The cost of the hardware and DB licences is normally a small fraction of the price of keeping your systems running. Implementing good practices for automation: backups, sheduled jobs, MI reports and implementing SSRS and sharepoint can seriously reduce the overhead of cleaning data, preparing and distributing reports.

I have working in healthcare in the UK. MI used server running SQL2005 with a part time DBA. The total cost of this probably less than £30K a year. However they had 6 analysts and a manager pulling data from SQL into local Access dbs, creating datasets and then sending the results out via email on Excel. Cost to the organisation? probably £150K+. I'm not saying that you could get rid of all of that, but the low level ETL and distribution could have been done by SSRS which was already included in their cost base.