If you work in IT, you’ve probably heard grandiose-sounding promises about the ROI of application modernization. It might not be surprising, then, that businesses everywhere are embracing the hybrid, multicloud cloud model.

According to an IBM commissioned study by Forrester Research, 62 percent of infrastructure decision makers reported using hosted private cloud in 2017, and 64 percent reported having an internal private cloud. Meanwhile, containers continue to rise in prevalence, as teams look for ways to modernize existing software and create cloud-native applications.

Cloud modernization challenges

There is clearly a lot of excitement around modernization, but what results should businesses expect from these transformation efforts? Are there major economic benefits beyond the hype?

To answer this question, IBM commissioned a Forrester study on the total economic impact of IBM Cloud Private, our own Kubernetes-based, container platform for private cloud, application modernization and cloud-native development.

According to the study, clients faced two major challenges before adopting the new technology:

1. Challenges from traditional infrastructure. Forrester found that businesses using traditional application servers struggled with slow deployments, silos that created management complexity and costly overprovisioning for handling spikes in capacity. These inefficiencies frustrated developers, business users, IT operations and line-of-business stakeholders.
2. Growing pressure to move to a cloud delivery model and achieve faster time-to-market. Organizations in the study reported two main priorities: modernizing established applications and bringing new cloud-native applications and features to market more quickly. Many organizations realized that in order to accomplish these goals, not only would they need to move to a continuous delivery model, they would also need the tools to support that transformation.

Application modernization ROI

Forrester interviewed a large range of IBM Cloud Private clients to better understand the concrete benefits that came with tackling these challenges. Overall, clients reported three main benefits:

1. Improved developer productivity. According to the study, developers are as much as 40 percent more productive, on average, on teams that have adopted IBM Cloud Private. By modernizing existing applications and providing access to better developer services, the right cloud technology can help make engineering teams more efficient and improve time-to-market.
2. Greater operational efficiency. The organizations that Forrester interviewed achieved a greater level of operational efficiency and saved their employees a massive amount of time. Cloud services can automate many manual tasks associated with rolling out, managing and monitoring the application environment. This provides operational simplicity and reduces the burden on IT operations and middleware administrators.
3. Reduced costs. IBM Cloud Private helped clients in the study to optimize infrastructure and license costs. This allowed for an average savings of more than $500,000 over the first three years of adoption. The right hybrid cloud technology can accomplish this by reducing past overprovisioning, providing license and support savings for middleware products and allowing organizations to use existing infrastructure to run workloads.

These are only a few of several benefits highlighted in the study. To learn more about Forrester’s study on the economic benefits of application modernization and IBM Cloud Private, download your free copy of the report today.

Related reading and resources:

• Download your free copy of the new Ovum study: Delivering Business Value through Transitioning from Managing VMs to Orchestrating Containers.
• Visit the IBM Cloud Private website.