Today we’re sharing findings from The Total Economic Impact™ Of CircleCI, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CircleCI.

The study revealed that CircleCI delivered a 664% return on investment (ROI) over a three-year period and highlighted that our platform increased developer productivity by 10%. This results in a greater efficiency value of more than $4.3 million, enabling organizations to increase engineering velocity that drives business success.

According to Forrester, enterprise organizations are struggling to get innovative digital experiences in front of customers faster. They need high-performing software development teams and tools to help them build, test, and iterate without clunky technology interfering.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with investing in CircleCI, Forrester interviewed four CircleCI customers and combined their experiences and results into a single composite organization. The study found that, overall, CircleCI users saw significant improvement in the speed of their software development.

Specific benefits the study found include:

  • End-to-end software development build time is reduced by 50%. Using CircleCI allowed organizations to shorten their individual build time by 50% due to parallelization and dynamic configuration features. Over three years and a cumulative total of 80,000 to 120,000 builds per year, the shorter software development cycle is worth almost $7.8 million to the organizations interviewed.
  • Reduced system maintenance increases developer productivity by 10%. Teams using CircleCI no longer need to maintain their CI/CD system or risk disrupting productivity with updates to the CI/CD engine. This means developers have more time to take on tasks that deliver business value. Over three years, this increased developer productivity is worth more than $4.3 million to the organizations interviewed.
  • Infrastructure costs are reduced by 50%. Adding all of CircleCI’s capabilities onto their prior environment would have increased the annual infrastructure spend of organizations by 50%. Using CircleCI also allows organizations to repurpose their DevOps professionals to focus on more productive work. Combined, this is worth nearly $2.2 million over three years to the organizations interviewed.
  • Improved quality of code increases developer productivity by 10% to 20%. Using CircleCI, developers recover time they would have spent fixing bugs and defects. As the platform catches bad code earlier in the process, the quality of code improves. Over three years, this improvement in code quality is worth close to $1.1 million to the organizations interviewed.

In the study, a Director of Engineering who uses CircleCI said, “CircleCI has helped us tremendously scale to the needs of the business and it has made our internal customers happy, which indirectly makes our external customers happy [because we are] able to deliver faster and deliver quality products.”

Download the study to learn more about the increased ROI, productivity, and security of using CircleCI.