Innovation, Not Infrastructure: How to Lower DXP TCO with a Managed Cloud Platform
How to unlock the budget from your existing Digital Experience platform — and what your team could build with the reclaimed time and money.
Teams running self-managed digital experience platforms (DXP) spend most of their budget keeping the platform running — patching, upgrades, scaling, and integration instead of building new experiences.
Moving to a fully managed SaaS model like HCL Mosaic cuts total cost of ownership (TCO) by roughly 25–30% and frees that budget for digital experience innovation.
What is HCL Mosaic?
HCL Mosaic is a modular, AI-first enterprise cloud platform delivered as a fully managed SaaS solution. It brings HCL DX (Compose), HCL Volt MX, and HCL Leap together in a cloud environment that HCLSoftware hosts and manages. It lets organizations build and run digital experiences across web, mobile, kiosk, and other touchpoints without maintaining their own infrastructure, upgrades, or integrations.
Why Some Digital Experience Platforms Cost So Much to Run
Most digital experience platform budgets are consumed by maintenance, not innovation. HCLSoftware ships new capabilities across HCL DX, HCL Volt MX, and HCL Leap roughly every six weeks, but teams on legacy, self-managed deployments often can’t adopt them fast enough — each release adds to an upgrade backlog instead of reaching users.
The cost and operational risk compound over time. Older deployments commonly still depend on WebSphere Application Server 8.5, which IBM has deprioritized, and on Java 8, which carries growing security and performance risk. Combined with a shrinking pool of specialist skills, the result is predictable.
When 70–80% of platform spend goes to keeping the lights on, very little is left for innovation.
Where the Self-managed Deployment Budget Actually Goes
Two costs dominate a self-managed deployment:
- Infrastructure operations — Provisioning, scaling, patching, backups, and compliance work to keep production healthy.
- Integration plumbing — Developers can spend up to 80% of their time building and maintaining back-end connections, security, and access, rather than building experiences.
That is effort spent on backend plumbing, not on the experiences customers actually see.
3 Ways a Managed Cloud DXP Model Lowers Your TCO
Moving to HCL Mosaic shifts the operating burden to HCL and changes the cost equation in three ways:
- Always current — HCLSoftware manages patching and upgrades, so new capabilities arrive without the need for costly upgrade projects.
- Lower, predictable cost — Optimized, Kubernetes-based infrastructure that scales on demand delivers roughly 25–30% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) at a single predictable price. (Source: HCL.)
- Integration, handled — HCL Foundry provides low-code connectivity and orchestration with access to around 400 enterprise adapters, so developers stop hand-building connections.
The point isn’t simply that you spend less. It’s that the spend you free up — and the developer and administrator time you reclaim — can be redirected to the work that differentiates you.
What Teams Can Build with Reclaimed IT Budget
Freed from infrastructure upkeep, teams can refocus on building personalized experiences across web, mobile, and kiosk; adopt the AI built into the platform, such as the HCL IQ practitioner assistant; and deliver from one platform instead of integrating point tools. HCLSoftware customers have reported up to 50% savings in development time and cost on the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. How much can HCL Mosaic reduce total cost of ownership?
HCL Mosaic can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by roughly 25–30% compared with a traditional self-managed deployment, by running on optimized, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure at a single predictable price that includes hosting.
2. Why are some digital experience platforms costly to maintain?
Most of the cost is maintenance: infrastructure operations (patching, scaling, backups, compliance) and integration, where developers and administrators can spend up to 80% of their time maintaining back-end connections instead of building experiences.
3. Does moving to SaaS mean losing my existing investment?
No. HCL Mosaic is built on HCL DX Compose, HCL Volt MX, and HCL Leap, so existing content and applications can be migrated, and the move can be incremental through modular on-ramps.
See what the shift looks like for your team. Explore the three paths off a legacy deployment, or talk to us about a Mosaic evaluation of your current environment.
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