The research was based on responses from 138 organisations. It was commissioned by Compuware, the world's 5th largest independent software vendor, and Forrester found that: 33% estimated the hourly cost to be between $10,000 and $100,000; 25% estimated between $100,000 and $500,000; 13% estimated costs to be between $500,000 and $1 million; and 4% estimated the cost to be greater than $1 million per hour.
The research also revealed that 67% of enterprises either did not know or could not provide an estimate of the financial cost to the business of IT downtime.
Mike Lucas, Regional Technology Manager, Compuware UK & Ireland, said:
"The majority of organisations do not fully understand the business impact associated with poor or non-performing applications. This lack of understanding can probably be attributed to the gulf that still exists between IT and the business. This gap needs to be addressed, otherwise downtime will continue to cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars each year without them even realising.
"If IT departments can demonstrate to business managers the impact application performance problems have on employee productivity and ultimately the bottom line, they should find that they get much more support from the board to combat these problems.
"By looking at the financial cost of downtime IT departments can also provide much clearer information to the board about the return on investment of application performance projects."