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April 24, 2007
How BI Appliances Lower TCO
Last week I talked about how more small and mid-sized companies are opting to deploy Business Intelligence appliances. Such appliances are attractive for several reasons, but mainly because they are easy to deploy and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of implementing an operational BI solution. I thought it might be interesting look at why, and how, an appliance-based BI solution lowers TCO. In a traditional operational BI rollout, there are costs for licensing based on number of users and the hardware platform used, installation and configuration, deployment and maintenance, and scalability and performance. These costs quickly add up.
Let's look at how costs are managed in an appliance-based BI solution. First off, there are no licensing fees to pay for an appliance, because companies pay one price for a package including a pre-configured hardware server, the BI application, and all other necessary software - regardless of the number of users. Second, there are few fees related to installation and configuration, because a BI appliance comes preconfigured out of the box, and most companies have complete implementations up and running in less than 90 days - and some in less than a week. That compares with an average of six months to implement a traditional BI solution. Third, a BI appliance really starts to show its capability to lower TCO in the deployment and maintenance area. That's because BI appliances are designed as "self-service" products that require no IT knowledge to use, so deployment is fast and requires no extra training, and old appliances can be upgraded in a day or two by swapping in a new one. Lastly, appliances also reduce costs in the scalability and performance category. Unlike a traditional operational BI solution that uses hardware servers and operating systems configured for multipurpose computing, an appliance uses 64-bit memory addressing an operating system optimized for that single purpose, ensuring fast response times even for large numbers of users. This efficient resource utilization means BI appliances can often support the same number of users with as few as one-tenth as many hardware servers as other approaches to operational BI would require.
Lowering TCO is top of mind for every company, which is why BI appliances are a great choice for operational BI deployments.
Posted by Diaz Nesamoney at April 24, 2007 10:00 AM
