|
With the growing importance of anywhere, anytime access for an increasingly dispersed workforce, IT managers are continually looking for ways to accelerate application performance across the wide area network (WAN).
Point products are available to improve one or another aspect of WAN performance, such as insufficient or congested bandwidth, impaired application performance, slow remote backup and replication, or obstacles to IT consolidation. However, IT managers would like a comprehensive wide-area solution that addresses all of these problems, so that users can enjoy LAN-like access to important data and applications regardless of their location.
One company that is offering the benefits of wide-area data services (WDS) is Riverbed, whose product line, the Steelhead family of appliances, optimizes TCP/IP traffic and provides further application optimization to make it easier for organizations to accelerate the most important applications for users anywhere in the world. By accelerating application performance and reducing bandwidth utilization, the Riverbed WDS solution is designed not only to improve application performance, but also to expedite the consolidation of IT infrastructure and enable faster network-based backup.
The Riverbed Steelhead appliances increase user productivity by speeding the performance of applications between distributed sites and between remote offices and enterprise datacenters, allowing faster access to centrally located applications and facilitating collaboration within a distributed workforce. The appliances also have a number of features designed to optimize the work of IT.
To validate and determine the business benefits of WDS, IDC interviewed IT managers at 12 companies of different sizes in a variety of industries that had deployed Riverbed’s WDS solution. IDC asked detailed questions about the deployment and support costs and the savings achieved and then applied our proprietary ROI methodology to the results to determine the average ROI and payback period that the surveyed companies realized from deploying the Riverbed solution.
On average, the surveyed companies achieved IT budget savings of $46,719 per 100 users in hardware, software, and bandwidth costs, while IT operations costs reductions contributed a further savings of $661 per 100 users.
IDC found that improved user productivity accounted for the greatest benefits from deploying the Riverbed Steelhead appliances. On average, users increased their productive time by 7.4%, saving 10.6 hours annually. These savings averaged $102,741 per 100 users per year.
After deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances, the companies were able to increase the number of users supported by each IT full-time employee by 5%. This resulted in average savings of $4,848 per 100 users over three years.
Additionally, companies benefited from the ability to grow revenue through previously impossible business strategies and to pursue new projects that could be geographically dispersed, as well as the ability to share work more effectively across offices around the world. This revenue growth averaged $3,219 per 100 users over three years, resulting in average total benefits from the deployment of $157,889 per 100 users over three years (see Table 1). From these benefits, IDC deducts the opportunity cost of not having the initial investment in some other instrument yielding 12%. For the surveyed companies, this results in a net present value (NPV) of the benefits of $103,321 per 100 users.
Based on the average investment of $21,360 per 100 users, the payback period from deploying the Riverbed solution averaged 7.3 months for the companies surveyed, yielding an average ROI of 484%.
Top of mind for the CEO today is to drive improvements that increase revenue, such as customer service enhancements and product innovation. Additionally, there is an ever-present need to respond to regulatory concerns of the business. IT managers are expected to play a role in these areas, in addition to increasing efficiency and responsiveness within the IT organization.
Viewed from the perspective of today’s business reality, the very nature of the network infrastructure has undergone a profound change. End users of IT systems are increasingly distributed throughout the organization. Employees are increasingly spending at least a portion of their working hours away from headquarters. At the end of 2006, the number of mobile workers reached 750 million worldwide. It wasn’t that long ago when they were sitting in headquarters in close proximity to the systems running back-office applications. Today, end users are increasingly mobile, often on the road visiting customers. Globalization has also spread end users across the far reaches of the world. Now businesses employ workers close to the client or wherever the best available talent may be ó regardless of location. Additionally, end users aren’t just employees anymore, but customers, business partners, and suppliers. This new extended enterprise brings with it new challenges, such as ensuring security, optimum service levels, and data protection at all points throughout the network infrastructure.
|
