Achieve a 222% 3-year ROI by using Google Cloud Platform

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) look for solutions that can help to gain a competitive edge and accelerate innovation. A lot of them are turning to cloud technologies that give them more time to focus on their business instead of losing time on managing their infrastructure. In this article, we’re sharing the results of the IDC study that describes how SMBs can accelerate business growth while achieving greater cost efficiencies.

If there’s anything we’ve learned so far in 2020, it’s that no one can predict what is going to happen the next day.

Technology should be there to help SMBs build for agility, flexibility, and be ready for change. 

IDC’s study

IDC interviewed small and midsize businesses, running most of their business workloads on GCP, to determine the impact of Google Cloud Platform on IT costs, productivity, and business agility. 

One of the major results of the IDC study is that Google Cloud SMB customers can achieve a 222% return on their investment over three years with an average annual benefit of $1.09M per year per organisation.

Here’s a closer look at some of the IDC’s findings.

1. GCP improves IT agility & productivity

SMBs often need to react fast to changes in customer demand and behavior. With Google Cloud SMBs only pay for the services they need to use. It helps SMBs scale up or down to meet the demand.

IDC also shared insights on how Google Cloud benefits application development teams through improved infrastructure agility, scalability, and flexible capacity.

Thanks to the fact that the teams have easy access to the resources needed to efficiently build new applications and features on Google Cloud, the productivity of the developers is 19% higher. Which is the equivalent of more than four additional development team members.

2. Improving business results and performance

SMBs need to adapt fast in order to maintain and grow their businesses. IDC’s research found that they must quickly take advantage of business opportunities as they arise. It’s important for them to consistently meet customer expectations to stay competitive & to stay relevant to the market.

Through the use of leading-edge cloud services such as Google BigQuery, Kubernetes Engine, and AutoML, these businesses are able to realise revenue gains of 16% per year per organisation which is equivalent to $881,500 annually.

GCP offers business increased agility, flexibility, and performance. 
IDC Study, 2020

Analytics teams benefit from the use of Google BigQuery and the overall performance of the platform, with IDC calculating a 53% higher level of productivity. 

3. Lower costs

Cutting costs on operations

Running IT operations have to be as cost-effective as possible because SMBs don’t have large budgets and not a large staff.

Having an efficient staff can help to lower the cost of operations. Study participants have enabled more effective and productive application development activities and saved time. The IDC study found that SMBs were able to achieve a 41% improvement in overall efficiency across IT teams with Google Cloud Platform. This is equal to the productivity of almost three IT staff resources.

Cutting costs on infrastructure 

When we look at the infrastructure costs, IDC calculated that SMBs spend 26% less over three years with Google Cloud Platform.

ROI Summary

IDC calculates that these organisations will achieve total discounted three-year benefits of $2.53 million. This is based on the cost savings of infrastructure, staff, employee productivity, and revenue gains. The total projected investment cost over three years is equal to $0.79 million.

This means a return on investment of 222% (on a 3-year level) with a break-even on their investment in 8 months.

Helping SMBs achieve more with the cloud