Study Overview

 

Introduction

The overall objective of this research effort was to have the ability to compare the actual Total Cost

of Ownership (TCO) of various Operating System (O/S) environments supporting respondents

operational Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Over 2000 hours were invested by senior

members of the META Group consulting and analyst team to define the objectives of the research

effort, produce the survey instrument, contact prospective respondents, collect detailed data, analyze

data and produce the final report. The respondent companies also invested thousands of hours of

effort to provide META Group with accurate details about their environments. Without their

cooperation and willingness to share information, this report would not have been possible.

 

Analysis Overview

The focus of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis was on the cost of ownership of various

O/S environments and the comparison of those O/S environments based on actual respondent data.

META Group defined the O/S environment in this research effort to include server centric expenses

for hardware, software, maintenance, application software, implementation and support services. The

workstation and network components were deemed a "neutral factor" in the analysis and therefore

not included in the survey process. Over half of the total Part One respondents were not willing or

able to provide detailed financial data on the cost of their ERP implementation.

The "average number of concurrent ERP users" was the most consistent factor reported by

respondent organizations to measure the value across different ERP environments. ERP systems are

real time/on-line systems as compared to environments like Sales Force Automation (SFA) where

many users can be working disconnected from a server complex on laptop computers. In the SFA

environment the measurement variable for number of users would be more appropriately the "number

of named or registered users". During the analysis phase, the "number of concurrent ERP users"

factor was used to normalize costs across all environments by dividing the cost elements by the

"number of concurrent ERP users" to determine the average cost attributed per concurrent user.

 

The executive summary of this study is available as attachement to this document.