One of the hurdles keeping organizations from fully embracing virtualization is cost justification. To combat that, virtualization providers have been developing and offering their own ROI and TCO calculators, and many of them are quite good. It was just over a year ago that VMware launched its own TCO/ROI Calculator. To do it right, VMware's calculator was independently developed by a leading ROI and TCO consul One of the hurdles keeping organizations from fully embracing virtualization is cost justification. To combat that, virtualization providers have been developing and offering their own ROI and TCO calculators, and many of them are quite good. It was just over a year ago that VMware launched its own TCO/ROI Calculator. To do it right, VMware’s calculator was independently developed by a leading ROI and TCO consultancy – Alinean, Inc. Microsoft has taken a page out of VMware’s book. Like VMware, Microsoft has created its own ROI Tool, and it too was developed independently by Alinean and ex-Gartner TCO/ROI experts. Microsoft’s tool helps partners and customers examine current production server, development/QA lab, desktop and application virtualization opportunities, quantifying the potential savings, service-level and agility benefits, investment and ROI for implementing Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. It even has an option to compare between Microsoft technology and that of its competition. At first glance, the tool seems very impressive and thorough with the amount of data it collects. The calculator collects specific information about current infrastructure costs and opportunities for improvement, then uses research by Alinean to project potential costs and benefits for various optimization strategies using the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization solutions. All research was collected from the Alinean ValueBase of IT spending metrics, and Microsoft product and pricing experts to reflect typical costs and savings for similar company type and size. You can try the calculator out yourself, but you will need to sign up for an account first. Once you’ve created an account and filled in the necessary information being asked in the calculator, you will be able to save your analysis, view the results, refine the analysis and run reports. And yes, it is free. Software Development