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Craig Mathias

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The Value of Advanced Technology – A New Farpoint Group White Paper

A more detailed look at why updating one’s infrastructure can yield great – if less than obvious – ROI.

By Craig Mathias on Tue, 06/21/11 - 6:38am.

. What's this?

As the effects of the recession drag on (and I fear they will be with us for a number of years yet), I'm often asked about how to determine the value of investments in new technologies, in my case, of course, those pertaining to wireless and mobile. The answer isn't always clear, and I've probably seen every possible variant on price/performance and cost/benefit analysis by now.

But my key theme for the recession has remained fairly constant (with one notable exception, to which I will return in an upcoming blog entry): capital investments in advanced technologies are easiest to justify when they improve productivity - in other words, when there's a clear payback in terms of improving the value of that most valuable and expensive of assets, human capital. Moving, for example, to 802.11n from .11g involved a good deal of hand-wringing in many IT shops, as it seems (but only seems) that .11g has had an awfully short life and rip-and-replace remains an expensive proposition under any circumstances.

But it's not what you spend, it's what you get for what you spend. If making that (usually capital) investment improves productivity, especially of users but also of IT staff, who are often spread quite thin in many organizations these days (again, I don't see that changing anytime soon either), then, barring a better ROI scenario for the funds required, go for it.

I started down this path of reasoning some time ago, but it's constantly being reinforced. Case in point: I spoke earlier this year with HP's marketing staff here in Massachusetts when they announced the first 3x3:3 APs, capable of up to 450 Mbps per radio. I have, BTW, adopted the "TxR:S" notation that a few others are using when describing .11n radios, where T is the number of transmit antennas, R is the number of receive antennas, and S is the number of spatial streams. An awful lot of products advertised as 3x3 are really two-stream, so hopefully this notation will clear up the confusion. Anyway, if HP is provisioning a lot more capacity per radio, and if that capacity translates into improved user productivity, well, you get my point. We expect to see, also BTW, an improvement in throughput and capacity even when a 3x3:3 AP is used with a two-stream client, perhaps getting as much as 5-10% closer to that theoretical 300 Mbps.

Anyway, there's a lot here, and you can explore all of this and more in our latest White Paper. Upgrades even with limited budgets have always been a fact of life in IT, and the advanced technologies that continue to evolve at a rapid pace in wireless are going to be motivating these upgrades for some time to come. And, as long as the benefits are there, why not?