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So How 'Bout that R.O.I.?

Justifiably, a lot of companies today want to justify every capital expense as an investment with an expected return. As you read this, Packeteer is working overtime to deliver an automated Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator. Until then, you can assess PacketShaper’s ROI looking at all sides of your situation. VistaOne can help you. Contact Us.

  • You can calculate the savings from avoiding service interruptions and help-desk calls.
  • You can evaluate the savings associated with extending the useful life of current WAN bandwidth.
  • You can look at the opportunity-cost savings of improving application performance, which, in turn, improves employee productivity.

Use any one of these examples, or a combination, as guidelines to calculate your own Packeteer ROI.

Service disruption avoidance (end user): Studies have shown that service interruptions typically cost $70 (USD) per hour per affected user. Assuming an hour of lost productivity per user, per month for a 20-user branch office, the monthly cost of service interruptions is $1,400. In this case, a PacketShaper 1500 pays for itself in less than three months, and a PacketShaper 2500 pays for itself in less than six months.

Help-desk call avoidance: A service interruption or poor performance is likely to result in end-user calls to the IT help desk to report the problem. The resulting support costs vary depending on the severity of the problem. According to published studies, a mid-level desktop support technician costs $50 (USD) per hour, and a problem of moderate severity is typically resolved in 30 minutes. Assuming four moderate service interruptions per week resulting in two help-desk service calls per interruption, the monthly cost to the IT organization is $800 for a 20-person branch office. In this example, a PacketShaper 1500 pays for itself in less than five months, and a PacketShaper 2500 pays for itself in less than 10 months.

WAN upgrade avoidance: Assume you can delay upgrading a Frame Relay WAN from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps, at a savings of about $1,000 (USD) per month. International WAN link costs run anywhere from 5 to 25 times greater than U.S. domestic WAN links. For an international WAN link, upgrade avoidance can justify a PacketShaper 2500 in less than one month. For a US domestic WAN link, the ROI comes at eight months.

For a company with 10 128 Kbps branch sites and a 100 Mbps main site, the ROI comes at about 7 months for PacketShaper Xpress compression. A savings of about $300 per site, per month is achieved by avoiding a 128 Kbps to 256 Kbps upgrade.

Application-performance optimization: Suppose a company with eight 256 Kbps branch sites recently spent $20 million USD deploying SAP, and the performance is unacceptable. Although harder to quantify, an investment in PacketShaper to address the performance problems makes the $20 million investment successful.