Forrester study reveals significant benefits and cost savings with Spanner

Is your legacy database sticking you with rising costs, frustrating downtime, and scalability challenges? For organizations that strive for top performance and agility, legacy database systems can become significant roadblocks to innovation. 

But there's good news. According to a new Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, organizations may realize significant benefits by deploying Spanner, Google Cloud’s always-on, globally consistent, multi-model database with virtually unlimited scale. What kind of benefits? We’re talking an ROI of 132% over three years, and multi-million-dollar benefits and cost savings for a representative composite organization. 

Read on for more, then download the full study to see the results and learn how Spanner can help your organization increase cost savings and profit, as well as reliability and operational efficiencies.

The high cost of the status quo

Legacy, on-premises databases often come with a hefty price tag that goes far beyond initial hardware and software investments. According to the Forrester TEI study, these databases can be a burden to maintain, requiring dedicated IT staff and specialized expertise, as well as high capital expenditures and operational overhead. Outdated systems can also limit your ability to respond quickly to changing market demands and customer needs, such as demand spiking for a new game or a viral new product.

Spanner's economic impact: Forrester's key findings 

To quantify the benefits that Spanner can bring to an organization, Forrester used its TEI methodology, conducting in-depth interviews with seven leading organizations across the globe who had adopted Spanner. These organizations came from a variety of industries such as retail, financial services, software and technology, gaming, and transportation. Based on its findings, Forrester created a representative composite organization: a business-to-consumer (B2C) organization with revenue of $1 billion per year, and modeled the potential financial impact of adopting Spanner. 

In addition to a 132% return on investment (ROI) with a 9-month payback period, Forrester found that the composite organization also realized $7.74M in total benefits over the three years, from a variety of sources: 

• Cost savings from retiring on-prem legacy database: By retiring the on-prem legacy database and transitioning to Spanner, the composite organization can save $3.8 million over three years. Savings came from reduced infrastructure capital expenditure, maintenance costs, and system licensing expenses. 

“The system before migration was more expensive. It was the cost of the entire system including the application, database, monitoring, and everything. We paid within the $5 million to $10 million range for a mainframe, and I expect that the cost of it would almost double within the next few years. Currently, we pay 90% less for Spanner.” - Senior Principal Architect at a software and technology organization

• Profit retention and cost savings from reduced unplanned downtime: Prior to adopting Spanner, organizations suffered unplanned database downtime triggered by technical malfunctions, human errors, data integration issues, or natural disasters. With up to 99.999% availability, Spanner virtually  eliminates unplanned downtime. Forrester calculates that the composite organization achieves $1.2 million in cost savings and profit retention due to reduced unplanned downtime. 

“In the last seven years since we migrated to Spanner, the total number of failures caused by Spanner is zero. Prior to Spanner, some sort of problem would occur about once a month including a major problem once a year.” - Tech Lead, gaming organization

• Cost savings from reduced overprovisioning for peak usage: With on-prem database systems, long infrastructure procurement cycles and large up-front expenditures mean that organizations typically provision for peak usage — even if that means they are over-provisioned most of the time. Spanner's elastic scalability allows organizations to start small and scale up and down effortlessly as usage changes. Databases can scale up for however long you need, and then down again, cutting costs and the need to predict usage. For the composite organization, this results in cost savings of $1 million over three years. 

“The number of transactions we are able to achieve is one of the main reasons that we use Spanner. Additionally, Spanner is highly consistent, and we save on the number of engineers needed for managing our databases." - Head of SRE, DevOps, and Infrastructure, financial services organization

• Efficiencies gained in onboarding new applications: Spanner accelerates development of new applications by eliminating the need to preplan resources. This resulted in 80% reduction in time to onboard new applications and $981,000 in cost savings for the composite organization.

Beyond the numbers

Beyond the quantifiable ROI, the Forrester TEI study highlights unquantified benefits that amplify Spanner's value. These include:

• Improved budget predictability, as Spanner shifts expenditures from capex to opex, enabling more effective resource allocation and forecasting. 

• Greater testing and deployment flexibility, allowing software development engineers to rapidly scale development environments for testing, conduct thorough load tests, and quickly shut down resources. 

• Expert Google Cloud customer service, providing helpful guidance to maximize Spanner's benefits. 

“The Spanner team are experts. They have a deep understanding of the product  they’ve built with deep insights on how we’re using the product if we ask them.” - Head of Engineering, financial services organization

• An innovation-friendly architecture, facilitating the design and implementation of new business capabilities and expansion, improving automation and customer satisfaction, all without incurring downtime. 

Together, these strategic advantages contribute to organizational agility and long-term success.

Unlock the potential of your data with Spanner 

We believe the Forrester TEI study clearly demonstrates that Spanner is more than just a database; it's a catalyst for business transformation. By eliminating the constraints of legacy systems, Spanner empowers organizations to achieve significant cost savings, improve operational efficiencies, and unlock new levels of innovation. Are you ready to transform your data infrastructure and unlock your organization's full potential?

Download the full Forrester Total Economic Impact study