Building your business case for VDI

When looking at the ROI business case for VDI there are three main areas to consider, desktop investment, desktop management cost and power consumption. b2Lateral has access to automated return on investment calculators, so please do not spend too much time developing complex spreadsheets to evaluate the ROI associated with creating a VDI. Call b2Lateral and we will do this for you.

However, if you want to get a quick feel for the sort of savings you could make, then use the following guidelines:

(i) Desktop Investment
Take the average capital cost for the provision of a desktop PC or laptop to each of your staff; for this example we will use a nominal figure of £1,500. Now multiply this by the number of employees that you have to provide this to, say 200 and then divide this by 3 which accounts for a refresh programme that sees desktops/laptops being replaced every 3 years. This in simple terms creates a cost saving of £100,000 per year across your 200 users.

(ii) Desktop Management
In our experience a desk based infrastructure costs approximately £131 per year to manage in terms of IT resource and management time. If you multiply this by our example of 200 desktops, this is a potential saving of £26,200 per year. In our experience this figure would halve with the deployment of a VDI solution.

(iii) Power Consumption
Moving to a VDI solution will cut down the power consumption of your current desktop and distributed server infrastructure. Utilising centralised servers pooled to support VDI, you are effectively using server capacity and therefore power on-demand, and we estimate that for a 200 user solution, this can save as much as £4,500 per year.

(iv) Investment
Although every implementation is different, based on our experience, we would expect a 200 user organisation be required to invest around £82,000 to implement a VDI solution, spread over the three years this would be just over £27,000 per year.

From this very quick and crude calculation, you will see that the total 3 year cost in NPV terms for a 200 desk based infrastructure would be just over £500,000 over three years. If this was replaced by a VDI solution, the total cost over 3 years would be approximately £182,000, a saving of £320,000. And what is more, these positive benefits would be seen after as little as 3 months.