Over the last few months, our CMS Carrying Cost Calculator has been extremely popular, blowing visitors’ minds as they see the outrageous savings they can gain by switching from their legacy enterprise CMS to Crownpeak. “I can’t believe it,” is the most common response we hear, since most people are shocked to realize they’ve been spending hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars on unnecessary infrastructure.

Born in the cloud, Crownpeak DXM has a far lower TCO than on-premises web CMS, as these come with a hidden burden of infrastructure and management costs. There are three key factors in the calculator that illustrate why legacy content management systems are overwhelmingly more expensive than Crownpeak:

1. Server and operational costs: Layers upon layers

Organizations are so used to having to manage the “stack” of an enterprise CMS that they frequently don’t consider its true ongoing operational costs – or they just may assume that CMS operating costs are about the same across all vendors. These costs are manifold, and spider into every nook and cranny in IT:

• The cost of servers (whether on-prem or hosted in the cloud) and the cost to administrate and maintain them, upgrade the operating systems, apply security fixes, ad infinitum...
• The cost of administrators
• The cost of developers
• The cost of upgrades, which includes exhaustively testing new versions of the platform against existing code to make sure it doesn’t break the site; updating existing code so that it works in the new version; deploying the new site across development, staging, content authoring and go-live phases - often across multiple, redundant systems.

2. Development and operations staff: Send in an army

The care and feeding of legacy CMS platforms requires a large number of web and IT professionals. For example, a properly managed legacy CMS will need back-end developers, architects, database developers, database administrators, database performance tuning experts, search and indexing development, administration and performance tuning; cloud hosting configuration, administration, performance and more! Notice how these are in addition to web development.

Since development on traditional CMS platforms is like building an entire application – as opposed to building a website – the number of developers required to develop, test, maintain, and upgrade code is quite significant. Companies can end up with large developer and product support teams to keep the system up and running. Those are precious resources that could instead be deployed to adding value and quality experiences for your customers.

3. Upgrade costs: An endless and expensive cycle

Many companies stay on tragically outdated versions of their legacy CMS because the cost and risk of upgrading to the latest, most innovative release is too high. Because all legacy content management systems are on-premises application frameworks, upon which organizations built customized code bases, upgrading them requires:

• Deploying the new platform version to a new set of servers
• Deploying the existing web and application code on to those servers
• Regression testing to see what broke in the new version
• Developing fixes for those problems
• Repeating that cycle of test-fix-test until it’s good enough for live
• Deploying the revised code base in coordination with the new platform version across:
  • Dev
  • Test
  • Staging
  • Live content authoring
  • Live content delivery

And while all that’s going on, new experience development is halted as the dev team goes in to “code freeze” - this means no new features until the existing code is verified and validated. If anything goes wrong, the code-freeze period can be quite long.

And with all of those interconnected systems (servers, databases, indexing), a single kink in the chain can cause big delays.

Make a clean sweep to Crownpeak

The industry’s first CMS born in the cloud, Crownpeak DXM, eliminates all of the costs detailed above. Find out how by reading our new eBook: “ When Cost and Speed Matter: The Key Benefits of Replacing Your Web CMS Today .”

If you haven’t already, use the Crownpeak CMS Carrying Cost Calculator to find out how much you’re spending, and could be saving by switching to Crownpeak.

Tags: Web Content Management Digital Experience Management CMS