NOVEMBER 2020

The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Support For Mission Critical

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Microsoft Support For Mission Critical

Microsoft

A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Microsoft, November 2020

Table Of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. TEI Framework And Methodology
  3. The Microsoft Support For Mission Critical Customer Journey
  4. Analysis Of Benefits
  5. Analysis Of Costs
  6. Financial Summary
  7. Appendix

Organizations are increasingly pressured by internal stakeholders and customers to minimize and respond rapidly to operational disruptions, especially those involving the organizations’ most critical applications. Digital disruptions to these applications could mean productivity losses, lost revenue, fines, and even brand damage. Organizations must invest in the right people, processes, and support to ensure optimal performance and resiliency of critical applications.

Identifying the cause of an incident, gathering the right internal subject matter experts and vendor support contacts, and managing incident response are crucial and time-sensitive tasks, especially for an organization’s most critical applications. Forrester has found that the optimal incident management practice focuses on perfecting:

  • Service support.

    Daily operations and management, ongoing resolution of noncritical incidents, and end user support.

  • Proactive remediation.

    Analyzing the configuration of the environment and data on performance analytics to predict or prevent incidents and undertaking post-incident root cause analyses to improve systems.

  • Rapid response.

    Quickly bringing a team of subject matter experts from within the organization and the vendor to assess the incident and rapidly restore service.1

Microsoft Support for Mission Critical (hereafter referred to as Mission Critical) provides organizations with solution-specific guidance to maximize the health and performance of the organization’s most critical applications. These crucial systems are highly complex in both architecture and the number of technologies involved, and they uniquely benefit from an enhanced level of support to ensure that complexity is both understood and optimally managed.

Mission Critical assesses the overall solution to provide prescriptive services that will drive proactive health, stability, and performance and ensure a smooth digital transformation. Mission Critical also aligns organizations with a team that understands its specific environment and solution and can quickly access other resources within Microsoft to resolve or prevent incidents.

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by investing in Microsoft Support for Mission Critical. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Mission Critical on their organizations for complex Intelligent Cloud and Office 365 workloads, above and beyond the benefit of Unified Support.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four customers who have the Mission Critical add-on to their Unified Support, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewed customers and combined the results into a single composite organization.

Consulting Team:
  • Sarah Musto

Project Contributors:

Key Financial Findings

  • ROI
    99%
  • Benefits PV
    $4.68M
  • NPV
    $2.33M
  • Payback
    < 3 months
Additional reduction in incident resolution time with Mission Critical, compared to the benefits of just Unified Support

25%

Quantified projected benefits. Risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits include:

  • An additional 25% reduction in the resolution time for incidents and up to 60% additional reduction in the risk of critical events occurring on top of the benefits provided by Unified Support.

    The addition of Mission Critical support for critical workloads increases the speed of incident resolution by up to 25%. Implementing proactive recommendations from the Mission Critical team to strengthen the environment reduces the risk of critical events occurring.

  • Mission Critical support teams augment internal staff, driving staff productivity by up to 20%.

    The Mission Critical team provides incident resolution support that reduces response time and provides proactive guidance which improves the health and stability of the environment. This reduces the time internal staff spend on support actions, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.

  • Internal staff use proactive guidance to implement two design improvements each year and shorten new product implementations by 15%.

    Interviewed organizations use Mission Critical recommendations to implement design improvements that deliver net benefits of $130,000 per year and to shorten implementation timelines for new products and features. These improvements and new implementations ensure business users have all of the tools they need to be productive, whether in the office or working remotely.

“We’re consuming a very expensive technology. We want that level of expertise.
It didn’t cross our minds from a technology standpoint to really look at anything else. We already had Unified Support. Mission Critical was the added benefit. I don’t think anything else comes close to having that level of engagement and services that really match that.”

— Managing director for end user compute, financial services firm

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that are not quantified for this study include:

  • Mission Critical provides a higher level of access to Microsoft expertise.

    Interviewed organizations highlighted exceptional rapport with their Mission Critical team, quick access to other experts within Microsoft, and the ability to provide input to Microsoft’s product roadmaps.

Costs. Risk-adjusted PV costs include:

  • Annual Mission Critical contract costs.

    Costs are determined based on the number and characteristics of covered workloads as well as any additional support required.

  • Staff time spent scoping Mission Critical coverage and onboarding the Mission Critical team.

    Staff spend time identifying the workloads to cover under Mission Critical and helping Microsoft engineers understand those solutions and the organization’s environment.

The customer interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $4.68M over three years versus costs of $2.35M, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $2.33M and an ROI of 99%.

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in Microsoft Support for Mission Critical.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Mission Critical can have on an organization.

  • DUE DILIGENCE

    Interviewed Microsoft stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Microsoft Support for Mission Critical.

  • CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS AND SURVEY

    Interviewed four decision-makers at organizations using Mission Critical to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.

  • COMPOSITE ORGANIZATION

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations.

  • FINANCIAL MODEL FRAMEWORK

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organizations.

  • CASE STUDY

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the New Tech TEI methodology.

DISCLOSURES

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Microsoft and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the report to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Microsoft Support for Mission Critical.

Microsoft reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Microsoft provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

NEXT SECTION: The Microsoft Support For Mission Critical Customer Journey

DRIVERS LEADING TO THE MISSION CRITICAL INVESTMENT

Interviewed Organizations

Industry Region Interviewee Number of workloads under Mission Critical
Investment services Headquartered in the United States
  • Global head of Windows engineering
  • Head of messaging and collaboration
 3
Financial services Headquartered in the United States Vice president of infrastructure systems 3
Financial services Headquartered in the United States Managing director for end user compute 3
Insurance Headquartered in the European Union Teach Lead for Windows Server platform 9

Key Objectives

Prior to investing in Mission Critical, the interviewees used Unified Support, third-party support, and internal staff support to manage its critical workloads.

The interviewed organizations struggled with common challenges and objectives, including:

    • Workloads deemed critical are highly sensitive to downtime.

      Interviewees describe these workloads as being, “critical to operating our business successfully and safeguarding business operations.” They support critical processes, and any downtime could come with a huge loss, including losing millions of dollars in revenue, fines, and reputational risk. These workloads need to be treated with the highest priority to ensure minimal risk of failure.

    • Organizations wanted to augment internal staff with embedded support from experts.

      In addition to prioritizing these workloads among internal staff, the interviewed organizations also sought the best support from Microsoft. This includes having fast and easy access to engineers who are not only experts in the solution but also the organization’s own environment. One interviewee stated: “We do have a lot of expertise onboard here, and we recognized that there’s a lot of expertise obviously in Microsoft. But the normal support channels weren’t connecting us directly to the people who knew the most at Microsoft at the time.”

    • The goal was to improve day-to-day reliability while also minimizing the risk of major events.

      These critical workloads underwent several stress tests, including: the introduction of new solutions; the transition to cloud-based technologies; and the shift to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviewed organizations wanted to ensure — for both existing critical workloads and newly introduced critical workloads — that despite these stressors they could, “maintain a secure, resilient, and stable production environment.” One interviewee noted: “Stability is a key thing. Our goal was and it still is to make sure that we continue to have a minimum set of interruptions.”

“In addition to the engineering efforts we have in-house, we wanted to make sure we had a direct line of support to Microsoft engineers who understood our environment and could assist us at a moment’s notice.”

Global head of Windows engineering, investment services firm

Aspects Of Mission Critical Used

The interviewed organizations noted several key features of the Mission Critical solution that they used:

    • Programmatic Support.

      This includes onboarding assessments, health checks, and the development of a comprehensive service delivery plan to understand and strengthen critical workloads.

    • Reactive Support.

      Incident support provided by engineers that are knowledgeable about the organization’s specific solution and environment with the goals of restoring operations quickly and discovering the root cause of the incident to protect against future incidents.

    • Proactive Support.

      Guidance based on incident root cause analyses and assessments to proactively improve health, stability, and performance of critical workloads as well as advice when introducing new solutions or transitioning to the cloud.

    • The Mission Critical team.

      Across these three support levers, Microsoft assembles a Mission Critical team composed of a customer success account manager (CSAM) that owns the relationship and regularly meets with the customer, a customer lead in charge of incident response, and a designated support engineer that delivers proactive recommendations. This core team can quickly coordinate additional Microsoft resources to ensure seamless support.

“If you look at that wheelhouse and the three different capabilities [of the solution], it’s not that one side of the wheel is stronger than the other. You want to equally drive them throughout your engagement to make sure you’re leveraging each one up to 100%.”

Managing director for end user compute, financial services firm

Composite Organization

Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis. The composite organization is representative of the four companies that Forrester interviewed and is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite has the following characteristics:

  • Description of composite.

    The composite organization is a global organization with annual revenue of $30 billion and 40,000 employees. The composite organization has extensive and complex business operations that rely on the performance of several key Microsoft 365 workloads.

  • Deployment characteristics.

    The composite organization invests in Mission Critical, in addition to its broader Unified Support contract, for three critical workloads: Exchange, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. The composite organization uses all three aspects of the Mission Critical solution.

Key assumptions:
  • Mission Critical support for three workloads
  • Leveraging all aspects of Mission Critical support
NEXT SECTION: Analysis Of Benefits

QUANTIFIED BENEFIT AND COST DATA AS APPLIED TO THE COMPOSITE

Total Benefits

Ref Beneit Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total Present Value
Atr Reduced risk of downtime $768,600 $1,294,200 $1,333,800 $3,396,600 $2,770,418
Btr Support team productivity $218,500 $327,750 $437,000 $983,250 $797,829
Ctr Efficiency and improvements from proactive support $240,125 $461,125 $682,125 $1,383,375 $1,111,881
Total benefits (risk-adjusted) $1,227,225 $2,083,075 $2,452,925 $5,763,225 $4,680,128

Reduced Risk Of Downtime

  • Evidence and data.

    One of the most important driving factors for interviewed organizations investing in Mission Critical is to quickly address and prevent minor, and especially major, incidents or outages to critical workloads. With Mission Critical, if something does go wrong, the organization has a team to call who is already familiar with its solution and can expedite the resolution of those issues. If other technical experts within Microsoft need to be included in the response, the Mission Critical team orchestrates these resources without the organization needing to repeatedly explain the issue, saving time.

    Interviewees shared which workloads needed this enhanced level of support:

    • “At the end of the day, if this application were not functioning, it would have direct and immediate impact to our operating capability. The most important workloads are email and file access. Communications really are by far the most important tools in our toolkit within the organization. It’s the lifeblood really. And so, we’re very sensitive to any type of outages that may occur or any type of hiccups in the system.”
    • “Email, instant messaging, the collaboration that’s available in Teams — you have a core set of products that are in everyone’s desktop. They’re mission critical apps. And so there wasn’t much hesitation when it came to having the shortest time-to-resolution or getting the most access to Microsoft in terms of those core products.”

  • Interviewees also shared how Mission Critical support provides benefits in the event of an incident:

    • “From an organization with a limited number of engineers, it’s great to have a group like Mission Critical that can provide that additional advanced level [of] engineering that you might need to help resolve issues. We’ve been able to post questions for them, and they’ve been able to respond clearly. That relationship would never happen with a standard kind of support arrangement. We would always be constantly reminding and regurgitating our infrastructure information, whereas with Mission Critical we’re not in that position.”

    • “There are cases where we have problems that are related to the integration of our system or the process that we run that’s related to Office 365. Having the support of the Mission Critical team has definitely helped us to get return of service quicker, and it can happen one or two ways. It could either be through having the right people at our disposal to be able to solve problems quicker or it could be Microsoft offering to help push a solution to our tenant as quickly as possible.”

    Modeling and assumptions.

  • For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

    • The composite organization has an average of three incidents per workload per year that result in an impact to performance or minor outage for a portion of the workforce. These incidents would result in 2 hours of impact prior to Mission Critical support.

    • The cost per hour of incident/downtime averages $300,000 which is mostly composed of lost productivity for one-third of the workforce.

    • Mission Critical support reduces the length of these incidents by up to an additional 25%, compared to the incident resolution benefits provided by Unified Support. In Year 1, this is 15% due to a learning curve for the Mission Critical team and the internal team.

    • A critical incident for these workloads has a low probability of occurring (5% probability per year before Mission Critical support), but the impact of these events is significant. The cost of a critical incident is $4.4 million, which encompasses a day of lost productivity and regulatory fines for one-third of the workforce. Forrester believes that this is a conservative estimate.

    • Mission Critical support reduces the probability of a critical incident occurring by up to an additional 60%, compared to the benefits of Unified Support. Each year this benefit grows as additional proactive remediations and improvements are made.

    Risks.

  • Potential risks that can impact the realization of this benefit include:

    • Mission Critical support only applies to workloads that are included as part of the annual contract. Interviewees noted that the scope needs to be defined carefully to include all critical workloads to ensure this benefit is realized.

    • It is difficult to accurately estimate the probability of critical events and the impact of those events for less measurable impacts such as reputation risk.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.8 million.

“What we saw of value is you can shorten the timeframe to get issues resolved and have that level of interaction with people that are familiar with your environment. In our industry, email is still heavily utilized as an added tool for transactions. If email goes out for a day, that is a huge deal. We have obligations financially. We have certain cutoff times when transactions have to happen. There’s a lot of follow-ups that are communication-based, whether it’s with auditors, regulators, other financial institutions, or government entities. Could one single day outage be a multimillion-dollar implication to the firm? Absolutely, 100%.”

Managing director for end user compute, financial services firm

Reduced Risk Of Downtime

Ref. Metric Calculation Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
A1 Number of incidents per year across covered workloads Interviews 9 9 9
A2 Length of incident (hours) Interviews 2 2 2
A3 Reduction in length of incident with Mission Critical Interviews 15% 25% 25%
A4 Average cost per hour of incident Interviews $300,000 $300,000 $300,000
A5 Average cost of a critical event Interviews $4,400,000 $4,400,000 $4,400,000
A6 Probability of a critical event in a given year, before Mission Critical Assumption 5% 5% 5%
A7 Reduction in probability with Mission Critical Interviews 20% 40% 60%
At Reduced risk of downtime (A1*A2*A3*A4)+(A5*A6*A7) $854,000 $1,438,000 $1,482,000
Risk adjustment ↓10%
Atr Reduced risk of downtime (risk-adjusted) $768,600 $1,294,200 $1,333,800
Three-year total: $3,396,600 Three-year present value: $2,770,418

Support Team Productivity

    Evidence and data.

  • The close relationship between the Mission Critical team and internal staff boosts staff productivity, allowing a small internal team to manage a large environment and focus more on strategic tasks. The Mission Critical team: provides end-to-end support through orchestrating other teams within Microsoft as needed; meets regularly with the organization to discuss support needs; helps with assessments; and provides proactive guidance. Interviewees shared the following:

    • “My team has a very close relationship with the Mission Critical team. They understand our environment, and we understand how they operate. We’ve benefited greatly from that relationship, particularly when we were having to adopt technology like Teams and OneDrive very quickly earlier this year as a result of COVID-19.”

    • “We would be dead in the water without them. [Without the Mission Critical team,] I think we would have to double the team if not more. We would have to be recruiting some very senior individuals who were almost ex-Microsoft to fully help us.”

    • “It’s the building of the familiarity of not just the way we operate, but our environment and having that conversation once with somebody that gets it, versus explaining yourself multiple times to somebody. Quite frankly, in a remote office, this is a powerful program.”

    • “I would say we are definitely saving time on each of [our projects]. We’re probably saving a good FTE worth of effort.”

    • “We meet with the Microsoft folks on a weekly basis, but we are in touch with them almost on a daily basis if there are specific cases that we are running with them.”

  • Modeling and assumptions.

    For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that:

    • Twenty staff members support the three workloads covered by Support for Mission Critical.

    • The productivity of this team goes up by 10% in the Year 1 of using Mission Critical. This increases to 20% by Year 3 as additional improvements are made to the environment to increase stability.

    • These are senior staff with an average annual fully loaded compensation, salary plus benefits, of $115,000.

    Risks.

  • Potential risks that can impact the realization of this benefit include:

    • The relationship between internal staff and the Mission Critical team is imperative to driving productivity benefits. One interviewee claimed: “I think the key to a successful Mission Critical service is that rapport we have with them. Aligning the right engineers to organizations and ensuring those engineers understand our operating standards and values makes a big difference.”

    • Some interviewees commented on the potential risk of turnover among Mission Critical team members and the implications of that turnover on realizing benefits and maintaining continuity of workforce.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of almost $800,000.

“We have people on the Mission Critical support team that are looking out for our interests and are reaching out and being proactive rather than us having to report things back to Microsoft. We’re running a large environment with a really small team. And we did not bring on additional resources to manage Office 365.”

Vice president of infrastructure systems, financial services firm

Support Team Productivity

Ref. Metric Calculation Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
B1 Number of support staff for covered workloads Interviews 20 20 20
B2 Productivity improvement due to Mission Critical support Interviews 10% 15% 20%
B3 Average annual fully loaded compensation Assumption $115,000 $115,000 $115,000
Bt Support team productivity B1*B2*B3 $230,000 $345,000 $460,000
Risk adjustment ↓5%
Btr Support team productivity (risk-adjusted) $218,500 $327,750 $437,000
Three-year total: $983,250 Three-year present value: $797,829

Efficiency And Improvements From Proactive Support

    Evidence and data.

  • From insights provided through the Programmatic Support (assessments and health checks) and Incident Response (root cause analysis) capabilities, the Mission Critical team can evaluate and recommend proactive actions to further stabilize the environment and prevent incidents from occurring. Additionally, the Mission Critical team can evaluate specific workloads where there are ongoing issues and prescribe a set of adjustments to resolve those concerns. This can include improving the performance of workloads and user experience. It can also include assisting in the introduction of new technology or features as well as in the transition to the cloud.

    Interviewees shared the following about design improvements implemented with Mission Critical:

    • “They perform proactive services that provide some checks and balances and reassurance that our environment is configured in an optimal way that would prevent us from potentially having outages. They’ve helped with quite a number of ad hoc things that have come up. The work we’ve done with them has helped us be much more robust and reliable and faster.”

    • “We’ve done the network assessments, media assessments, security assessments. We have used that information in many places to improve the performance of things like videoconferencing.”

  • Interviewees shared the following about accelerating new implementations with Mission Critical:

    • “They’re great from a sounding-board perspective as well, and anything that we do major-wise, they’re always part of that discussion or even part of the implementation, depending on what’s required.”

    • “As Microsoft has released new products, we have looked at them, and done our own evaluation based on our requirements. This is an area where the Mission Critical team has been very helpful in getting us access to the right level of expertise to address concerns and answer questions. In some cases, to help us do some customization. It would take us three or four times the effort in some of these cases [without Mission Critical support].”

    • “We pull in the Mission Critical team to solve some of the longer-term strategic challenges or even factor into some of our direction.”

    • Modeling and assumptions.

  • For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that:

    • Each year, the composite organization implements two design improvements based on proactive guidance provided by the Mission Critical team. Each improvement costs an average of $20,000 per year to implement and maintain.

    • Each design improvement provides business value of $150,000 per year in addition to further reducing the probability of critical events and providing support team savings. Some examples shared by customers include:

      • Improving the performance of key remote collaboration capabilities to reduce help desk support tickets and improve employee productivity.

      • Implementing a Hyper-V Replica setup for branch offices for higher availability in case of hardware failures.

      • Implementing an Active Directory Security baseline for higher security and resiliency.

      • Configuring solutions in a way that allows the composite organization to deploy key collaboration products to all staff, removing the risk that some regions cannot access productivity solutions.

    • The composite organization undertakes one new implementation effort each year where the Mission Critical team is involved to provide guidance and access to Microsoft experts. This reduces the implementation effort by 15%.

    Risks.

  • Potential risks that can impact the realization of this benefit include:

    • While the Mission Critical team can provide proactive guidance and recommendations to improve the environment, ultimately the composite organization must decide to implement those recommendations to achieve these results.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $1.1 million.

“Working with someone that has a vast knowledge of the product like the subject matter experts from Microsoft, that knows and understands your environment, your intricacies, and your integration points — not only is it the fastest way to resolve challenges but as you come across post-incident challenges or design questions, you can bring in those individuals to help solve some of those challenges.”

Managing director for end user compute, financial services firm

“We have an ongoing relationship with engineers and product people at Microsoft now. As we were implementing various components of E5 security, we had people to talk to and we were able to have an ongoing dialogue rather than constantly arranging support, making new tickets, and going through a formal process. You’ve got people at Microsoft who are in it together with you and part of the extended work team. I think that’s the way I would best summarize the benefits that we’re getting out of the Mission Critical team.”

Vice president of infrastructure systems, financial services firm

Efficiency And Improvements From Proactive Support

Ref. Metric Calculation Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
C1 Number of design improvements made with Mission Critical insights, per year Interviews 2 2 2
C2 Value of a design improvement, per year Interviews $150,000 $150,000 $150,000
C3 Cost of a design improvement, per year Interviews $20,000 $20,000 $20,000
C4 Total impact of design improvements C1(cumulative)*(C2-C3) $260,000 $520,000 $780,000
C5 Number of new implementations, per year Interviews 1 1 1
C6 Months to implement, without Mission Critical Interviews 6 6 6
C7 Cost to implement per month (staff time) Interviews $25,000 $25,000 $25,000
C8 Timeline reduction due to Mission Critical support Interviews 15% 15% 15%
C9 New implementation impact C5*(C6*C8)*C7 $22,500 $22,500 $22,500
Ct Efficiency and improvements from proactive support C4+C9 $282,500 $542,500 $802,500
Risk adjustment ↓15%
Ctr Efficiency and improvements from proactive support (risk-adjusted) $240,125 $461,125 $682,125
Three-year total: $1,383,375 Three-year present value: $1,111,881

Unquantified Benefits

Additional benefits that customers experienced but were not able to quantify include:

  • The combination of the level of expertise provided by the Mission Critical team, the ease of accessing that expertise, and the rapport with internal staff delivers exceptional value for critical support.

    Interviewees shared the following:

    • “We’ve established a great rapport with the engineers that have been assigned to us. They understand the way we operate and how we like to engage with them. We have a very open dialogue with the Mission Critical team.”

    • “The important thing is that we do get an immediate response. And if we need access to product experts or the actual product teams themselves, the Mission Critical team is able to broker that. That’s a level of accessibility that, without the Mission Critical support, we wouldn’t be able to get that access.”

    • “When Microsoft is having some type of system issue that’s regional or country or global in scope, the Mission Critical team provides more communication and understanding of what’s going on so that we can position ourselves properly and share the right information with our customers and our management. That’s very helpful to us.”

“Mission Critical is that additional insurance policy where not only do you get a faster response, but I think the key thing for us was that you have an embedded set of individuals that really get to know our environment and provided us with guidance and best practices. With incidents, 80% of the challenge is to get somebody acclimated quick enough to understand your intricacies, because it’s not typically a problem with the product.”

Managing director for end user compute, financial services

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might invest in Mission Critical and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

  • Being more agile in adopting new Microsoft capabilities or products.

    One interviewee shared: “Microsoft has always provided us with information about new or in place technologies and features and supported us with the implementation. Due to firsthand knowledge, it is easier for us to react quickly to internal customer need. This makes us very flexible in the use of Microsoft solutions.”

  • Expanding the use of Mission Critical support to additional workloads.

    One interviewee noted: “We are looking at new Mission Critical areas, especially more of it in the security space as a whole. We might benefit from that as well.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).

NEXT SECTION: Analysis Of Costs

Total Costs

Ref. Cost Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 2 Total Present Value
Dtr Microsoft Support for Mission Critical contract costs $0 $882,000 $882,000 $882,000 $2,646,000 $2,193,403
Etr Onboarding time $24,200 $145,200 $0 $0 $169,400 $156,200
Total costs (risk-adjusted) $24,200 $1,027,200 $882,000 $882,000 $2,815,400 $2,349,603

Microsoft Support For Mission Critical Contract Costs

    Evidence and data.

    Annual contract costs are determined by several characteristics, including:

    • The number of solutions supported.

    • The complexity of each solution based on the technologies it includes, dependencies it has, size, business operations it supports, etc.

    • The amount of time needed from customer success account managers.

    • The number of incidents historically.

    • Special projects the organization has.

    • The knowledge-level of internal staff related to the covered solution (if solutions are newly introduced, there may be additional proactive work in Year 1).

    Modeling and assumptions.

    For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that:

    • The annual cost to use Mission Critical in the support of three workloads is $840,000.

  • Risks.

    Costs are variable based on the characteristics outlined above.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.2 million.

Microsoft Support For Mission Critical Contract Costs

Ref. Metric Calculation Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Dt Microsoft Support for Mission Critical contract costs Assumption $0 $840,000 $840,000 $840,000
Risk adjustment ↑5%
Dtr Microsoft Support for Mission Critical contract costs (risk-adjusted) $0 $882,000 $882,000 $882,000
Three-year total: $2,646,000 Three-year present value: $2,193,403

Onboarding Time

  • Evidence and data.

    Staff spend time scoping the support needed, and once the scope has been determined, they begin getting the Mission Critical team up to speed on the solutions and environment. In the first 90 days of the engagement, staff work with the delivery team over the course of a few weeks to gather and share data and help them understand the environment and solution.

  • Modeling and assumptions.

    For the composite organization, Forrester assumes that:

    • The initial scoping to identify and explore the three workloads covered by the Mission Critical contract took on average 5 hours per week for four weeks for the 20 staff that support those workloads.

    • Onboarding the Mission Critical team takes the 20 staff 15 hours each over eight weeks across the three workloads.

    • Annual staff fully loaded compensation averages $115,000 or $55 per hour.

  • Risks.

    Potential risks that can impact the magnitude of this cost include:

    • As new workloads are brought under Mission Critical support, additional time may be needed to get engineers up to speed on those additional workloads.

    • If new engineers are added to the Mission Critical team, staff may need to help get that engineer up to speed.

To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $156,000.

Onboarding Time

Ref. Metric Calculation Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
E1 Number of staff involved in onboarding the Mission Critical team Interviews 20 20
E2 Number of weeks Interviews 4 8
E3 Hours per week per staff Interviews 5 15
E4 Average hourly fully loaded compensation Assumption $55 $55 $55 $55
Et Onboarding time E1*E2*E3*E4 $22,000 $132,000 $0 $0
Risk adjustment ↑10%
Etr Onboarding time (risk-adjusted) $24,200 $145,200 $0 $0
Three-year total:$169,400 Three-year present value: $156,200
NEXT SECTION: Financial Summary

CONSOLIDATED THREE-YEAR RISK-ADJUSTED METRICS

  • These risk-adjusted ROI, NPV, and payback period values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each Benefit and Cost section.

Cash Flow Chart (Risk-Adjusted)

Cash Flow Table (Risk-Adjusted Estimates)

Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total Present Value
Total costs ($24,200) ($1,027,200) ($882,000) ($882,000) ($2,815,400) ($2,349,603)
Total benefits $0 $1,227,225 $2,083,075 $2,452,925 $5,763,225 $4,680,128
Net benefits ($24,200) $200,025 $1,201,075 $1,570,925 $2,947,825 $2,330,525
ROI 99%
Payback period <3 months

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

NEXT SECTION: Appendix

Appendix A: Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

Total Economic Impact Approach

  • Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.

  • Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.

  • Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.

  • Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”

  • PRESENT VALUE (PV)

    The present or current value of (discounted) cost and benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate). The PV of costs and benefits feed into the total NPV of cash flows.

  • NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)

    The present or current value of (discounted) future net cash flows given an interest rate (the discount rate). A positive project NPV normally indicates that the investment should be made, unless other projects have higher NPVs.

  • RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

    A project’s expected return in percentage terms. ROI is calculated by dividing net benefits (benefits less costs) by costs.

  • DISCOUNT RATE

    The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.

  • PAYBACK PERIOD

    The breakeven point for an investment. This is the point in time at which net benefits (benefits minus costs) equal initial investment or cost.

Appendix B: Endnotes

1 Source: “The Changing Landscape Of IT Incident And Crisis Management,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 20, 2018.

About Forrester Consulting

Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester’s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit forrester.com/consulting.

© 2021, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to forrester.com.

Cookie Settings