Unlock Cloud-Era Visibility and Financing with nGenius Vantage Point Software Solution

Corporations have long balanced the use of both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx) to fund information technology (IT) projects and day-to-day operations. In a more simplified time, the addition of networking switches, routers, servers, and storage was, in large part, funded by CapEx dollars. From the financial perspective, the equipment was an investment, had a long-term use expectation, and was amortized or depreciated as a consistent, predictable monthly cost in the budget.

From an OpEx perspective, the cost of wide-area-network (WAN) connectivity has long been classified as a subscription service. This recurring monthly expense line item has varied, and still does, depending on the contracted bandwidth in each location, which could increase or decrease monthly depending on utilization needs. Although this route causes some unpredictability in their monthly budgets, it has provided organizations the flexibility to "right-size" their needs on a location-by-location and month-to-month basis.

Financing Cloud-Era Services

Fast forward to the cloud era, and it is easy to find example after example of digital transformations introduced over the last decade or so that align well with an OpEx strategy. Consider the IT solutions below. How many of these are treated as OpEx by your finance organization?

• Public cloud
• Colocation sites (colos)
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications
• Unified communications as a service (UCaaS)

Digital transformation service costs are being classified as OpEx for the reasons WAN connectivity costs were. They provide organizations with similar benefits—flexibility, and elasticity to grow or retract based on cyclical business trends, employee remote office work demands, and competitive realities.

Managing Performance in the Cloud Era

The advent of the cloud era has brought both rewards and challenges. Positives include flexibility, elasticity, accelerated application introductions, and cost efficiencies–often attributed to the subscription models (as OpEx)—that empower companies to pay for just what they need and use.

On the other hand, challenges that come with cloud services include:

• Complexity with multiple vendors supporting multiple parts of the IT ecosystem, often worldwide
• Increased points of failure, such as multiple colocation sites for remote offices to gain access to corporate services
• Reduced control over service levels and performance
• Lack of visibility into user experience for employees and customers

Network and application performance management has provided IT organizations with ways to overcome these visibility gaps, assure network and application performance, and deliver quality user experience from wherever their users access the network—even in a proactive manner when users are at rest. NETSCOUT has been a leader in this area, with some of the world's largest enterprises, service providers, and government agencies relying on nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions to help deliver flawless network, application, and user experience performance.

Introducing nGenius Vantage Point Solution

NETSCOUT's innovative nGenius Vantage Point software solution is a subscription bundle for organizations that want an OpEx option for nGenius Enterprise Performance Management. It uniquely combines NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) and/or vSTREAM deep packet inspection instrumentation with nGeniusONE performance management analysis software.

This subscription solution enables enterprise service assurance customers to eliminate blind spots caused by digital transformation initiatives by cost-effectively expanding instrumentation to new vantage points across their network. Organizations that already use nGeniusONE and ISNG and want to add visibility in a new part of their enterprise ecosystem can do so by using nGenius Vantage Point software. Organizations implementing NETSCOUT for the first time also can take advantage of this offering to gain insights into critical areas of their ecosystem.

With this solution, NETSCOUT provides organizations with a comprehensive, real-time performance management solution that can be purchased annually as an OpEx. The nGenius Vantage Point software subscription helps customers to right-size their deployment of instrumentation to achieve pervasive visibility for application performance and user experience across their network.

Learn more about NETSCOUT's nGenius Vantage Point software and how it may be the right cost-effective solution to add performance visibility into your environment.