Many Curl engagements involve application modernization. Now that Web applications are reaching the sophistication of client-server capabilities enterprises are finally considering replacing them. It was with interest I read Tim Pacileo's article in eWeek on How to Build a Business Case for Application Modernization.

Tim opens by saying:

“CIOs of large organizations recognize the benefits of modernizing applications and moving away from legacy systems. But starting the process and justifying the investment needed in an application modernization initiative can be daunting. And too often, the potential gains of a streamlined environment are deferred in favor of a short-term focus on cost containment through maintenance of outdated,redundant and inefficient legacy applications.”

Indeed many of our sales situations involve making a trade-off between strategic long-term investment and short-term cost containment. In these situations we help customers construct the business case for a strategic investment. With over 400 enterprise class customers we have a lot of actual examples of Curl implementations providing real business savings. Unfortunately the details of these examples are mostly company confidential. Recently we have been detailing possible business savings based real customer cases but using example data. We find this helps in getting the discussion going on what the opportunity for savings could be. Here are three examples:

• Better Performance -The current application takes 90 seconds to perform a complex data visualization. If 1,000 employees perform this operation 50 times per day this is 1250 hours of wait time per day. If the visualization time is reduced to 1 second this saves 300,000 hours per year and at $20/hour that is more than $6M/year!

• Better Visualization - The current process to find error patterns in operational data takes 60 minutes and the department of 100 employees whose job it is to identify and fix these errors typically finds 600 errors a day. If good data visualization can reduce the time to find one error pattern to 10 minutes this would save 500 hours per day or 130,000 hours per year. At $20 per hour this is $2.6M in savings per year!

• Support Cost - The current client-server application must be updated 6 times a year to 10,000 users. Each update costs $5 in distribution and material costs and 15 minutes of end user time. A Web application would eliminate this cost and save approximately $600,000 a year.

While these examples use hypothetical data they are based on real customer examples.  It's easy to plug in your own data and start to measure the actual savings you might get.