Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Azure ROI Calculator


I'm pleased to announce the availability of Neudesic's Azure ROI Calculator, available online at http://azureroi.cloudapp.net. This is a beta tool we are soliciting feedback on.

The ROI Calculator lets you estimate what your monthly cloud computing charges will be on the Azure Services Platform. It also helps you determine what your return on investment will be if you migrate an application over to the cloud.



Let's take it for a spin, starting with the Monthly Cloud Charges tab (shown above). You can do a lot of different things with the Azure Services Platform. Estimate your consumption in each of the areas you plan to use--hosting, database, storage, service bus, and communication in or out of the data center. You can find explanations for each of these topics by clicking on a heading. Daily, monthly, and yearly costs are computed and displayed and update automatically as you make changes to the parameters. If you want to see some example configurations, click on the Small, Medium or Large radio buttons.

The Migration and ROI tab (shown below) helps you determine your return on investment for migrating an enterprise application over to the cloud. To use this, first enter the monthly costs of operating your current enterprise application. Next, estimate the cost and amount of months to revise your software for the cloud. The final parameter is your monthly cloud costs. This value is automatically set from the Monthly Cloud Charges tab so you don't have to enter it. The ROI calculator will plot your running costs during and after the migration period and will determine your break even point and monthly savings going forward.




At the next Azure User Group meetings across the country we'll be discussing the rates and other recent Azure announcements and we'll show you how to compute your cloud computing costs and ROI.

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Great initiative. But you doubt. What is really the use of "Computer Hours." A web portal 24x7 I hire "Computer hours" = 24?

David Pallmann said...

Yes, it's not totally clear yet if "compute time" is really CPU time or just the chronological time your instances are deployed. Keith Craig has a good blog post on this where he explores some pricing scenarios at
http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/keithc/Blog/archive/2009/07/17/example-scenarios-of-windows-azure-pricing.aspx

Unknown said...

It's minor, but if you go to the Migration Costs + ROI the -ve savings are listed in GBP (£ symbol) whereas all +ve's are listed in USD ($ symbol) it's probably an accurate representation of the current economy though

Matt Rogers - Windows Azure said...

Hi David, we are referring to these as 'instance hours' to be a little more clear. For now, we are measuing time the application is available not CPU utilization.

Tom said...

David,

I left a comment on the Azure forum, but wanted to post here also. There is a problem with the calculator. It isn't carrying the Savings over from the first year to the second. The easiest way to see this is to make the Migration Costs really large. You will see that you owe money at the end of 12 months and then after 13 months, you are making a profit.

I'm guessing that isn't by design. But that makes all the Break even points at the very worst, 13 months.

Tom said...

In regards to compute time, it is chronological time.

Ramesh Narasimhan said...

Great Initiative.. unable to get the tool working for me.. any help appreciated.

David Pallmann said...

Thanks for the feedback. An updated version of the Azure ROI calculator is due out shortly, look for an upcoming post.

Anonymous said...

This Calculator tool does not properly work if REGIONAL SETTINGS is not in U.S..
For instance, if regional Settings is in spanish (, instead .), all the examples are wrong and shows super higher costs (multiplied by 1000), etc.

Cesar de la Torre

Anonymous said...

MS launched their own calculator. You can see it here. http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2010/01/19/windows-azure-platform-tco-and-roi-calculator-now-available-online-and-offline.aspx