In speaking with Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) customers, from IT managers to DevOps professionals, Forrester Consulting learned that Cisco FSO solutions are providing real value to their organizations.
I understand why.
When I was VP of engineering at Ellie Mae, I became familiar with Cisco AppDynamics and knew I could use it to assist in our efforts to move our on-premises, customer-facing applications to the cloud. Baselining the performance of applications like e-commerce and loyalty allowed me to validate that moving to the cloud did indeed allow us to scale and perform better. Later, as the head of DevOps at Albertsons, I saw the value of Cisco AppDynamics firsthand. Like Victor Kiam from Remington, who famously bought the company because he loved its product, I saw so much value from Cisco AppDynamics, I decided to work for the company.
Forrester discovers the value of Cisco AppDynamics
Cisco recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) our customers could get by deploying Cisco FSO solutions. Forrester spoke directly to four Cisco customers and created a composite customer to determine aggregate ROI metrics. What they were able to quantify, I already knew: Cisco FSO solutions provide enormous value.
Forrester findings included:
- A 50% reduction in the likelihood of revenue-impact outages and a 60% reduction in the average length of a major outage by the end of Year 3, valued at $22.5 million. By implementing Cisco FSO, customers not only gained insight into their applications that directly drive revenue, but they also experienced a significant decrease in both the number of outages and the average length of major outages. The solution also helped eliminate the need to rely on customer-reported issues. Over three years, the composite organization saved $22.5 million in avoided revenue loss due to outage prevention.
- Retirement of 65% of legacy tools by the end of Year 3. By implementing Cisco FSO, customers gradually phased out outdated, antiquated, and siloed legacy monitoring tools while consolidating redundant technologies. This effort not only eliminated the licensing fees for those tools, but it also reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs. Over three years, the composite organization saved $19.2 million by reducing tool sprawl and streamlining IT maintenance.
- A 50% improvement in incident prevention and a 90% decrease in MTTR (Mean Time to Remediation), leading to labor savings of $13.9 million. Cisco FSO empowered customers with real-time visibility and contextual insights into systems and applications. Because they could identify issues within minutes, they didn’t need war rooms for triaging and resolving incidents. Additionally, the composite organization was able to reduce production issues and false positives by 50%.
- Increased internal resource efficiency and productivity by 30% through Cisco certifications. With access to Cisco certified training and Cisco University, Cisco’s virtual university platform that offers courses specifically focused on Cisco technologies, customers’ internal staff increased their solution knowledge and efficiency. Over three years, the composite organization saved $1.1 million in internal resource efficiency and productivity.
In addition to the quantifiable benefits, there were many unquantified benefits customers realized with Cisco FSO solutions:
- Enabling migration to the cloud and expanding business operations. Organizations are often reticent to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud because of the potential loss of visibility. However, Cisco FSO solutions provide the visibility they need to feel confident moving to the cloud. For example, with Cisco FSO, Carhartt moved 96% of its applications to the cloud. Without having to invest in new data centers and additional IT staff, and by relying on a strong cloud-based IT infrastructure, the company was able to make strategic business investments that fueled exponential growth—even during the pandemic.
- Improving departmental alignment and cross-team collaboration. At the State of Indiana Office of Technology (IOT), Cisco FSO solutions helped departments work better together, especially by eliminating the needs for war rooms and fire-drill meetings to troubleshoot outages and other issues. Additionally, users evangelized the benefits of Cisco FSO solutions to other departments. As other departments learned about the value of FSO, they began requesting it by name, inspiring IOT to evangelize the solution throughout their organization.
- Boosting developer productivity. Cisco FSO solutions helped Royal Caribbean bolster developer productivity by as much as 100 percent. By providing advanced insight into system performance, these solutions helped developers shift from a reactive to a proactive and predictive state so they could spend more time developing and less time supporting a broken system.
Cisco FSO Value Management Office from the global lifecycle sales team
If you’re not convinced Cisco FSO solutions will provide real value for your organization, we have other ways to demonstrate the potential benefits based on your individual needs. First, Forrester created a dynamic value calculator using the same methodology as their TEI study. By inputting information such as the number of tools you currently use for application observability and the number and duration of outages you’ve experienced per year, you’ll get a personalized ROI score showing your potential cost savings.
For more granular detail on the potential value, the Cisco FSO Value Management Office, a Cisco pre-sales team, will work with you to understand your specific use cases and business objectives and make sure our Cisco FSO solutions align to them. They can assist with you in conducting a business value assessment and developing a joint success plan, in collaboration with Cisco CX professional services teams and customer success teams, to ensure you achieve the best business outcomes with Cisco FSO solutions. For instance, they can show you how Cisco FSO solutions can reduce MTTR by 70% for most of your applications. Additionally, they will follow up after one year to measure your success against your specific business objectives. Just ask your Cisco account manager how you can get started.
Learn more about The Total Economic Impact of Cisco FSO
Joe Byrne is Vice President of Technology Strategy and Executive CTO at AppDynamics, where his primary focus is on working with customers and prospects on observability strategy and helping with digital transformations. He also works closely with sales, marketing, product and engineering on product strategy. Prior to AppDynamics, Joe held technology leadership roles at Albertsons, EllieMae and Johnson & Johnson.