Investment Control

Investment control helps you maximize the return on investment you have made on the Mendix platform. To do so, you can prioritize the right low-code opportunities to optimize value delivery and cost management.

Let’s deep-dive into both of these sub value drivers:

1. Value Delivery
2. Cost Management

Value Delivery

Your business and IT leaders expect quick and maximum return on investment from your low-code platform initiative. Focus on value delivery is, therefore, paramount. You should prioritize apps that will make an impact, can go live quickly, and always lead back to their broader business strategy. How will you do so with Mendix? Let’s find out.

How can I organize all my company’s low-code opportunities and ideas?

Effective portfolio management is indispensable for organizations navigating the complexities of digital transformation. It serves as the strategic compass, guiding decision-makers in aligning initiatives with overarching business objectives, driving standardization, and maximizing overall value. Mendix Portfolio Management is a platform-native capability that helps you do just that.

All digital initiatives can be organized here. You can create multiple portfolios for different strategic goals or business units – it’s very flexible. Built-in access ensures segregation of duties and confidentiality when needed.

How can I prioritize the right initiatives with Mendix Portfolio Management?

Mendix Portfolio Management helps make your decisions data-driven. It comes with industry-leading prioritization models such as RICE ((Reach * Impact * Confidence) / Effort)) and WSJF to do so. Based on the scoring levers and weights, a score helps prioritize low-code opportunities, as illustrated below.

Cost Management

Effective cost management is crucial to the success of any platform and project. Cost management on low-code platforms essentially ensures efficient and optimized resource use and control while ensuring transparency, which is critical for informed decisions and avoiding overspending.

The Mendix platform provides rich capabilities around resource transparency and the ability to manage cloud resources for apps across your Mendix landscape.

How can I gain visibility into entitled cloud resources and their usage across our Mendix landscape?

Effectively monitoring resource spending within their app landscape is a crucial responsibility for Mendix Administrators. Mendix provides a holistic perspective on subscriptions, offering detailed insights into entitlements of products and services provided to our customers.

To access entitlement information for cloud resources, Mendix administrators can log in to their Mendix Control Center. The Entitlements tab provides a comprehensive overview of Cloud Resource Packs (CRPs) and App Platform entitlements.

This entitlements view concisely summarizes entitled, consumed, and remaining quota for both Cloud Resources and Apps. Additionally, Mendix Administrators can delve into transactional details, resembling a typical bank statement, to understand and trace how and when these resources are utilized. The introduction of a virtual credit system called Cloud Credits further enhances this process on our platform.

This feature ensures administrators thoroughly understand resource utilization and expenditure patterns throughout their Mendix landscape.

How does Mendix make resource monitoring and management simple and flexible?

Mendix has simplified resource monitoring and management through several key capabilities:

1. Entitlements Dashboard: This Control Center dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of entitlements, consumption and quota remaining details of CRPs and app platform entitlements. The dashboard is updated in real time, ensuring Mendix admins can access up-to-date resource allocations and usage.
2. Cloud Credits are a virtual currency system providing customers more flexibility and control over their cloud resources. Cloud Credits allow customers to provision and consume CRPs of any size and specification, regardless of whether they have subscribed to the specific CRP or not. It is important to note that this flexibility is accorded to all customers without changing the purchase process and pricelist items.
3. Deployed Apps view on Control Center: The dashboard displays a cost view of all Mendix applications deployed on Mendix Cloud and the Mendix Free Apps cluster. Mendix Administrators can use this tool to quickly deprovision or provision a cloud resource pack from any app across their Mendix landscape in seconds.

How can I start to manage resources myself?

Mendix Administrators can independently manage their resources using Mendix’s Self-Service capabilities available on Control Center.

Transparency is the first step to effective resource management. Mendix Administrators gain immediate insight into application costs across their landscape through the Deployed Apps view on Control Center.

Mendix Administrators can use this capability to quickly identify the resource cost of their apps (in terms of cloud resources consumed) and trigger action to reallocate cloud resources wherever necessary.

To deprovision a cloud resource, administrators simply trigger the deprovisioning action for an environment (previously stopped from the developer portal). The environment is deprovisioned within moments, and resulting cloud credits are promptly returned to the customer’s entitlements.

Similarly, when administrators need to allocate a new resource to an application, they can seamlessly provision a new cloud resource pack to an app. This process allows them to select a cloud resource pack of any specification per their platform plan without requiring a contract amendment. Once provisioning is initiated, the additional cloud resource becomes available within seconds, with the corresponding entitlements deducted accordingly.