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For IT Pros it’s often easy to see the value of new software but communicating it to management can be a challenge. The fact is, as you move up the corporate ladder, the reason to spend money changes. Successful IT Pros know the key to getting what you want is presenting a convincing business case. Your boss is going to want to be sure that the company will get more benefit from a purchase than you spend. One way to evaluate the effectiveness of any company expenditure is to calculate the length of time it takes before the benefits received from the purchase exceed the cost, in short, the ROI or Return on Investment.

Let’s assume that your company has been plagued by Exchange server outages and solving that problem is now on management’s radar. You need a new backup and recovery solution that guarantees a major reduction or elimination of downtime. For simplicity, let’s assume the following facts about your company:

Your company has 100 email users and they’re paid an average of $25 per hour.

The average outage is 4 hours a day.

You have had 2 server outages in the last 12 months.

So email downtime costs your company $10,000 (100 users x $25 per hour x 4 hours) per day in lost productivity when there is an outage. Assuming 2 outages a year, the company is losing $10,000 per outage in lost productivity or $20,000 per year. And these are just the “hard costs;” this model doesn’t factor in the cost to store backups which can be reduced by a backup solution with compression and/or deduplication, or the cost of recovery testing which can be reduced or eliminated by a backup with recovery testing built in. Let’s assume you’re considering a backup solution that costs $5,000. What is the ROI? About $15,000! This means the benefits that the company receives will start exceeding the cost of the initial software investment in less than 3 months. Presenting this ROI case to your boss will have a much stronger effect than simply asking for $5,000 for a backup solution because it’s the next generation or it will reduce your personal workload. Of course, your assumptions in your ROI model must be realistic.

To help, we’ve created a template you can use to gather and document all the information you need to convince your boss to support one of your initiatives. Check it out here and if you use it, let us know! We’d love to be a small contributing factor to your success.

You might also want to read about the experience of other IT folks who were in the same situation. Check out these backup and recovery CASE STUDIES of real people in real companies who are leveraging Replay backup and disaster recovery software package to tackle some of the same real-world challenges you are facing.