An In-Depth Look at ROI

An In-Depth Look at ROI
A Riverbed White Paper An In-Depth Look at ROI

INTRODUCTION - DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
As the economy turns sour, and IT budgets remain flat or get reduced, doing more with the infrastructure you have has never been more important. But investing even more money in the same old networking infrastructure, storage, servers and bandwidth is not going to help you reach your strategic goals. Riverbed offers a compelling and powerful return on investment in hard dollars, and a way to leap past the obstacles preventing you from reaching your IT objectives. Here are just some of the ways our Steelhead appliances can help your company save real money today: . Save WAN Bandwidth. Avoid upgrading expensive WAN links to branch offices, or decommission expensive over-provisioned links around the world. . Consolidate IT Infrastructure. Reduce or eliminate complex and outdated branch office IT infrastructure through server consolidation - less servers and software to backup, patch, protect & manage. . Lower IT Services Costs. Reduce or eliminate your outsourced server management bill at branch offices. . Reduce Media Management Costs. Reduce or eliminate off-site media management / data storage for most sites around the world. . Enable Datacenter Consolidation. Make your data center consolidation project more successful by helping you avoid degradation in end-user application performance after local data centers are eliminated. This can also reduce your real estate investments and operating expenses. . Reduced Real Estate Expenses. By enabling more people to work from home with the same LAN-like experience, you can radically reduce the office space required to support your business. . Reduce RTO / RPO. Improve your business continuity process by accelerating backup and replication which means shorter RTO and RPOs across longer distances, without adding more expensive bandwidth. . Reduce Power and cooling Requirements. Reduce power and cooling requirements by having fewer servers in branches, fewer data centers and getting better utilization out of fewer centralized servers. . Reduce Business Travel. Reduce travel requirements by making global collaboration over long distances to really work well, even for data-intensive CAD / CAE apps. . Reduced Facilities Costs. Reduce facilities expense by making enterprise applications work for home-based workers just like they do at headquarters - which allows more people to work from home. . Results: 61% IRR; $3 Million NPV; a One Year Payback - Without Counting any "Soft Benefits" Riverbed can help you simplify and consolidate your IT infrastructure, improve security and business continuity plans, save money and at the same time, improve the performance of your applications. This paper shows how a hypothetical mid-sized enterprise with 230 sites around the world can achieve a 61% IRR and $3 million NPV on a Riverbed deployment, and get payback in 1 year - without considering any soft benefits at all. When those soft are taken into account, the ROI can be much higher. While this paper is focused specifically on cost savings, those same Steelhead appliances you deploy to save money will also help you in two other key areas: "business agility" and productivity. Business Agility is simply the notion that your business should not be tied down by your data and infrastructure. If you need to open a new branch in Asia, you should be able to do that without thinking about whether you need to build a local data center to support it. You should be able to do it without thinking about the risks of storing data in-country. Riverbed gives you the performance that makes you agile - able to respond to business conditions as quickly as possible. Even if you don't consider the monetary value of those aspects of a Riverbed deployment today, you will reap the benefits anyway; you can dramatically simplify your IT infrastructure and at the same time prepare your organization to meet the future needs of the business. At the same time, you'll be helping your business users become more productive, collaborate better and deliver products and services faster.
© 2009 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 1 An In-Depth Look at ROI

Doing More with Less From networking to storage, and from data centers to mobile workers, we can help you get as much as possible out of the investments you have al... [download for more]