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042 The true ROI of ColdFusion (How to Sell CF to your Boss or Client) with Thomas Grobicki

By Michaela Light Leave a Comment

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 Michaela Light. 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
  • 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

 

Bio

CEO of Avilar Technologies, Inc. talent management apps –  learning and competency management system in hospital healthcare, insurance, finance, and DOD.

Thomas Grobicki

Links

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Thomas Grobicki. If I'm saying his name right. That looks really Polish there Thomas.

Thomas:           [inaudible] [00:09] Polish. So, you know a lot of different channels, but absolutely.

Michael:          So, today we're going to be looking at the true ROI of using ColdFusion, and why that ROI may be much higher. And ROI just in case you didn’t know is “Return on Investment”. So, it's how much value you get out of using ColdFusion versus other languages. And how you can make the business case for using ColdFusion. Overcoming fears you might have about Adobe Eckstein the ColdFusion markets. Dealing with end of life cycle issues with features go away, [and we have a couple of features we're going to talk about going away, and how Thomas dealt with that]. And some horror stories he had migrated from C.F. 10 to 11 a few years back. So, welcome Thomas.

Thomas:           Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity, and looking forward to sharing my enthusiasm for ColdFusion.

Michael:          Me too, we’re here to help ColdFusion be more alive. So, I think knowing that ColdFusion has a good ROI is important because oftentimes even if developers, or CIO’s want to use a technology sometimes, they have to show that it has a good ROI.

Thomas:           Right, right yeah, so again I grew up, I’ve been doing software development for a long time. But Avila has been doing ColdFusion for the last twenty years. So, our products are built on a ColdFusion basis. And a lot of times, people… I'm certainly evangelical about ColdFusion features, and things like that. But the bottom line is as a business owner, you have to make the case for why using ColdFusion is better than other alternative environments. And certainly, when you look at ROI factors like people frequently bring up the cost of ColdFusion and then something is free, and ColdFusion costs money. But I don't really ever judge things from that perspective. Yeah, it costs some money. But programming time and server outages, and other things that cost you customers are a lot more expensive than the relatively low cost of a ColdFusion environment.

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