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109% ROI and Less Than a Three-Month Payback Period: The Total Economic Impact™ of AppDirect's AppMarket

By Dan Saks / February 11, 2019

Digital marketplaces—and the platforms that power them—are now recognized as the answer to many of the digital economy's most complex problems. "In this era of SaaS-first and SaaS-only strategies, business executives can get overwhelmed with choices—which creates redundancy, cost overruns, and new risks," writes Forrester Research in a recent report. "SaaS marketplaces promise to solve these issues[...]"

Despite the promise of marketplaces, many companies run into a familiar roadblock when trying to launch a digital platform: the "build versus buy" question. In short, should companies build marketplace technology in house or work with an outside vendor? The choice is rarely easy, particularly with large, complex projects like digital platforms. There can be so many variables that the true cost and return on investment can be hard to predict.

Should companies build marketplace technology in house or work with an outside vendor?

Companies Avoid $2.8M in Marketplace Capital Investments with AppDirect

To remove the guesswork, AppDirect commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on AppMarket, our marketplace platform solution. The study found a range of compelling numbers, but for companies looking to build a marketplace solution, this may be the most significant: $2.8 million, the amount that companies save by avoiding investing in application marketplace development.

As the Forrester study explains, "AppDirect provided organizations with an out-of-the-box commerce platform that integrated to their core back-end systems, allowing them to avoid intensive capital investments in internal development and ongoing maintenance."

AppDirect Helps Generate Millions in Incremental Revenue and 109% ROI

Companies interviewed for the TEI study saw a range of other financial benefits, including $30.3 million in new revenue and a 109 percent return on investment with a less than three-month payback period. The value that AppMarket provides, however, can be much higher than that. In fact, a business and financial software organization highlighted in the study saw a 249 percent lift in overall lifetime value with AppMarket-powered software sales to small businesses.

AppDirect: $30.3M in new revenue, a 109% ROI, and a less than three-month payback period.

New Lines of Business, Improved Time to Market, and More

Measurable benefits always grab the most attention, but the TEI study also identified numerous other business benefits of using AppMarket. Among them is the ability to create new product portfolios and enter entirely new lines of business. As a senior product manager said: “We have really started a new business where AppDirect is the key enabler, and I think without this enabler, we couldn’t do the whole business. We wouldn’t have been able to enter the public cloud market and realize the strong growth rate there without our investment in AppDirect.”

Improved time to market is another key benefit. As a VP of the cloud business marketplace for a major telecom company explained: "Usually we have a production lead time of 12 to 24 months to roll out service lines with all our really complex legacy platforms and containers and so on. And with AppMarket, we were able to bring this down, depending on the service, to just three to four months. We greatly improved time-to-market security."

We are incredibly proud of AppMarket and the real, measurable benefits that our solutions deliver not only for our customers, but also for their end users. When technology becomes more accessible, everyone wins.

Read the Full TEI Study and watch our on-demand webinar.

This is just a brief summary of the full TEI study, which includes detailed cost and benefit analyses, financial summaries, and excerpts from customer interviews. Click here to download the complete study.

On February 20th, 2019, we’ll be hosting a webinar with guest speaker Sam Conway, Forrester Consultant, who will be taking a deep dive into the study results. Click below to watch our on-demand webinar.

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Dan Saks is the co-founder and co-CEO of AppDirect. This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can read the original here.