041 The true ROI of ColdFusion (how to sell CF to your boss or client) with Thomas Grobicki
Thomas Grobicki talks about “The true ROI of ColdFusion (how to sell CF to your boss or client) ” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michael Smith. We re discussing the ROI of using Coldfusion. I strongly believe that the case to use CF has to be made for business reasons. All
“I strongly believe that the case to use CF has to be made for business reasons. All to often the discussion is about the technical merits and completely ignores why a business might want to use CF, particularly CF enterprise.” – Thomas Grobicki
Episode highlights
Why the ROI of using ColdFusion is much higher than you think
Saved time developing apps
Easy built in features
Web services
Easy db query
Easy migration between db platforms
Charting
Threading
And many more
Google maps
Few lines of code to write or read later in maintenance
50% more efficient to code in than .Net, PHP, Java, C++
Savings of $10-100k+ depending on team size, developers and project size.
Better reliability
Cost of outages
SLA refunds
Reputation and trust with customers
Auto bug reporting
Self healing databases
99.8% app uptime
And most of the downtime is Windows patching scheduled downtime
Savings of $10-100k depending on your SLA and customer base
Lost opportunity cost of delayed features to market
Lost customers due to slow feature delivery
Savings of $10k-1M+ depending on your customer base size and product pricing
Value of RAD of new features for new customer demos for their strongest pain point that was missing from your app (and all your competition)
50% of sales have been closed due to this
Backwards compatibility of CFML among versions
Not having to extensively rewrite when a new version of CF comes out
Not having to use 3rd party libraries to get stuff done
When you upgrade the non-CF language you have to retest/recode to allow for this.
Sometimes the library is even discontinued and you have to replace and recode to replace it
ColdFusion deals with this for you because the features are built in
Saving $10-100k
Total savings from using CF $40k-$1.3M ← How to make the business case for using CF
Why CF Enterprise vs Standard
If an Enterprise feature saves you even ½ a month of developer time it is worth it
Overcoming concern of availability of developers in CF
There is an active CF consulting marketplace
But easy to train good web-db developers from languages to CFML
They already know HTML, CSS, JS, SQL
They already know how to write good scripting language code
Easy to learn CFML
Be ok investing in your staff
The developers programming skills and attitude are more important than the language they first
Overcoming fear about Adobe exiting the CF market
10 year road map for CF
50+ developers on the Adobe CF development team
Adobe support the annual CF Summit
Adobe CF developer week
6 CF conference this year
Adobe is selling thousands of new CF licenses every quarter
Plus upgrades
Plan B: Lucee CFML open source
200k+ public CF sites and many more intranets and cloaked sites
Dealing with End of Life cycle CFML features
CF report builder
Crystal Reports is not an option
CF Chart
Provide replacement 3rd party tools if a feature is deprecated
Provide a migration tool if changing how features work
The horrors of migrating from CF 10 to CF 11
Why are you proud to use CF?
WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?
(* WWIT = What Would It Take)
Mentioned in this episode
ROI = Return on Investment
SLA = Service Level Agreement
RAD = Rapid Application Development
Legacy apps in any language are harder to maintain whatever the language
Idea: CFML for PHPers guide
Adobe CF Summit
Adobe CF developer week
CRF files = ColdFusion Report writer files
Hackathon contest: CF vs PHP (no libraries allowed)