When implementing a large system in a large organization, I always figure 5 to 10x for the cost of implementation and support over the cost of s/w acquisition…and this doesn’t include ongoing maintenance costs.

For example (fairly realistic), SAP licenses might cost $40M but the real cost of implementation is >$200M (more like $250M).

For SharePoint, the infrastructure and licensing may cost $250K, but you’ll probably spend well over $1M if you implement any significant enterprise level apps. Plus, it’s hard to keep track of the costs associated by the end users building their departmental solutions in SharePoint, so you’ll probably never know the actual cost.

However, in the end, I believe there is plenty of ROI to be gained by replacing many other systems and “SharePoint-tizing” business processes.

Short repsonse…needs several beers for more details…

So, basically we’re talking $325 a month for 20 users. Seems like a good deal and not so difficult to have positive ROI.

I have been wanting to write up a series of good posts on this with a number of example scenarios. Perhaps I will re-prioritize and see if I can get something out soon (or perhaps early next year).

From Hosters (Examples: Rackspace, FPWeb, etc) to more SaaS based models like SharePoint Online there are a number of alternative hosted models that can be used.

The pricing can get really complicated around licensing then too if you are SPLA and begin getting into cloud based services (like provisioning Amazon EC2 instances) and a SaaS service of your own.

Nice catch John!