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

Show notes

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

10 year road map for CF

50+ developers on the Adobe CF development team

Adobe support the annual CF Summit

Adobe CF developer week

6 CF conference this year

Adobe is selling thousands of new CF licenses every quarter

Plus upgrades

Plan B: Lucee CFML open source

200k+ public CF sites and many more intranets and cloaked sites

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

ROI = Return on Investment

SLA = Service Level Agreement

RAD = Rapid Application Development

Legacy apps in any language are harder to maintain whatever the language

Idea: CFML for PHPers guide

Adobe CF Summit 

Adobe CF developer week 

CRF files = ColdFusion Report writer files

Hackathon contest: CF vs PHP (no libraries allowed)

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Thomas Grobicki

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

Links

Website

LinkedIn 

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.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.