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.