Is Network and Application Performance Management Worth the Investment?

For years, NETSCOUT has listened closely to our customers to understand the impact of performance degradations on their business, including customer experience with service and support, critical application performance implications on revenue and production operations, and even how disruptions or outages might affect regulatory compliance and/or corporate reputation. To put some realistic facts and figures together about the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises might realize by deploying NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution, we commissioned a Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study performed to quantify some of those benefits.

For the purposes of this study, Forrester used the results of interviews with decision-makers and influencers from four organizations that had experience using nGenius Enterprise Performance Management and combined them into the results for a single composite organization, to represent a the interviewed customers’ experiences. The objective of the framework was to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact nGenius Performance Management can have.

NETSCOUT was very interested in how the decision-makers perceived the value of network and application performance management for the disruptions, degradations, and outages affecting today’s enterprise information technology (IT) environments.

Digital Transformations Increase Complexity in Performance Management

Complexity has increased as digital transformations have made use of hybrid cloud, software as a service (SaaS), unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and mission critical applications more common. This has complicated troubleshooting and problem resolution for these IT organizations. The preferred approach to address such issues is proactive network and application performance management with deep packet inspection at scale.  Regarding reducing troubleshooting time, one interviewed senior manager of platform engineering at a healthcare IT services company put it this way:

“It’s not even possible to solve some problems without having a technology like this. We used to spend hundreds of hours troubleshooting the problem, and NETSCOUT solves it in 20 minutes.”

The study revealed value associated with productivity savings for both customer-facing agents, like salespeople and customer service representatives, as well as non-revenue generating employees, such as finance or human resources. Reducing troubleshooting time by getting to root cause quickly meant services were more rapidly restored for both internally and externally facing employees, which one interviewed director of technology and automation tools from a pharmaceutical development and manufacturing company, explained:

“Day in and day out, the software pays for itself by enabling us to be truly proactive in identifying and responding to user issues, which means our employees can focus on the business of either discovering new drugs or manufacturing our products to get them out to customers.”

Do War Rooms Help or Hurt Troubleshooting Effectiveness?

Another topic uncovered during the interview process was the need for war rooms to troubleshoot challenging network and application problems before their organizations added the nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution. The study described that, "A critical incident would result in lengthy and unproductive war room calls with potentially hundreds of professionals, including senior managers. Teams wasted time by avoiding accountability and assigning blame without reaching a consensus on the origin of the issue.” The use of proactive nGenius solutions improved interviewees’ effectiveness.  One interviewed CTO at a specialized healthcare services company shared his company’s experience:

“In terms of first responders, it’s about 100 people that would get on the phone. Those people would each spend probably two hours related to their domain and then communicating with their teams. With NETSCOUT, we have probably got that down to about 10 people within half an hour.”

Forrester TEI Reveals NETSCOUT Value

The Forrester TEI study achieved a couple of major objectives.  First, was to determine how our network and performance management solutions were meeting customers’ expectations and helping them reduce the time to troubleshoot and solve priority issues.  Second, was to understand the cost savings and productivity gains our customers were experiencing. Some of the key findings revealed from this study were significant and were supported by risk-adjusted quantifiable benefits, as shown in the Forrester figures included here.

Overall, Forrester’s framework not only identified the costs and benefits that impacted the investment decisions to implement nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution, but also definitively established that there was a positive ROI for the composite customer. More importantly, the study demonstrated that organizations that invested in best practices for proactive network and application performance management leveraging packet-based, real-time analysis were able to overcome the troubleshooting challenges of today’s complex enterprise environments. As one interviewed network and platform manager from a healthcare services company commented:

“There are a lot of ‘aha’ moments. And I think really the big priceless part is we do reduce mean time to resolve. There’s absolutely proof in that. NETSCOUT provides that deep level of visibility that we just can’t accomplish through other systems and tools.”

Learn more from the Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact Study for NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management