AJAX in the Enterprise

AJAX solutions provide real business benefits such as competitive differentiation; increased online revenue and sales conversions; higher customer satisfaction, retention, and productivity; and lower support costs by improving the usability of your Web applications.

ROI: Better user interfaces can result in fewer human errors resulting in time savings, and less overall frustration. Reduced long-term impact of bandwidth requirements.

“Ajax Cost Savings = Hourly Labor Rate X (Seconds Saved per Transaction X Number of Transactions per year) / 3600

Looking at a conservative potential time savings of 36 seconds per transaction, if a business performs 50,000 of these transactions per year, and a labor cost of $20/hour, we see a total labor savings of $10,000 per year, or 500 man hours, on this transaction type alone. Given the Microsoft Fiddler predicted time savings of 199.01 seconds per transaction for a remotely hosted application, you see a more aggressive cost reduction of approximately $55,281 per year for this transaction type, or 2,764 man hours.” Measuring the Benefits of Ajax by Alexei White, www.developer.com

Although the benefits of improved application architecture extend beyond mere time savings, when included with other qualitative factors a quick ROI calculation such as this can strengthen the business case for Ajax based solutions.

User Satisfaction: enables developers to provide new kinds of data visualizations and interactivity that would only have been seen before on the desktop, allowing users to do more with their information assets.

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership when compared to an existing application including the impact of yearly licensing of proprietary desktop software, as well as distribution and support costs.

Opportunity Costs: develop Web applications with comparable capabilities to that of static, expensive desktop application without losing but rather enhancing the user experience.

Reach New Audiences: Forward thinking government agencies have reduced costs by extending intuitive self-service applications to audiences who found earlier web applications too difficult and too slow to use on a regular basis.

Increase Sales: Frustrated by lower than expected on-line sales, large pharmaceuticals companies have improved revenues by replacing their old web-based e-commerce system with an easier to use, interactive purchasing application.

Increased online revenue: Through reduced website abandonment and higher sales conversion rates

Lower support center: costs through a more intuitive, capable, responsive, and flexible user interface that reduces customer calls

Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty: which are critical factors since the Jupiter Group reports that retaining current customers has now become a higher priority for online commerce than gaining new customers

Metrics:

Data Transition Time: Time is money. Over many repetitions, the time employees spend waiting for servers to refresh pages can add up to significant costs. AJAX Data is More Compact

Task completion Time: Increased user interface efficiency can result in more intuitive designs that can save time performing specific tasks. AJAX is Faster

Reduced Bandwidth Consumption: Bandwidth does not increase linearly, but does increase as the company invests in larger-capacity Internet connections and new hardware to accommodate greater server loads. A firm's cost structure for bandwidth depends on the scale of their operation and these capital investment needs. If repetitious tasks consume a lot of bandwidth, these costs can escalate dramatically. AJAX is More Efficient