SMARTDesktop - Microsoft Licensing & Total Cost of Ownership – Part 3

In the last part of the article SMARTDesktop - Microsoft Licensing & Total Cost of Ownership – Part 2 – we saw the licensing matrix for a given customer situation. In this article, we evaluate the cost factors and try to arrive at the TCO over three years, and check whether the savings would be more than the actual investment.

First & the foremost thing, one must keep in mind that any virtualization & VDI initiatives are a program and not a simple product purchase. Many factors do affect the decision and if properly planned & implemented VDI solution would bring many benefits onto the table and SMARTDesktop would stand out among the lot.

Coming to subject matter, the sample customer, considered in the Part 2 of the article wants to replace 200 of his ageing Desktop computers and has started evaluating the VDI & hence SMARTDesktop in place of procuring the Desktop computers. The TCO summary is shown below.

Total Investments Summary:

Savings Summary:

The factors that affect TCO are:

1. Hardware Purchase – Servers, Desktop Computers, Thin Clients etc.
2. Operating System & Software Licenses including office applications, anti-virus etc.
3. Network and bandwidth costs – WAN & Internet Costs
4. Power consumption

For the sample client considered here, only, desktop, OS & other software purchase costs were considered as against the reuse of existing desktops to arrive at TCO. The Network costs did not affect much as all offices & the data centre were interconnected through the MPLS links or leased lines. People with roaming profile were connecting to corporate applications through the VPN under corporate plans. The network bandwidth cost was already under OPEX. However, the there is a line of thought that after carefully measuring the bandwidth consumption with SMARTDesktop, one may reduce the bandwidth on MPLS & Leased lines and hence reduce the costs incurred. SMARTDesktop with Shared Sessions reduced the CAPEX considerably as shown and the savings earned ensured that the CAPEX incurred was recovered within II year of Operation and this customre chose to go with SMARTDesktop with HSD solution as it was suiting the business need and provided the necessary flexibility as the business desired.

It is not necessary that True VDI costs are equal to that of New desktop procurement. It purely depends on the type of Application, OS on which it is installed, the licensing policy that is applicable to desktop OS as VM image under VDI scenario, server, storage & network requirements etc.

As already stated above, any virtualization & VDI initiatives are a program and not a simple product purchase. Many factors do affect the decision and if properly planned & implemented VDI solution would bring many benefits onto the table and SMARTDesktop would stand out among the lot.

Contact us to evaluate SMARTDesktop under your specific environment.