SUSE OpenStack Cloud – More to this than Meets the Eye

Organizations that are looking for a more agile IT infrastructure to provide a competitive advantage are finding that an OpenStack private cloud is a good place to begin their transformation. SUSE® OpenStack Cloud is a proven enterprise-ready solution that can help organizations future-proof their infrastructure with an open-source, IaaS approach. But there is more to this than meets the eye.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud customers have realized many benefits in the years after adoption.  In a recent, SUSE commissioned, study from Forrester: “The Total Economic Impact™ of SUSE OpenStack Cloud”, many of these were explained.

The report shows a number of benefits that help make the case that migrating to SUSE OpenStack Cloud will provide a tangible return on investment (ROI), such as half a million dollars in time and staff savings. But there are also benefits that OpenStack Cloud customers saw that may not have an obvious financial impact.

Here are a few examples:

A Partner with Proven Reliability

The study found that SUSE OpenStack Cloud customers were pleased with their working relationship with SUSE, who not only helped them to understand how to migrate and manage their private cloud but also provided help and support when needed. According to one customer, “That’s more important than the technology itself.”

Standardizing and Validating Policies

One customer was able to use the new private cloud environment to evaluate each of the organization’s processes and determine whether or not each process was valid. Each time, the IT team asked, “What is that process for?” Those new criteria helped streamline the way the business was organized.

Standardizing internal service offerings

That same customer was also able to create service levels for internal stakeholders based on CPU usage and virtual machine (VM) configuration. Users pay a higher rate when they use more minutes, which helps the internal IT team price usage on a consistent scale. The senior solutions architect said, “It works for us as a central IT group, and it helps the developers.”

Defining IT roles

Another SUSE OpenStack Cloud customer is changing the way it organizes its IT as a result of adoption. It plans to have a cloud administrator, engineer, architect, specialist and product manager. Starting out, some team members may have dual responsibilities. But as the organization grows, that may change. “We expect that they will become unique roles and important to the growth and maturity of our environment,” said an executive with the organization.

With SUSE OpenStack Cloud, there is more than meets the eye. That is why when determining ROI for private cloud adoption, it’s important to consider the benefits you can’t quantify, along with those you can. The “Total Economic Impact™ of SUSE OpenStack Cloud” report provides additional detail on the methodology that Forrester used to determine tangible and intangible benefits.

Download the report and join us for our upcoming webinar where you can hear more about the report directly from Forrester and hear about how one of our users became an IT Superhero by leveraging SUSE OpenStack Cloud.