As an example I looked at recently, we had a customer that was doing 27,000 emails a month. That would mean that if we spent 30 seconds reading each email, it would total 2,700 hours per year just reading emails. And that's not solving the issues. That works out to 1.3 FTEs just reading the emails for that customer. Suppose all-in, in the US, we're paying FTEs $72,000 to $75,000 just to read emails. Our license fees are certainly less than that for that one customer.

In terms of ROI, we haven't fully gotten there yet. We've reduced those 2,000,000 emails by 42 percent, so far. We haven't gotten them all done yet. But who do you think is on our list to get moved over to this solution? That customer 27,000 emails, we're going to move them over as fast as we can.

Our ROI is to get people off the old, manual system with 8.2 touches and down to two touches. Once we start hitting critical mass, the product will certainly pay for itself in a very reasonable period of time.

I don't know if there's ROI from BMC TrueSight Operations Management because I'm not involved in calculating the ROI.

The very fact that we've been on it for ten years is a testament. We continue to make the investment. We continue to pay the renewal because the return has been fantastic. I don't have any specific data points other than the fact that we've been on the product for ten years. There's a reason for that.

I don't know that I have a number available. When we embarked on this journey we had some business-case assumptions about what our internal savings would be. We've got a little more work to do to come up with those numbers. We need to get more volume deployed before we can say we have a reliable percentage of OpEx reduction.

TrueSight has helped reduce IT operations costs. From a software standpoint, I have been able to eliminate a lot of other tools, saving approximately half a million dollars a year in other maintenance costs. That is easy savings. The more important one is the labor savings: more reliable, simplified tickets. 

The time savings are recognized by the operations teams, not my team. Therefore, it's hard to know the time savings, but if an operations person takes at least 15 minutes to analyze a ticket and their ticket volume is reduced by 10,000 a month, then TrueSight does save time.

We've been reducing ticket noise five to ten percent annually every year, and it has been cumulative. This means less tickets, noise, and operator intervention.

We have reduced headcount and shrunk the mean time to resolve. That's how we justify the expense of the product. It has really worked out.

It has helped us reduce IT Ops costs. We were able to replace the headcount of five out of six Level 1 technicians. We repurposed those people to higher level tasks. Without this solution, we would not have replaced that job function.

Any customer who has multiple servers will not be able to monitor them manually. The tool helps to know the unknown. Instead of having a person, we use the tool to monitor the server for errors.

The solution hasn't helped reduce costs in a measurable fashion. That's a measure that we wouldn't undertake. There might be soft costs benefits, such as 

• impact on the quality of life for operations folks
• our ability to show our clients that the services we provide to them are healthy
• giving the business teams, our relationship teams, the ability to speak intelligently, rather than just colloquially, about how our systems are running.

Life at our company as an operations person is nicer now because you have confidence that what you're doing makes a difference, that the business service that you're working on is healthy. The business is happier when we're able to talk to them intelligently and say, "I can actually show you that we've been up and successful." 

It has helped in our ability to work on smarter things rather than silly incidents. If we eliminate incidents, then we're doing better work. We're able to do the good work of business rather than the sad work of recovery. That's not only quality of life but it's also the ability to get things done. So I know that, at some level, we're doing more with less because of our monitoring. But we don't have any hard numbers from a monitoring perspective.

It does help reduce IT operations costs. A lot of times, people are doing things manually. They might have a network operating center where they just monitor screens all the time, so you can reduce labor costs. From a scale perspective, if they have thousands and thousands of servers in their data centers, you can determine which ones are more critical over the other ones and focus on the critical pieces, not the pieces which don't matter.

Monitoring is like an insurance. If you have it, you feel safe. If you do not have it and run into an accident, you wished you had it.