Business Value White Paper, sponsored by IBM

Understanding theBusiness Value of
IBM WebSphere Liberty
Arnal Dayaratna

Research Vice President,
Software Development, IDC

Megan Szurley

Senior Research Analyst,
Business Value Strategy Practice, IDC|

November 2023

Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Table of Contents

CLICK ANY HEADING TO NAVIGATEDIRECTLY TO THAT PAGE.

Business Value Highlights . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 3Executive Summary .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 3Developer Benefits . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 3Business Productivity Benefits .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 4Application Performance Benefits . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 4Reduced Costs .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 5Sustainability Benefits . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 5

Situation Overview .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 6Liberty. . . . . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 7The Business Value of Liberty. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 7Study Firmographics. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 7The Choice and Use of Liberty .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 8

Business Value and Quantified Benefits.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 9Developer Benefits . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 11
Enhanced Productivity. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 11
Increased Developer Satisfaction .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 15
Augmented DevSecOps Capabilities . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .16

Staff Benefits .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 16
Application Performance Benefits . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .19Business Enablement Benefits .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 21
IT Cost Savings Benefits. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 23
ROI Summary . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 25

Challenges/Opportunities .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 27
Challenges. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 27
Opportunities. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 27

Conclusion .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 28
Appendix 1: Methodology. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 29
Appendix 2: Supplemental Data.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 30
About the IDC Analysts . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 32

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Business Value Highlights
Click each highlight below to navigate to related content within this document.

328%

11.8 months

21%

40%

three-year ROI
greater developer
satisfaction

to payback investment

31%

more productive
development teams

more applications
released per year

Executive Summary
Cloud-native development, or development that is optimized for the cloud, delivers
a multitude of benefits to developers, development teams, and organizations.
This optimization brings the automation of the cloud to applications and their associateddevelopment stacks. For example, cloud-native development stacks are exemplary of
attributes of cloud infrastructures such as auto-scaling, high availability, and self-service
provisioning. In addition, the support of cloud-native applications for microservices,
containers, container orchestration frameworks, and DevOps processes increases
development-related automation.

According to IDC research, organizations that use IBM WebSphere
Liberty (Liberty), a cloud-native Java application server, have realized
the following benefits:

Developer Benefits• Enhanced productivity:
The development-related automation specific to Liberty empowers developers to push code
to production faster, thereby leading to faster release cycles and more rapid identification
and remediation of development-related issues. With Liberty, developers can create
and iterate on digital solutions more rapidly as a result of developer-friendly features andfunctionality such as fast start-up times, streamlined configuration, support for integrations

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Table of Contents3

Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

with DevOps technologies, and an expansive ecosystem of extensions. These featurescollectively increase developer productivity and empower developers to enhancethe digital solutions they build. Developers can perform more work in less time, which
accelerates the execution of an organization’s digital transformation initiatives.
• Increased developer satisfaction:
Liberty amplifies developer productivity by allowing developers to spend more time working
on higher-value development tasks such as conceptualizing and architecting applications.
Moreover, Liberty provides opportunities for organizations to upskill developers on
cutting-edge technologies, such as containers, Kubernetes, microservices, API gateways,
and service mesh technologies. This upskilling of developers enhances developer
satisfaction and lowers attrition because developers feel that they are augmenting theirskill sets and keeping pace with developments in the industry.
• Augmented DevSecOps capabilities:
Cloud-native development platforms augment the security of digital solutions due to themicroservices architecture of cloud-native applications. The architecture mitigates against
the proliferation of security threats and breaches throughout an application. Developers
can leverage Kubernetes to swiftly deprovision containers suspected of having a security
vulnerability, thereby accelerating the resolution of security incidents as they arise.
In addition, cloud-native development platforms integrate with cloud-native security
solutions that specialize in the identification and remediation of container-native security
considerations.

Business Productivity Benefits:• Liberty’s support for cloud-native development, along with its ability to accelerate developer
velocity and enhance developer agility, enables organizations to deliver innovation fasterthan they typically can when using other application servers. This accelerated innovation
strengthens the ability of organizations to update digital solutions in response to relevantchanges in the business and regulatory landscape. Consequently, organizations canremain competitive by delivering cutting-edge functionality that responds to the changing
needs of their customers.

Application Performance Benefits:• Liberty enhances application performance because its lightweight architecture translates
into faster start-up times, reduced memory consumption, low latency, and high application
throughput. In addition, the platform’s dynamic resource allocation capabilities andself-healing qualities increase application resiliency and availability.

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4Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Reduced Costs:• Organizations that use Liberty reported significant cost savings derived from reduced
licensing and infrastructure-specific costs, such expenses related to cores, power andcooling, and colocation. Given Liberty’s lightweight architecture, organizations use
fewer cores to run the same workloads compared with other Java application servers.
In addition, Liberty enhances the operational efficiency of infrastructure management
due to the increased agility specific to provisioning and deprovisioning containers,
enabling organizations to optimize the use of hardware for their fleets of applications.
As a result, organizations can run more workloads with fewer infrastructure resources
and correspondingly save on infrastructure, licensing, and labor costs.

Sustainability Benefits:• The reduced infrastructure costs related to the diminished use of cores, power, cooling,
and colocation means that Liberty positions organizations for enhanced sustainability
practices. As sustainability continues to increase in priority amongst business and technology
leaders, adoption of sustainable software and practices will be critical. The combinationof Liberty’s lightweight architecture and dynamic resource allocation allows organizations
to take advantage of fewer resources while still enhancing application performance andsaving costs.

IDC conducted research that included a series of in-depth interviews with organizations
using Liberty. The research examined the business value specific to the development
and operational management of cloud-native applications. In addition to thebenefits enumerated above, key findings showed that the use of Liberty results inenhanced application portability, granular application scalability, and improved resource
consumption.

IDC calculates that these interviewed IBM customers will achieve
benefits that amount to $28,000 or ~17% of a developer’s salaryfor every developer in an organization. This will:• Optimize the performance of application development teams, leading to more quality
applications, features, and updates released to end users and customers

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5Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty• Enable IT teams to deliver more value by reducing routine operational work,
freeing up time for high-value IT projects and more effectively serving theneeds of developers and development teams• Minimize the unavailability of applications by reducing the frequency andduration of unplanned downtime events• Improve business performance by optimizing analytics and other data-related
business transactions

Situation Overview
Recently, organizations have increased the attention paid to developers
because developers can influence the conceptualization and vision of digitaltransformation initiatives. While developers were once responsible primarily
for creating code, they now enjoy a seat at the table when it comes to developing
digital transformation strategies. As a result, developers can now create digitalsolutions and conceive designs for solutions in collaboration with customers
and key stakeholders. Data from IDC’s Developer View, a global survey of
2,500 developers, indicates that developers influence approximately 66%
of IT spending in a range of areas, including developer tools, cloud adoption,legacy application modernization, and the implementation of AI and ML.
The increased importance of developers has spawned in-depth research on
the drivers of their satisfaction and the salient attributes of developer tools andplatforms that contribute to their adoption. IDC developer research has shownthat the attributes of developer tools such as automation, self-service provisioning,collaboration functionality, and rich user experience were key contributors todeveloper happiness and, by extension, their decision to adopt select developer
tools and platforms. IDC notes that IBM WebSphere Liberty, a lightweightJava application server that specializes in cloud-native applications andworkloads, features a multitude of attributes of developer tools that are desiredby contemporary developers, such as its acceleration of developer velocity,
amplification of developer productivity and enablement of developer satisfaction.
In addition, the research presented here illustrates how Liberty, as a cloud-native
development platform, augments application performance, reduces costs,
enhances innovation, reduces time to market, increases customer satisfaction
and bolsters application security.

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The benefits ofLiberty include
accelerated
developer velocity,
increased developer
agility, enhanced
application
portability,
granular application
scalability,
improved resource
consumption, andfaster innovation.

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Liberty
IBM WebSphere Application Server and Liberty are Java application servers that hostJava applications. Liberty differs from traditional J2EE Application Servers because it
specializes in cloud-native applications that are optimized for deployment in public clouds,
such as the IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services.
Liberty supports microservices architectures characterized by a modular approach toapplication development and hosting. One important benefit of Liberty’s support for
microservices architectures is its reduced application footprint in comparison to traditional
J2EE application servers. The reduced application footprint enables faster start-up times
and reduced start-up memory consumption for the applications it runs, thereby rendering
it optimal for applications that prioritize efficient resource consumption. Other important
attributes of Liberty include its support for containerization, agile development practices,
and Java EE/Jakarta EE and MicroProfile specifications.
Liberty’s specialization in cloud-native applications means that it supports development
practices that leverage microservices, containers, container orchestration frameworks,
application programming interfaces (APIs), and DevOps practices such as continuous
integration and continuous delivery. More broadly, Liberty is optimized for applications
that are characterized by frequent deployments or updates and the rapid provisioningof infrastructure-centric resources such as containers. As a lightweight Java runtime
environment, Liberty’s ability to optimize resource consumption also enables customers
to effectively manage costs associated with Java deployments.

The Business Value of Liberty
Study Firmographics
IDC conducted research that explored the value organizations achieved and the benefits
they realized by using Liberty to support their enterprise applications. The research
included interviews with 10 organizations that use the platform and have experience andknowledge about the benefits and costs associated with using it. During the interviews,
companies were asked various quantitative and qualitative questions about the impactof Liberty on their IT operations, applications, core businesses, and costs.
Table 1 (next page) presents the study firmographics. The organizations that IDC
interviewed had an average base of 85,660 employees and total average annual revenueof $32 billion. This workforce was supported by 8,846 IT staff supporting 3,120 businessBusiness Value White Paper, sponsored by IBM
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7

Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

applications. In terms of geographic distribution, seven companies were based in the
United States, with the remainder in Australia, India, and Spain. A wide variety ofvertical markets was represented, including healthcare, financial services, insurance,
construction, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical.

TABLE 1

Firmographics of Interviewed Organizations
Average

MedianRange

Number of employees

85,66055,000600 to 275,000

Number of IT staff

8,846

3,400

16 to 40,000

Total number of businessapplications

3,120

675

6 to 20,000

Annual revenue

$32B

$5B

$300M to $95B

Countries

United States (7), Australia, India, Spain

Industries

Healthcare (3), financial services (2), insurance (2), construction,
manufacturing, pharmaceuticaln = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

The Choice and Use of Liberty
The organizations that IDC interviewed described typical usage patterns for Liberty.
They also discussed their rationale for choosing it as a cost-effective way to continuously
deliver secure, cloud-native applications that better meet customer demand.
Study participants expanded on their decision criteria, citing that Liberty offered a usefulway to modernize their entire technology stack while providing better cloud-based
virtualization. They appreciated that the platform fostered easier migration to the useof containers and noted IBM’s particular expertise in vulnerability assessment.

Study participants further commented on these benefits:
Stack modernization, manufacturing organization:“In selecting Liberty, my organization was looking to take advantage of the cloud andspeed up development, testing, and deployment. We pretty much wanted to modernize
our entire technology stack.”

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Table of Contents8Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Better virtualization and application throughout, pharmaceutical organization:“We selected Liberty based on the overall advanced technology. Some of the main factorsthat led to this decision were development, coding, and the ability to be more efficient.
My organization also wanted to have cloud-based infrastructure, which is the trend acrossthe board in the industry. We needed better virtualization because we are a global
company and greater speed, which has allowed for a higher throughput of things being
put in applications.”
IBM vulnerability support, insurance organization:“Liberty would give my organization portability. We also were looking to rely on experts
for vulnerability issues or Log4J remediation that needs to happen. We knew we
could always rely on a vendor like IBM, so there is some level of comfort.”
Easier migration, financial services organization:“My organization studied several alternatives to Liberty. We selected Liberty because
the migration from traditional WebSphere into Liberty was a lot easier than with any of
the other alternatives. It would make that migration as fast as possible because Liberty
was very compatible with what we already have. I wouldn’t say easy, but it was lesscomplicated to be able to transition to containers using Liberty with some early proof
concepts. We also found it was quite efficient in terms of compute power.”

Business Value andQuantified Benefits
IDC’s Business Value research illustrates how study participants use Liberty to continuously
deliver secure, cloud-native applications that better meet customer demand. Liberty enables
IT teams to deliver more value by optimizing application development and tasks, leading
to an increased number and quality of applications, features, and updates released to end
users and customers. Liberty also increases the productivity of various IT teams, including
help desk and security teams, by reducing routine operational tasks, freeing up time tospend on high-value IT projects. In addition, companies minimized the costs and risks
associated with application downtime by reducing the frequency and duration of unplanned
disruptions. Liberty also helps these companies improve their overall business performanceby speeding up analytical processes and other business-critical transactions and operations.
Combined, these benefits generate positive business value in terms of operations andfinancial results.

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Study participants commented on these benefits:
Reduced time to market, insurance organization:“One of the most significant benefits of Liberty is the total time to market; our release
cycles have reduced by 30%. The second is that we have modernized our entire landscape.
On the cloud, we have redeployed 20% of our monolithic applications into microservices
using Liberty. The performance improvement has been at least a 70%–80% reductionin the response time of my applications.”
Secure platform with strong toolset, construction organization:“In selecting Liberty, we found that it provided us with a subset of tools that allowed us tolive within the cloud but also integrate with other systems in the cloud. Overall, it provided
a platform that was intrinsically secure simply out of the box, so we didn’t have to develop
security around it. It allowed us to develop portable apps, which is common within Java
space. And it allowed us to easily scale.”
Cost, time, and effort savings, healthcare organization:“The most significant benefit is what we get back, the savings in cost, time, effort, all of
those things. For example, to spin up a server for what we were doing in the old WebSphereapplication developer studio took 3–5 minutes. Now it’s taking anywhere from 45–90
seconds. We’re getting tremendous ROI there.”
Agility and speed, pharmaceutical organization:“The speed is the benefit from the programming/development side of the coin, as well as thatthe overhead to support it is much more efficient. Just to be able to perform in a more agile
environment, our methodology gives a significant cost savings from a work standpoint.”
Increased customer satisfaction, financial services organization:“The ability for reuse is the most significant benefit. You’re creating a single connection
between application and application, and if a similar connection is required, you’re able toreuse it. It also enables us to adapt functionality faster and allows us to deliver to ourclients at a higher pace because of the flexibility the tool provides and because of the reuse.
The business is getting what it needs and getting the outcomes faster for the clients thanpreviously. These days, ideally, everyone wants things faster, and the clients are happierwhen they get what they need.”
Figure 1 (next page) presents IDC’s calculations of cumulative customer benefits after the
adoption of Liberty. The average annual benefits specific to Liberty are broken down
into the four major contributing categories of Developer Benefits, Staff Benefits, Business
Productivity Benefits, and IT Cost Savings, as shown below. Assuming that a developer’s
average salary is roughly $168,000, the business value of Liberty amounts to $28,000
or ~17% of a developer’s salary for every developer in an organization.

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FIGURE 1

Average Annual Benefits per Organization($ per organization)

Average annual benefits per organization: $15.6 million$712,674$630,070$2,435,714$11,795,139

Developer
Benefits

Staff
Benefits

Business Productivity
Benefits

IT CostSavingsn = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
For an accessible version of the data in this figure, see Figure 1 Supplemental Data in Appendix 2.

Developer Benefits
Enhanced Productivity
One of the salient benefits of Liberty is its ability to accelerate developer productivity
because of its foregrounding of microservices to architect applications. Microservices
enable discrete development teams to work in parallel by empowering them to work
on discrete application functionalities at the same time; one development team does
not have to wait for another team to complete work or obtain approval from a centralized
governance authority. Moreover, the ability of container orchestration technologies,
such as Kubernetes, to manage the scaling of container clusters enhances developmentrelated automation by managing the provisioning, deprovisioning, scaling, and self-healingof containers and their corresponding applications.

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IDC’s examination of the business value of Liberty illustrated its ability to enhancedeveloper productivity. The increased automation specific to the Liberty platform empowers
developers to ship code faster, as illustrated below.
Study participants reported that Liberty resulted in substantial reductions in application
development and deployment time in addition to instant provisioning functionality as well as
streamlined collaboration between developers.

Study participants elaborated on these benefits:
Reduction in application development and deployment time, healthcare organization:“If you want to develop an application and deploy it in the old way, [it takes] maybe twomonths to go through all the way from development to production. Now, it’s just maybe twodays with Liberty, provided everything is working and all the configuration management
and billings criteria are there.”
Instant provisioning, insurance organization:“One of the most significant benefits for the development team is the instant provisioningthat Liberty provides. My organization has also improved development time and application
performance.”
Instant application update feedback, healthcare organization:“In the traditional WebSphere, if you make a change to Java, you have to restart the server,which could take anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes. Liberty offers some new tooling that canessentially update the application server without restarting it. So, I could change one line ofcode in the old stack and not be able to get feedback on it for one hour, and now, I can get
feedback instantly.”
Strong application deployment functionality, healthcare organization:“Liberty achieved our migration costs goals and gives us application developer flexibility.
The traditional way is tough because the developer has to wait for the administrator to get
his application deployed. Liberty brings application deployment into the CI/CD pipeline.
The value of Liberty is its function set.”Less complex application ecosystem, insurance organization:“Instead of building large monolith applications, you have a simpler and less complex
application ecosystem because you are separating monolith to microservices architecture.
Liberty gives us the ability to manage specific service instances and not impact the entire
application ecosystem. We can now target specific updates to a specific service at any
point in time. Also, rolling updates, we could not do that with network deployment type ofarchitecture. With Liberty, we can do rolling updates throughout the day.”
DevSecOps approach to application development and deployment,
healthcare organization:“The most significant benefit of IBM WebSphere Liberty is definitely better developer ability.

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Liberty gives our developers a full DevSecOps approach. It’s a helpful tool for them todevelop and deploy quickly. The applications will roll out through the CI/CD pipeline into ourinfrastructure.”
To get a complete picture of post-adoption experiences with Liberty, IDC comprehensively
evaluated its impacts beginning with development teams. In supporting migration to
cloud-native development, the platform substantially reduced the complexity of creating,testing, and deploying applications. As a result, application teams are significantly
more agile. This, in turn, helps them release more applications, features, and updates.
Liberty is a flexible solution for developing and deploying a variety of applications.
The interviewed companies reported that their application management teams took fulladvantage of the automation that Liberty provided to manage and maintain workloads.
This functionality helped them support their application environment with greater efficiency.
Table 2 quantifies these benefits. After adoption, interviewed companies saw a 31%
productivity boost for their development teams. This improvement represents the equivalentof adding 170 full-time employees (FTEs) and resulted in an annual productivity-based
business value of $16,985,000 for each organization.

TABLE 2Development Team Productivity Gain
BeforeLibertyWith
Liberty

Difference

Benefit

Equivalent productivity level(FTEs)

553.0

722.9

169.9

31%

Value of staff time per year

$55.3M$72.3M$17.0M31%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

The interviewed organizations stated that Liberty has improved the efficiency of theirdevelopment teams across several key functional areas. As one study participant noted:“Application development and testing time has been drastically reduced with Liberty.
As a result, people aren’t waiting around; they can just move on to the next thing in thepipeline. In our traditional stack, deploying an application might take one hour, whereas
with Liberty, it takes one minute, so it’s orders of magnitude faster. And that’s just for
deployment.”

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

IDC evaluated these benefits by identifying and measuring key application design
key performance indicators (KPIs). As shown in Figure 2, after adopting Liberty,
the greatest efficiency improvements were seen in application development/coding(37%), application integration (36%), and application design (31%).

FIGURE 2

Application Delivery KPIs(% more efficient)

37%

Application development/coding. .  .  .  .  .  .  .

36%

Application integration. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

31%

Application design .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

24%

Application testing .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Application deployment .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

21%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

IDC then drilled down further on specific benefits for development teams. The IBM
platform enabled interviewed companies to release applications on a rolling basis.
They were no longer tied to large releases, and they did not need to provision appropriate
resources. As one study participant working in the insurance sector noted:“The development time has reduced a bit with Liberty because developers are notdeveloping or fixing complex applications. Liberty has given my organization the ability totarget a specific service within the ecosystem. The frequency of release updates has gone
up because we are able to do deployment whenever the feature or capability is ready,instead of targeting a large release and lining up resources for production or regression
tests. The frequency of releases has gone up 20%–30% because of the nature of Liberty
and the containers and the cloudlike experience. Every week you could have a deployment.”
As shown in Figure 3 (next page), participants experienced substantive improvements
specific to the development of applications as well as the delivery of new features and theimplementation of updates. In terms of applications, participants developed 40% more
new releases annually after deployment. Meanwhile, organizations decreased the averagedevelopment time by 36%. Additional results are presented below for features and updates.

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

FIGURE 3

Liberty’s Impact on Development Activities(% more or quicker)■ Number of new releases per year

■ Average time to develop
45%
41%

40%
36%

33%
28%

Applications

FeaturesUpdatesn = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
For an accessible version of the data in this figure, see Figure 3 Supplemental Data in Appendix 2.

Increased Developer Satisfaction
Liberty’s ability to accelerate developer velocity and amplify their productivity enables
developers to spend more time on higher value development tasks that contributeto developer satisfaction because of a deeper alignment with their skills and uniquestrengths and capabilities. Moreover, Liberty fosters opportunities to work on cutting-edge
development projects in ways that further increase job satisfaction and reduce attrition
because developers appreciate the acquisition of new skills and capabilities.
IDC calculated that Liberty’s ability to enhance the acquisition of skills on the part ofdevelopers resulted in 21% greater developer career satisfaction and 13% longer developeron-the-job tenure. Commenting on better job satisfaction, one study participant working
in the insurance sector noted: “I would say that because Liberty can be containerized,
all the developers and support folks now have exposure to cloud-like technologies andsupport cloud-like environments, so you have more job satisfaction because you’re now
working on the latest and greatest from a cloud standpoint. I would think our attrition levels
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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

able to retain talent because of the transformation initiatives that we have to use the latest
and greatest technology.” Another participant working for a pharmaceutical organization
said about Liberty: “I would say it’s probably increased tenure because of giving new tools
and up-to-date technologies. People usually jump ship when they’re not learning anything.”

Augmented DevSecOps Capabilities
Liberty is more secure than other J2EE application servers because they integrate security
protocols and scans directly into development processes as part of a broader practiceof DevOps adoption. The deepened integration of automated security analytics improves
the ability of developers to identify security vulnerabilities and expediently remediate
them. Additionally, the use of microservices to develop cloud-native applications limits
the spread of security vulnerabilities due to those applications’ modular architecture.
Moreover, developers can use containers and container orchestration frameworks suchas Kubernetes to automate the deactivation and deprovisioning those containers identified
as having a security vulnerability. Consequently, developers and IT operations staff
can better mitigate security threats and vulnerabilities once they have been identified.

Staff Benefits
In addition to providing positive impacts for development teams, Liberty also helps IT
operators and data analytics teams fulfill their day-to-day tasks and responsibilities
by making their efforts more productive. They appreciated that Liberty decreased coding
time and easily accommodated fluctuations in workloads.

Study participants commented on these benefits:
Better security and analytics, pharmaceutical organization:“Liberty has significantly decreased the coding time. The functionality and some of theanalytics from a maintenance and security perspective are much better. It produces better
statistics. From a development and configuration standpoint, Liberty gives me significant
savings, and from a maintenance and monitoring standpoint, it allows me to get information
quicker, with better analytics.”
Easy IT configuration and use, healthcare organization:“Liberty gives my organization greater simplicity in the handling of workloads throughout
the month because it fluctuates so much. Sometimes we’ll have a low volume, sometimes
a high volume at the end of the month. Compared with other products, Liberty handles
this very well. Liberty is easy to configure and to use from an IT team perspective.
IBM support is more than enough; the library of information to troubleshoot or improve
the product is available with quick and easy access.”

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Strong security and ease of use, healthcare organization:“Liberty is easy to use and has great security. Also, the agility of Liberty as far as adapting
to other programs was huge for us. It has given us the ability to get things out quicker, as
far as our programming needs are concerned, and our applications too. That whole process
was shortened using the product, and the workloads in general were just calmer and not
as spikey throughout the month compared with what we had before.”
Quick resolution of security issues, manufacturing organization:“I appreciate the speed we can get to resolve security issues because of the software
life-cycle process of the Liberty. Say, we get a CVE 10, which is the worst possible security
issue you could have. In traditional WebSphere, it might take IBM three to six months
to issue a fix for that, whereas in Liberty, they can issue the fix in a day or two, and we
can have it rolled out everywhere. Some of these fixes could live for a year on traditional
WebSphere, and now, it’s only hours.”
The interviewed organizations noted how Liberty enabled IT infrastructure teams to support
more applications with greater efficiency. They noted that teams benefited from Liberty’s
task automation and had far fewer incidents to troubleshoot, thereby easing the burdens on
help desk teams. Interviewed organizations estimated that they received 32% fewer IT help
desk calls after adoption.
Table 3 quantifies these benefits. As shown, interviewed companies saw a 13% efficiency
gain in the work that their IT infrastructure teams did. This efficiency gain enabled
13.4 FTEs to spend more time supporting other important business initiatives. As a result,the interviewed organizations achieved an annual efficiency-based business valueof $1,343,445.

TABLE 3IT Infrastructure Team (Non-Developer) Efficiency Gain
BeforeLibertyWith
Liberty

Difference

Benefit

Total FTE count

101.8

88.3

13.4

13%

Value of staff time per year

$10.2M

$8.8M

$1.3M

13%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Study participants also reported that the built-in security functionality of Liberty was a big
advantage for their security teams. If a problem occurred, they appreciated that IBM support
was available to backstop and help resolve incidents with speed. Table 4 quantifies these
impacts. After adoption, interviewed companies experienced a 35% efficiency gain for theirsecurity teams. Importantly, this team needed 15.6 fewer FTEs to secure applications with
Liberty than their previous solution, resulting in an annual efficiency-based business valueof $1,562,956.

TABLE 4

Security Team Efficiency Gain
BeforeLibertyWith
Liberty

Difference

Benefit

Total FTE count

44.2

28.5

15.6

35%

Value of staff time per year

$4.4M

$2.9M

$1.6M

35%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

The teams responsible for data analytics benefited from applications that were run
on Liberty. The applications had less latency, ran reports effectively, and provided
improved analytical results. Table 5 shows these impacts. After adoption, interviewed
companies experienced an 18% productivity gain and the equivalent of adding 8.6 FTEs.
These benefits translated into an annual productivity-based business value of $601,028
for each organization.

TABLE 5

Data Analytics Team Productivity Gain
BeforeLibertyWith
Liberty

Difference

Benefit

Equivalent productivity level(FTEs)

46.8

55.4

8.6

18%

Value of staff time per year

$3.3M

$3.9M

$601,02818%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Application Performance Benefits
Liberty enhances application performance because its lightweight footprint and modular
architecture result in faster startup times for applications, as well as reduced resource
consumption. In addition, its support for microservices and container orchestration
frameworks such as Kubernetes optimizes performance by dynamically allocating resources
to ensure that only those microservices and their associated container-native infrastructures
are deployed as needed. Moreover, Liberty’s support for Kubernetes enhances theautomated scaling of applications and increases application resiliency because of its
self-healing, load-balancing, and automated scheduling and deployment capabilities.
Java applications deployed on Liberty typically experience increased application throughput,
reduced latency, accelerated startup times, reduced resource consumption, and fewer
instances of unplanned disruptions or downtime.
IDC evaluated the impacts of Liberty’s adoption on the use and performance of businesscritical applications that were the foundation of the core business activities of theinterviewed companies. This evaluation was performed with an emphasis on two criticalareas: application downtime and application performance.
According to the study participants, Liberty mitigated the incidence of application
downtime, thereby ensuring high levels of business continuity. In addition, the performancelevels of these business-critical applications were significantly boosted. In particular,
study participants highlighted what they described as Liberty’s lightweight application
management capability enabling them to load what is required on the fly. They pointed out
the advantages of Liberty’s better self-healing capabilities with fewer unplanned outages
than what they experienced with previous approaches. By avoiding the chain of one
application affecting others, the severity of incidents was minimized.

Study participants made these comments:
Lightweight application management, healthcare organization:“Performance is really good for Liberty. It is improved quite a bit compared with the legacy by
about 60%–80%. It is lightweight, so it’s not unnecessarily loading any of those applications;
it only loads what is required on the fly.”
Better self-healing capabilities and fewer unplanned outages,
manufacturing organization:“We have fewer unplanned outages with Liberty. My organization takes advantage of thecloud platform, which offers scalability features, better availability, and self-healing
in the case of our containerization, because in the old day, when something went wrong,
we needed human intervention. Now, the software can recover from a lot of problems,and no human needs to be called at 3:00 a.m. Both time to detect and time to resolve
outages are reduced. Another benefit is that, in the past, problems might go unnoticed
for a long period of time, but now, with Liberty, we benefit from the software-driven stuff
approach to finding problems.”

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Containers decrease unplanned downtime, financial services organization:“I know that downtimes have decreased. This is mostly related to the older version of things,
where if one application in a server of 50 applications went nuts and began eating up
all the resources, that would impact all the other applications. The severity in the past
was greater because one application could potentially affect many other applications.
In the current model of containers from Liberty, each application is running its own instanceof Liberty, so that cannot happen anymore. If one application goes down, it’s not taking
any other application with it. It might get stuck, it might restart, but the problem is a lot
more contained.”
Figure 4 provides IDC’s calculations for improvements in application downtime. As shown,
after adopting Liberty, the number of monthly unplanned downtime incidents decreased
by 34%. In addition, when incidents occurred, they were resolved faster, with the averagetime to resolve decreased by 18%.

FIGURE 4

Application Downtime KPIs(% less)

Number of unplanned downtime
incidents per month. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Average time to resolve
unplanned downtime .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

34%
18%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

According to study participants, their development teams were more agile with Liberty.
As a result, they could work to improve their applications, output over time with appropriate
feedback from business units. Ultimately, this meant that better applications could be
pushed out to business end users. The interviewed organizations also realized significant
improvements in application performance. This has a significant impact on the businessvalue chain, such as better analytics processing that benefits end users and fosters
improved business decision making.
After the adoption of Liberty, the time organizations needed to execute business
transactions reduced significantly (39%), as shown in Figure 5 (next page). In addition,
the time needed to run analytical queries and application latency reduced by 34%,
and application latency was reduced by 32%.

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FIGURE 5

Application Performance KPIs(% less)

Time to execute business
transactions. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

39%
34%

Time to run analytical queries. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

32%

Application latency. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Time to run batch processes.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

23%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

Business Enablement Benefits
Liberty augments the ability of businesses to respond to the changing needs of its
customers by facilitating the rapid delivery of product enhancements and innovation.
For example, Liberty reduces the time to market for digital solutions by empoweringdeveloper teams to work in parallel on discrete microservices. The platform’s support
for developers to work in parallel also amplifies the cadence of innovation and improves
customer satisfaction by accelerating and streamlining the delivery of new featuresand functionality to end users. Additionally, the platform’s acceleration of developer
velocity enables organizations to respond to changes in the business landscape fasterby means of either new digital products or solutions, or updates to existing ones.
Study participants explained that they have enabled more efficient business operations byproviding line-of-business employees with higher-performing and better-quality applications.
With study participants running core enterprise applications on a daily basis, optimal
application performance ensured that their employees had the tools to deliver maximum
value within their organizations. In addition, the timely delivery of new applications andfeatures had measurable impacts on employees’ job effectiveness.
Study participants reported that they were able to optimize key aspects of their businessby getting better insights into customer behavior and improving their agility in meetingcustomer needs. They also noted that Liberty helped them better adapt to business growthand go to market faster.

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Study participants elaborated on these benefits:
Deeper customer and business insight, construction organization:“The platforms that we’ve developed, some of them are customer centric, and some areinternal. Basically, it provides the internal business with more insight into our customers,
and their ability to log in and provide machine data for us allows us to be more reactive
to that customer information and pool information from our ERP and our consolidated datathat we use the WebSphere for to develop some of these toolsets and to make smarter
decisions within the business from a strategic and financial perspective: budget planning,
spending, revenue, stuff like that.”
Agility to meet client needs, pharmaceutical organization:“My organization has gained agility and the ability to quickly modify and change things
without too much need to code. It’s more instant. That helps, especially for front facing tocustomers or client’s things; they can be changed more quickly on the fly.”
Better business agility, financial service organization:“My business has gained the ability to enable their workflows in a more effective mannerand for technology to provide what they need faster so they can service clients. We haverecognized a lot more process efficiency as a result because they’re getting what theyneed from tying systems together that normally couldn’t be tied together. One use case:
if we can provide a single pane of glass in the call center, and the call center can havea mashup of applications on their screen that can allow them to have not many clicks,
which reduces the cycle time for the phone calls, and seconds per call are getting shaved
off. That helps us ensure that we made our service-level agreements, but also, anybody
in our call center call, if they can get off a minute earlier because of the efficiency of thecall center rep, it makes people happier from a client satisfaction perspective.”
Responsiveness to business growth needs, healthcare organization:“Liberty is a consistent product to help our business move as we add more to it; it doesn’ttake a lot to add to it, and it’s very responsive to the requests that are being made as
we grow.”
Ability to go to market quicker, insurance organization:“A big benefit is that we can go to market quicker because Liberty is lightweight.
My organization is able to develop solutions and capabilities faster.”
IDC then examined the financial impacts resulting from business enablement.
The interviewed organizations directly correlated the use of Liberty to higher annual revenue.
These gains were based on better supporting the needs of their customers and being
more agile in responding to market demands, as previously described. In fact, interviewed
organizations stated they were 28% faster going to market with services and products
as a result of using Liberty.

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IDC quantified business enablement improvements. Table 6 shows significant revenue gains
through business enablement, with each organization achieving an average of $2,233,333
more in revenue. IDC’s financial model applies a 15% operating margin assumption, resulting
in net revenue gains of an average of $335,000 per interviewed organization.

TABLE 6

Business Enablement — Higher Revenue
Per Organization

Per Developer

Total additional gross revenue per year

$2.2M

$4,039Assumed operating margin

15%

15%

Total additional net revenue per year —IDC model$335,000$606

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

IT Cost Savings Benefits
The final area that IDC examined was the overall cost-effectiveness of the Liberty platform.
Cost savings constitutes one of the key benefits of Liberty’s light footprint and translates
into reduced spending on infrastructure and application hosting costs. Organizations
that use Liberty only pay for containers that applications provision and use as they scale.
Moreover, additional cost savings are attributable to the increased density of containers
on bare metal infrastructure and the corresponding ability to store more applications
on one server. Furthermore, container-native applications tend to have lower start-up times
than VM-based applications, leading to additional cost savings for customers.

The study participants elaborated on IT cost-saving benefits:
Hardware cost savings, financial organization:“The main benefit my organization has achieved with Liberty is cost efficiency. One of thefirst countries in my organization to move to Liberty and containers was the German
branch. They are one of the smallest in my company, and that move saved them around€200,000 a year in hardware and infrastructure costs. So you can see that we spent
too much on hardware and infrastructure.”
The ability to run more applications with less infrastructure, healthcare organization:“From a business perspective, a benefit is the agility and also the financial perspective.

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Liberty saves a lot of money for us. We don’t want to unnecessarily load all the components
to dispense multiple servers to just run a simple application. Liberty is lightweight and brings
the flexibility for application and from the infrastructure end, so we run more applications
with less workloads.”
Cost efficiency from the container-based approach, financial organization:“The main advantage we found is greater infrastructure efficiency by moving the workloads
to Liberty. We have been able to reduce infrastructure by 50%. It was a huge change fromtraditional servers. We used to have one big server with maybe 250 applications jammedin there. We moved to a container-based approach where each application has its own
instance of the server, and they are all independent, and that approach led us to efficiency
in infrastructure. Now, we can match the infrastructure to what each application needs,
and that led to the reduction. And in this stage of the appropriate architecture, closing into
the end of life, the decommissioning of applications is a lot easier.”
Significant reduction in cores, healthcare organization:“My company is seeing a significant ability to reduce the number of cores required to run
workloads, thanks to Liberty. Specifically, this is quantified at the level of 25%–35% lesscores being used to run the same workloads as our previous infrastructure.”
Organizations that use Liberty reported significant cost savings derived from reduced
licensing and infrastructure-specific costs, such as cores, power and cooling, and colocation
expenses. The lightweight architecture of Liberty means that organizations can use fewer
cores to run the same workloads compared to other Java application servers.
In addition, Liberty enhances the operational efficiency of infrastructure management due
to the increased agility specific to the provisioning and deprovisioning of containers.
Due to this operational efficiency, organizations optimize the use of hardware for their fleetsof applications. As a result, organizations can run more workloads with fewer infrastructure
resources and correspondingly save on infrastructure, licensing, and labor costs.

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Figure 6 summarizes IDC’s calculations on cost savings, showing total annual benefits of$907,301. Note that these calculations include savings due to licensing and core facilities
infrastructure.

FIGURE 6

IT Cost Reductions($)■ Datacenter■ Licensing

Total reduction:$907,301$98,158$809,143

Annual Cost Savingsn = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
For an accessible version of the data in this figure, see Figure 6 Supplemental Data in Appendix 2.

ROI Summary
Table 7 (next page) presents IDC’s ROI and analysis of the study participants’ use of Liberty.
As shown, IDC projects that these companies will achieve three-year discounted benefits
worth an average of $35,508,800 per organization ($64,211 per developer) throughbetter application performance, IT staff efficiencies, and improved business performance.
These benefits compare with total three-year discounted costs of $8,289,500 per
organization ($14,990 per developer). These levels of benefits and investment costs
are projected to result in an average three-year ROI of 328% and a break-even point ininvestment occurring in 11.8 months.

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TABLE 7

Three-Year ROI Analysis
Per Organization

Per Developer

Discounted benefits$35.5M$64,211

Discounted investment$8.3M$14,990

Net present value (NPV)$27.2M$49,221

ROI

328%

328%

Payback period

11.8 months

11.8 months

Discount factor

12%

12%

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023

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Challenges/Opportunities
Challenges
Perceived Complexity of Kubernetes
One of the challenges specific to the adoption of Liberty is the perception amongdevelopers that Kubernetes is a complex technology that requires specialized training.
Given the centrality of Kubernetes to cloud-native development, this perception has
the potential to deter developers from deepening their competency in cloud-native
development and its attendant practices. Moreover, organizations may be predisposed
to limit the adoption of cloud-native development due to concerns about the availabilityof developer and operator talent that have advanced training in Kubernetes.

Opportunities
Prioritization of Accelerated Developer Velocity
Within the contemporary developer landscape, organizations continue to make developer
velocity a priority. For developers, this means they must ship code faster withoutcompromising quality and security. Business leaders are increasingly aware of how
digitization enables organizations to pivot operations in correlation to rapidly changing
business, IT, and regulatory requirements. As a result, organizations are increasinglyinterested in investing in development platforms that enable accelerated developer
velocity and faster time to market.
Intensification of Legacy Application Modernization and Transformation
The push to modernize legacy applications and conduct transformation initiatives arefactors for adopting Liberty with its support for microservices and modern development
practices such as CI, CD, automated security analytics, and the use of APIs. IDC estimatesthat 50% of applications within the global application estate should be consideredlegacy applications and that the share of those applications that have experienced somedegree of modernization will increase from 65% in 2022 to 76% in 2024 (IDC Developer
View, 2023). These data points underscore the enormity of the universe of legacy
applications as well as the depth of investments made with respect to the modernization ofthese applications. As organizations increase investments in application modernization,
the industry should expect increased investment in platforms such as Liberty that support
microservices, rapid application development, and the increased integration of automation
into development.

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Understanding the Business Value of IBM WebSphere Liberty

Enduring Popularity of JavaIDC data from Developer View 2023 indicates that Java continues to be the world’s mostpopular development language. Of the world’s full-time developer population of 17 million
developers, approximately 14.5 million developers use Java. Java’s enduring versality
across a multitude of development use cases, deployment infrastructures, and form factors
renders it relevant both for mission critical, production-grade applications within large
enterprises and for more experimental, proof of concept applications specific to both
start-ups and their larger counterparts. As organizations deepen their investments in Java,
Liberty’s lightweight architecture and ability to reduce startup memory consumption while
increasing application throughput and reducing latency render it an obvious choice as adevelopment platform, particularly because of its ability to concomitantly increase developer
velocity, agility, productivity, and happiness.

Conclusion
Based on IDC’s quantitative and qualitative research, organizations realized a multitude
of benefits attributed to their use of Liberty. Developer productivity and satisfaction,
application performance, innovation, time to market, and security were areas whereorganizations achieved considerable gains. The improvements organizations have achieved
with Liberty translate to annual benefits of $15.6 million per organization or $28,000
per developer. Liberty’s ability to increase developer productivity and improve application
performance while delivering business benefits and cost savings underscores its value
and competitive differentiation in the landscape of J2EE application servers. As such,
Liberty differentiated itself from other Java application servers because of its ability
to improve developer productivity and job satisifacation as well as streamline the useof complex, cutting-edge technologies such as Kubernetes for Java development.

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Appendix 1: Methodology
IDC’s standard ROI methodology was utilized for this project. This methodology is basedon gathering data from current users of Liberty as the foundation for the model.

Based on interviews with organizations using Liberty, IDC performeda three-step process to calculate the ROI and payback period:
1. Gathered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a
before-and-after assessment of Liberty’s impact. In this study, the benefits included
IT cost reductions and avoidances, staff time savings, productivity benefits,
and revenue gains.
2. Created a complete investment (three-year total cost analysis) profile based on theinterviews. Investments go beyond the initial and annual costs of using Liberty
and can include additional costs related to migrations, planning, consulting, and staff
or user training.
3. Calculated the ROI and payback period. IDC conducted a depreciated cash flow analysisof the benefits and investments for the organizations’ use of Liberty over a three-year
period. ROI is the ratio of the net present value and the discounted investment.
The payback period is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment.

IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on several assumptions,which are summarized as follows:• Time values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and overhead)to quantify efficiency and productivity savings. For the purpose of this analysis, IDC has
used assumptions of an average fully loaded salary of $100,000 per year for IT staff
members and an average fully loaded salary of $70,000 per year for non-IT staff members.
IDC assumes that employees work 1,880 hours per year (47 weeks × 40 hours).
• The net present value of the three-year savings is calculated by subtracting the amountthat would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding
a 12% return to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This accounts for both the assumed
cost of money and the assumed rate of return.
• Furthermore, because Liberty requires a deployment period, the full benefits of thesolution are not available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates
the benefits on a monthly basis and then subtracts the deployment time from thefirst-year savings.
Note: All numbers in this document may not be exact due to rounding.

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Appendix 2: Supplemental Data
The tables in this appendix provide an accessible version of the data for the complex figures in this document.
Click “Return to original figure” below the table to get back to the original data figure.

FIGURE 1 SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Average Annual Benefits Per Organization
Per Organization
Developer benefits$11,795,139

Staff benefits$2,435,714

Business productivity benefits$712,674

IT cost savings$630,070

Total$15,573,597

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
Return to original figure

FIGURE 3 SUPPLEMENTAL DATAIBM WebSphere Liberty Impact on Development Activities
Applications

FeaturesUpdatesNumber of new releases per year

40

33

28

Average time to develop

36

45

41

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
Return to original figure

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Appendix 2: Supplemental Data (continued)
FIGURE 6 SUPPLEMENTAL DATAIT Cost Reductions
Annual Cost Savings
Datacenter$98,158

Licensing$809,143

Total$907,301

n = 10; IDC Business Value In-Depth Interviews, May 2023
Return to original figure

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About the IDC Analysts
Arnal Dayaratna

Research Vice President, Software Development, IDC

Dr. Arnal Dayaratna is research vice president, Software Development at IDC.
Arnal focuses on software developer demographics, trends in programming languages
and other application development tools, and the intersection of these development
environments and the many emerging technologies that are enabling and driving
digital transformation. Arnal’s research examines how the changing nature of softwaredevelopment relates to broader trends in the technology landscape.
More about Arnal Dayaratna

Megan Szurley

Senior Research Analyst, Business Value Strategy Practice, IDC
Megan Szurley is a senior research analyst for the Business Value Strategy Practice,responsible for creating custom business value research that determines the ROI and costsavings for enterprise technology products. Megan’s research focuses on the financial andoperational impact of these products for organizations once deployed and in production.
Prior to joining the Business Value Strategy Practice, Megan was a consulting manager
within IDCʼs Custom Solutions division, delivering consultative support across every
stage of the business life cycle: business planning and budgeting, sales and marketing,and performance measurement. In her position, Megan partners with IDC analyst teams to
support deliverables that focus on thought leadership, business value, custom analytics,
buyer behavior, and content marketing. These customized deliverables are often derived
from primary research and yield content marketing, market models, and customer insights.
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