You probably already realise that deployment automation can offer you real business benefits. But, perhaps you are unsure exactly how to calculate the ROI of RapidDeploy? Read our guide and find out how you can prove the advantage of continuous delivery and deployment automation to your organisation.

1. “The Release Managers, working with the
Developers, had been writing scripts...ever
more complicated, longer and more
numerous...they had created a
monster...leading to more delays and
resource wastage...As software builds grew
steadily from one hundred to over five
hundred a month, they implemented an
automation solution... eliminating the
resource bottlenecks they had been seeing.”
How to Calculate
the Return on
Your
RapidDeploy
Investment

2. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 1
How to Calculate the Return
on Your RapidDeploy™
Investment
MidVision innovates so that you can do
more, faster, every day.
You think you know that implementing an Application Release
Automation solution will offer your business some benefits. But maybe
you’re finding it challenging to articulate exactly what they are, or
identifying the scale of improvements you could be set to see. We’re
here to help.
The ARA Adoption Curve
You might be releasing your applications manually, or perhaps you are
further along the maturity scale if you’ve built some scripts or maybe
even your own deployment automation tool. But now you know we’re
out here, with RapidDeploy™ - an automation solution with fifteen
years of development history and a whole host of customers inputting
into its roadmap. Although you may have tailored a solution to meet
your own, unique needs, we’re pretty sure we’ll have thought of things
you haven’t yet – we’re living and breathing this stuff – it’s all we do.
Plus we can take your maintenance overheads away, and you’ll benefit
when we develop new functionality as our customer base request it.
ADOPTION CURVE / MATURITY SCALE
So wherever you are on the maturity scale, we can help you figure out
how implementing RapidDeploy™ can make your life easier and help
you deliver on the targets your business might be setting you to save
dollars or do more with less.

3. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 2
2
CUSTOMER STORY
An Operations Director joined a team experiencing a sudden
uptick in application development. His employer, a rapidly
expanding retail business had identified a business imperative to
understand its customers better and so head devised a plan to
deliver a number of new customer focused applications. Seeing
his team of Release Managers becoming a bottleneck to
Development for delivery of the new
capabilities, the Ops Director prioritized
automation of the application release
process. He could see that the resources
he had could not do any more if they
remained reliant on their established
manual processes.
The Release Managers, working with the Developers, had been
writing scripts, scripts that had become ever more complicated,
longer and more numerous. In short, they had created a monster.
Often, there was a single individual who fully understood the part
of the monster they had created and who was the only one who
could tame him – leading to more delays and resource wastage as
others sat around with nothing to do and powerless to help. This
individual was often cited as a hero, but the Operations Manager
felt things could be done better. As software builds grew steadily
from one hundred to over five hundred a month, they implemented
an automation solution which saw them managing this growth as
they reduced the time to market of each release dramatically and
reduced risk by sharing the tasks and providing self-service to the
developers, eliminating the resource bottlenecks they had been
seeing.
Drivers and Compelling Events
Are you planning a PAAS project? About to perform a major version
upgrade on one of your key middleware platforms? Is your business
driving a migration of a critical application? Have you designed a new
disaster recovery architecture? Or are you planning a datacenter
move?
All of these activities are examples of the triggers we have seen that
helped our customers make the decision that they needed
RapidDeploy™ to help them deliver ambitious projects in tight
timescales, in the knowledge that what they implemented as a result
would make a big difference to their every day work ahead.

4. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 3
Proof of Concept
Perhaps you have shortlisted a number of vendors who deliver these
type of solutions or you may have already conducted a Proof of
Concept of RapidDeploy™ in your own environment using your own
use cases. If you haven’t, it’s easy to do – the downloadable evaluation
version has an integrated database for ease and speed of installation
and we’ve developed a whole host of learning assets (videos, guides
and quick start packages) to help you along your way. We know that
you’ll need to show how RapidDeploy™ works if you want your
business to spend the money for you to use it and we’re online all day,
every day to help you make your Proof of Concept purr.
High Level Benefits
You most likely have some ideas already
about how RapidDeploy™ might save you
some money – probably productivity
improvements, maybe scaling down or
redeploying your resources or simply being
able to deliver more, faster, responding to
your business’ demand. Here are the high
level benefits our customers most often
describe to us:
- Eliminate configuration-related errors and minimize downtime
- Release additional scalability and accelerate growth
- Reduce effort and make productivity gains
- Release highly skilled resources
- Expedite the “time to value” for applications from weeks to hours
- Eliminate unaudited manual and script-based processes
- Enable compliance management reducing business risk
- Provide rapid installation and configuration of applications in all
of your environments; physical, virtual and cloud
“Ultimately, RapidDeploy™ is making daily life easier and has
freed us up from some tedious, arduous tasks,” concludes Robert
O’Connor, Technical Support Manager at Domestic and General.
“We are delivering new web application capabilities to the
business at a vastly increased speed, supporting our ambitions
for growth.”

5. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 4
4
Building a Business Case
Even when you’ve proved in principle the product does what it says
and, most importantly, what you need, it’s more than likely that the
people with the purse strings are going to want some strong, hard facts
about how this investment will not only pay for itself, but how it’s going
to carry on making quantifiable savings for your business. So let’s
figure out how to do just that.
Show Them the Money
Another of our customers, a UK based leading Retail Bank saw
amazing productivity improvements through using MidVision’s
RapidDeploy™ Application Release Automation technology, including
delivering WebSphere binaries 533% faster, the reduction of downtime
across the lifetime of a project by 500 hours and saving over 100 man
days from a single 130 man day build project. But we calculated this
with them post-implementation – how do we forecast hard dollar
savings?
We’ve devised an ROI Calculator <link> which you can use at any time,
but here we’ll explain the methodology behind our algorithms, so you
can build and justify your own business case if that suits you better.
The Size of Your Enterprise
Just as 100% of nothing is nothing, 10% of ten thousand is a lot more
than 10% of a hundred. That’s not to say that if you are a smaller
enterprise you won’t see savings, and conversely your investment will
be lower, but the bigger you are, the more savings you’ll see.
The Complexity of Your Infrastructure
Similarly, the more heterogeneous your environments and platforms,
the more complex your job of management – the greater the
opportunity for automation to simplify. RapidDeploy™ supports a broad
range of platforms and we’re extending its capability all the time, in line
with our customers’ demand in addition to adding ISV application
specific tasks.

6. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 5
- Apache TomCat
- Apache TomCat TC
- IBM DB2
- IBM WebSphere Application Server / XD / VE
- IBM WebSphere BPM
- IBM WebSphere DataPower
- IBM WebSphere ESB
- IBM WebSphere Message Broker
- IBM WebSphere MQ
- IBM WebSphere Portal
- IBM WebSphere Process Server
- Microsoft MySQLServer
- Microsoft .Net
- Microsoft SQL
- Oracle Database
- Oracle WebLogic
- Red Hat JBoss
Your Resourcing Profile
By analyzing the resources you have involved in the release process,
we can help you identify if you can reduce your resourcing overheads,
redeploy to other higher-value tasks, or increase the output of each
individual head. You’ll probably have staff in both your Development
and Operations team spending time getting your releases to market,
and fixing problems when things fail. By stopping things failing and
making it quicker and easier to fix things when they do fail we can
optimize your team’s performance. Additionally, by providing simple to
use, push button tooling, secured so that individuals can only access
what they need to do their job, we eliminate the bottlenecks caused by
having an elite group of individuals holding all the knowledge.
Once you’ve established the volume and costs of the staff you have
working on your release process, both on and off-shore, you need to
start answering these questions:
- Are your release and deployment engineers also delivering
other services such as configuration management, support?
- What percentage of your release and deployment managers’
time is spent troubleshooting and fixing errors?
- Do you have business restrictions that dictate you perform
application releases and upgrades outside of business hours?
- How often do application releases result in an error and need
to be triaged and run again?
- How much time do your release and deployment engineers
spend on applying patches and feature packs?

7. How to Calculate the Return on Your RapidDeploy Investment 6
6
- How much time do your release and deployment engineers
spend on upgrades?
Your Workload
- How many application releases do you perform on a monthly
basis?
- How long does the application release process currently take on
average?
- How many new environments are likely to be needed in the next
12 months?
- How long does it take you to set up a new environment currently?