Selling the Cloud Dream and Turning CDEs Into an Executive No-Brainer

Proving ROI and business value to secure buy-in for cloud development environments

Matt Vollmer

 on September 20th, 2024

9 min read

If you’ve ever ventured the halls – real or virtual – of your company’s sales organization at the end of the quarter, you’ve likely found sales managers unraveling BANT for their latest opportunities. Four ingredients can make or break any deal:

• Budget
• Authority
• Need
• Timing

After many thousands of badge scans and conversations at industry events, and nearly as many onsite customer visits, we’ve identified an interesting trend.

Without question, platform teams and development leads recognize the clear benefits of cloud development environments. However, after their excitement peaks and their tinkering with our open-source platform concludes, reality sets in. They release a visceral sigh when they realize they need to sell the promise of CDEs up the chain of command to capture the necessary budget.

Defeated, these stewards of developer experience and operational excellence wander off, unsure of what to do next. Is it even worth the frustration? Is their folded tradeshow data sheet enough to spark a conversation?

You might have influence or even authority. You absolutely have a need. And the timing? Yesterday, of course. However, one key ingredient is missing: budget.

We partner with platform teams and other technical buyers daily to help them navigate these complicated waters. Here are a few strategies we’ve found effective in advancing internal conversations about cloud development environments.

Understand what matters to your leadership

By framing the conversation around company goals and providing a clear business case, you stand a better chance of turning what could be perceived as a “nice to have” into a “must have.” You often have one swing at this, so let’s make it count.

We’re all technically minded, but it’s important to refrain from immediately diving into the feature-level details, take a step back, and consider what your leadership team cares about most. In the era of doing more with less, but not at the expense of speed and security, it’s a safe bet that your company’s objectives closely align to:

• Revenue growth
• Operational and cost-efficiency
• Risk management
• Innovation and competitiveness

Your role is to connect the dots between these strategic objectives and the outcomes a CDE like Coder offers. While you might get excited about how you can scale Coder on K8s, your leadership team wants to know how that translates into tangible benefits for the business.

Focus on cost and efficiency

One of the first things executives want to know is how a new tool or initiative impacts the bottom line. If you ask them to invest in Coder, you must show how it will save money, improve efficiency, or ideally both.

Starting points to consider:

• Optimizing cloud resources – We discovered that 1 in 3 developers runs a VM 24x7 in most enterprise organizations. Coder maximizes cloud efficiency by eliminating idle VMs and automatically shutting down expensive GPUs when ML jobs finish. This reduces cloud costs and ensures you’re only paying for active resources, helping to better manage budgets without sacrificing performance. Coder also serves as a modern alternative to legacy VDI for developers, commonly eliminating 90% or more of the costs associated with VDI.
• Faster onboarding & reboarding – Coder centralizes and standardizes development environments, making it easier for new hires to get up to speed or for existing developers to swivel chair between projects. What used to take days (or even weeks) to configure locally can now be done in minutes. Less time onboarding means developers contribute to projects faster, accelerating their time-to-value and improving developer experience.
• Developer productivity – Faster, more reliable environments lead to more productive developers. If leadership can see that an investment in Coder leads to fewer disruptions, reduced ticket queues, consistent GenAI tool deployment, and faster coding feedback cycles, they’ll appreciate the long-term efficiency gains. Plus, productive developers are happy developers, and happy developers typically stick around. Finding, hiring, and onboarding new developers is an expensive endeavor.

Your case becomes much more compelling when you quantify these benefits in terms of dollars saved or hours gained. If you need air support for this, let us know. One of our first steps is to help you craft a detailed value hypothesis because if we can’t help you prove the value, then nothing else matters.

Highlight security and compliance

Security is another high-priority issue for leadership teams. A security breach or non-compliance can result in massive financial penalties, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. For many companies, the cost of mitigating these risks is a primary driver behind new investments.

Key points to address:

• Centralized control and governance – Coder offers a “golden path” by standardizing development environments, ensuring consistent security and compliance by default. Through centralized management, you can enforce access controls, monitor usage, and perform audits, reducing vulnerabilities from decentralized developer environments and improving recovery times in case of an incident.
• Consistent updates and patching – Since Coder manages developer environments in the cloud, updates and security patches can be deployed centrally and consistently. This eliminates the variability that often comes with developers managing their own environments locally, where outdated software and tooling can become vulnerable.
• Reduced attack surface – By minimizing the need for developers to work directly on their local machines, Coder reduces the risk of local data loss or other threats compromising their workstations. In the event of a breach, centralized environments can be audited and isolated more easily than distributed local systems. Coder effectively transforms each developer’s device into a thin client.

By focusing on how Coder minimizes security risks, you’ll help leadership see that it’s not just a productivity tool – it’s a risk management solution.

Align with strategic initiatives

Another important step is to tie Coder’s benefits to any ongoing or planned strategic initiatives within your company. Is your organization undergoing a digital transformation? Is there a push toward remote work? Are local development environments the final boss fight in a broader migration to the cloud?

Show how Coder fits within these broader efforts and helps support key initiatives.

Possible angles to explore:

• Remote work enablement – In a world where remote and hybrid work have become the norm, Coder means that your developers can access consistent, secure environments from anywhere. This aligns with efforts to maintain flexibility while reducing the complexity of managing distributed teams. This is especially true if you lean on contractors who might bring their own devices or need to get up and running quickly before they become frustrated and churn.
• Agile transformation – We get it. Agile has been downgraded to a buzzword, but if your company is focused on becoming more agile, Coder supports faster, iterative development cycles. The ability to spin up and tear down ephemeral environments quickly complements Agile processes, giving teams the flexibility to experiment and innovate faster without the risk of destroying coveted local environments.
• ML operations – Coder enables the migration of ML operations to the cloud by providing access to powerful cloud compute resources like GPUs. This allows teams to run intensive ML workflows in the cloud, reducing reliance on local machines and enabling more scalable processing. With Coder, data scientists can work directly alongside real training data, obviating the need to create and secure local data sets.

By linking Coder to larger, organizational initiatives, you’ll help leadership see it as a strategic investment, not just another tool for developers.

Build a compelling ROI case

Ultimately, most purchasing decisions come down to ROI. If you can demonstrate a clear return on investment, you’re much more likely to get the green light. We can help you use hard data and real-world examples wherever possible.

Here’s how to build a strong ROI case for Coder:

• Calculate time savings – Estimate how much time your team spends setting up environments, dealing with inconsistencies, and troubleshooting local issues. Compare that to the time saved with ready-to-use cloud development environments.
• Factor in reduced downtime – How often are your developers delayed because of environment issues, dependency conflicts, or other disruptions? Reduced downtime directly impacts productivity, which translates to faster project completion.
• Quantify infrastructure savings – Calculate the savings from optimizing cloud resources with Coder. By shutting down idle VMs, automatically turning off GPUs when jobs are complete, and preventing unnecessary resource usage, Coder helps you reduce cloud costs.
• Leverage customer success stories – Many companies that have adopted Coder report significant gains in both productivity and security. Share these case studies with leadership to show that others in your industry have seen measurable benefits.

Providing a clear, numbers-driven argument can be the key to unlocking the budget for Coder. We’ve found that conservative value hypotheses are a powerful strategy for advancing the conversation around CDEs. Even if we cut those projections in half (and in half again), they still deliver a compelling business case that is hard to dismiss.

Make it about the business

When it comes to winning executive buy-in for a CDE, it’s all about making the case in terms of business value. Developers and engineers naturally focus on the technical side of things, but leadership is more interested in how a tool will impact efficiency, security, and the company’s bottom line.

By tying Coder’s benefits to organizational goals like cost savings, risk reduction, and strategic initiatives, you’ll be better positioned to secure the support you need. Approach the conversation from their perspective, show measurable benefits, and frame Coder as a critical piece of the bigger picture.

Next steps: Prepare your case, gather your data, and let us help you present Coder as a business solution your company needs.