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Money Changes Everything

Bob Wescott

Sometimes performance work is all about the customer: “What do we need to handle the seasonal peak with reasonable response time?” Sometimes performance work is all about the money: “Can we cut 30% of our IT budget?” When it is all about the money, you have to have some financial numbers to work with that everyone agrees upon. Specifically, you need a target amount to save and the relevant costs of the major pieces of hardware in your computing world. Get those financial numbers first, and make sure that everyone is in agreement on them. Now go do your performance work.

For a money-centered question, design your talk to lead with the money, because that is what your audience is focused on. Then talk about what is possible and what, if any, pain will result. For example:

■ The goal was to cut the IT hardware budget by 30%. That can be done, and 11 months out of the year all will be well. However, at your seasonal peak, my data predicts horrible response times.

■ I believe you can save $250K by making the following changes with no change to your average response times.

The Real Cost of Bad Performance

When looking at the cost of lost business, it can be useful to look at the lifetime value of a customer, not just the cost of “losing” X transactions.

For example: Imagine a grocery store refuses a return on a bad can of peas. It saved a $1.29 by doing so. However, if that customer buys $200 of groceries a week, 50 weeks a year, and lives near that store for five years, then the lifetime value of that customer is about $50,000.

What is the real cost of losing a customer due to slow response time issues?

Bob Wescott is the author of “The Every Computer Performance Book”.

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Money Changes Everything

Bob Wescott

Sometimes performance work is all about the customer: “What do we need to handle the seasonal peak with reasonable response time?” Sometimes performance work is all about the money: “Can we cut 30% of our IT budget?” When it is all about the money, you have to have some financial numbers to work with that everyone agrees upon. Specifically, you need a target amount to save and the relevant costs of the major pieces of hardware in your computing world. Get those financial numbers first, and make sure that everyone is in agreement on them. Now go do your performance work.

For a money-centered question, design your talk to lead with the money, because that is what your audience is focused on. Then talk about what is possible and what, if any, pain will result. For example:

■ The goal was to cut the IT hardware budget by 30%. That can be done, and 11 months out of the year all will be well. However, at your seasonal peak, my data predicts horrible response times.

■ I believe you can save $250K by making the following changes with no change to your average response times.

The Real Cost of Bad Performance

When looking at the cost of lost business, it can be useful to look at the lifetime value of a customer, not just the cost of “losing” X transactions.

For example: Imagine a grocery store refuses a return on a bad can of peas. It saved a $1.29 by doing so. However, if that customer buys $200 of groceries a week, 50 weeks a year, and lives near that store for five years, then the lifetime value of that customer is about $50,000.

What is the real cost of losing a customer due to slow response time issues?

Bob Wescott is the author of “The Every Computer Performance Book”.

Image removed.

Hot Topics

The Latest

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...