Why would I buy Nintex?

In my blog post ECM Governance - Post 5, I mentioned that I should post about Nintex and how to determine an ROI for the purchase; I bet anyone who knows me never thought I would get a post out this soon...

So, first things first, lets talk about Nintex. 

First, I want to point out that I do lead a large SharePoint practice in Western Canada and we are a Nintex Platinum partner, but that said, I am not driven by sales here, I am driven by a piece of software that can make your life and SharePoint solution better.

Nintex is a company, not a product, in reality Nintex offers several products, but when SharePoint people (like me) talk about "Nintex" they are referring to two products (Workflow and Forms) that are often bundled together as a BPM solution for SharePoint.  These are the products I am going to examine and hopefully explain how you can gain value and save money in their use.

What does Nintex do that SharePoint doesn't?

First Workflow...

Now this is a question I get a lot, while the answer was simple, it has recently changed.  I used to say that Nintex doesn't do anything you can't already do with SharePoint, but now I have to say it doesn't do a lot more, but it has some additional functionality when it comes to integration.  So now you are saying, if it doesn't add much, why would I buy it?  Well that answer is simple, while SharePoint offers extensive workflow capabilities out of the box, you need to be a developer or employ a developer to leverage it.  Out of the Box (OOTB) SharePoint needs either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio to create anything but the basic workflows in the platform, while the workflow development tools are there, unless you know C# I don't see you creating workflows anytime soon.

Nintex changes all that, it takes what is a programming interface in SharePoint and makes it a graphical interface, then it adds in all the parts that take a lot of effort to program, like auditing, tracking and performance monitoring and throws them in.  The first advantage this gives is that it allows developers to mentor power users in the creation and maintenance of their own workflows (though this still takes a lot of time and effort because it still follows programming logic).  It also allows your developers to reduce the time to create a workflows by a factor of three (from my experience) and finally, everyone can see the workflow and each step as it executes, tracking the time for each step, the decisions made and auditing each step in real time.

Then Forms...

Until recently I would answer that forms provide a nicer interface than the Microsoft tools (InfoPath)and an easier way to brand your forms consistently, but since Microsoft announced the deprecation of InfoPath, Nintex Forms no longer has a Microsoft equivalent to compare, making it and other third party tools a requirement if you want to customize the form user experience.

Ok, so how can we calculate an ROI?

Now I am going to simplify the math I am using, I will first go through my basic Math assumptions and rough estimates (over estimated) cost for Nintex (Forms and Workflow), then you can see where the break even should be.

Assumptions

• Nintex Cost $15000 USD per Web Front End (WFE) = C
• You have two WFE Servers (for load balancing and redundancy) = S
• The average C# workflow will cost $10000 (from my experience it is usually more) to develop = W
• Nintex Reduces your development by a factor of 2 (as mentioned above, my development team has typically realized a factor of 3) = f
• We will not account for the value added by Forms or by Power Users who learn to develop workflows.

The Formula

Where X = Number of Workflows to Breakeven

XW = CS + (XW/f)
10000X = 30000 + 5000X
5000X = 30000
X = 6

The teacher always said, Show your work, lol.  Now realize by over estimating the cost Nintex, underestimating the cost of a C# workflow and under estimating the factor of improvement, we achieve a worst case scenario or 6 business processes before you begin saving money, the reality is most of my clients realize it between three and four workflows created.  I guess the question to you is, how many workflows do you have that could be automated and is there any advantage to them being automated?

If you want to find out more about Nintex, you can go to their website:  http://en-us.nintex.com/

If you want to follow me on twitter I am @DavidRMcMillan or @DevFactoPortals, feedback is always appreciated, good, bad or indifferent.