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Key Takeaways
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Are you considering a switch to Automic SaaS? Does your company have a mandate for moving apps to SaaS or a cloud-first strategy? Let’s explore some key benefits that may influence your decision to move from an on-premises Automic Automation solution to a cloud-based SaaS model.
Automic SaaS includes the servers that support the automation platform as part of the subscription. Compared to on-premises solutions, this results in significantly lower infrastructure costs.
Oracle and SQL Server databases have annual support and maintenance costs associated with their use. By transitioning to an open-source database like PostgreSQL, such as that featured in Automic SaaS, you gain the benefit of eliminating these ongoing costs (unless you purchased a managed service from a cloud provider).
Your DBAs need to spend time managing your databases, no matter which type of database is deployed. Moving to SaaS means the database is fully managed by the Broadcom service, substantially reducing the time your team spends on maintenance.
With the SaaS model, the responsibility for managing the platform, including installing hotfixes, service packs, and upgrades, shifts away from your team. In addition, Broadcom automates many general maintenance tasks, leading to considerable time savings in administration.
Typically, servers on-premises and in virtual environments are defined with a certain number of CPUs (cores) and amount of memory. Changing these defined configurations takes time, requires approvals, and so on. When running a server in the cloud, you can scale more easily, but costs also increase. With Automic SaaS, you can scale easily as your workload increases.
Compared to some other solutions, Automic SaaS and on-premises provide full feature parity, so you do not make any sacrifices in functionality by moving to a SaaS instance.
SaaS provides earlier access to new features and better compatibility with the latest operating systems and applications. Without SaaS, upgrading to achieve these benefits typically requires more frequent, and potentially disruptive, version upgrades.
Some of these benefits are considered "hard savings," which directly translate to financial savings. Moving to SaaS also introduces "soft savings," which are less tangible but still valuable.
The cost of running servers can vary greatly. Each on-premises server might cost around $1,500 per month. For a typical Automic setup involving seven servers, the calculation would consider depreciation and management costs. On the other hand, in the cloud (IaaS), it might be as low as $331.
Number of servers x monthly cost x 12 = Annual savings
Example: 7 × $331 × 12 = $27,804 per year in savings
This example assumes the use of Oracle Enterprise Edition with a high-availability database for production and a stand-alone instance to support all non-production instances of Automic. The cost of maintenance and support contracts for Oracle are based on the processing power of the supporting servers. For this illustration, we have taken the Automic recommendations of eight-core processing and assumed a reasonable corporate discount from Oracle, resulting in an annual charge of $21,908 per year for all databases.
DB provider support and maintenance or managed service charge x 12 = Annual savings
Example: $21,908 per year in savings
According to Forrester, a DBA can typically manage 25 TB of databases; this might be 125 databases with 200 GB, five 1 TB databases, or some variation. For a medium-sized installation of Automic Automation, the recommendations are you have a one TB database, highlighting a potential benefit of 20% of the fully burdened cost of a DBA.
Your organization will already be able to provide the fully burdened cost for any of your roles. For our exercise, we will assume the values reported in a historic blog which reported a fully burdened cost of $158,000 per year, or $79 per hour, assuming 2,000 working hours per year.
Fully burdened DBA Cost x 20% = Annual savings
Example: $158,000 x 20% = $31,600 per year in savings
A fully managed Automic SaaS service removes several burdens from the Automic administrator. Typically, for an on-premises version, an administrator will need to apply up to four hotfixes per year, apply four service packs per year, and planning, managing, and applying a major version upgrade every two to three years. For our example, we have assumed a fully burdened cost of an administrator for Automic Automation at $120,000 per year, and the impacts of consuming SaaS will remove at least 50% of their traditional workload.
Fully burdened Automic administrator cost x 50% = Annual savings
Example: $120,000 x 50% = $60,000 per year in savings
If your servers are currently on-premises, this would increase the annual benefit by $97,776, or $293,328 over three years, totaling $717,264 over the period.
The potential savings from transitioning to Automic SaaS are compelling. In addition to substantial hard savings, the move can offer qualitative benefits like faster access to new features, improved compliance with the latest technology standards, and simplified scalability.
Interested in learning more or even exploring what your individual ROI could look like with Automic SaaS? Reach out to us for more information.