allows for migrations from older, proprietary infrastructures with high maintenance costs to commodity server environments and provides enterprises future-proof options in terms of your cloud usage.  See our recent blog post on this topic to learn more: Maintaining Docker Portability in a Multi-Cloud World

Hopefully this blog post and simple formula will help you justify your organization's transition to containers and Docker Datacenter.   For a more detailed discussion on a business case specific to your organization or for a briefing on Docker Datacenter, please contact us at info@boxboat.com.