I was just reading an article by a fellow dog lover Tracy Corbo of IDC called Technology That Is Relevant in a Recession - Network Infrastructure Management

 She points out something that I have been thinking about, that is, in this recession the more selling and other operations that can be moved to the network, the more money can be saved.

There are a couple results of that sentence. One, we are in a recession. That means budgets are tighter including for IT so throwing hardware at a performance problem to make it better –- maybe not.

Two, the network's importance goes up. The American saying is "don't put all your eggs in one basket" – in this case don’t put everything on the network, but we don't have much choice. The cost of moving all those network interactions to phone calls would be astronomic. According to the book Net Income Cut Costs Boost Profits By Wally Bock and Jeff Senné, the average cost of going through a customer call center is US$20. I don't have an exact reference for a number for web transactions but I bet it is less than $1, that is a 20:1 cost increase.

Three, therefore managing the network becomes critical to organizations. And that means network management software is pretty important to have.

The support for this conclusion: a number of network management vendors have recently reported strong earnings. Actually, this was Tracy’s main point.

Here are some tidbits from our customers on how NNMi helped them (paraphrased):

• ·Health Care Customer: It is nice to have NNMi find a down device before someone needs to go use that lab.
• ·Beta customer: We found 6 bad power supplies and a couple bad fans using the software, if the redundant units had gone down we have a network down and a scramble. Now we can send a tech out to replace the units in a planned way.
• ·Internal testing - using the NNM iSPI Performance we found links with duplex mismatch. [Duplex mismatch will create packet errors due to collisions and can exhibit as weird performance problems.] We found them before we put the links into production saving a lot of headaches trying to track them down.

If you have any cost savings examples please put in a comment. Or if you like contact us about being a guest blogger.

For the Network Management Center Michael Procopio,  LinkedIn.com/in/mjprocopio

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