For almost a year now, we've been hearing about the importance of knowing the return on your network investments. ROI is one of those buzzwords that's been flying around like a gnat in most network executives' ears. Granted, ROI has been around as long as investments themselves, but marketing and sales materials have recently put the acronym into overdrive, making it a huge selling feature of any product or service.

But when you get down to it, how exactly do you calculate ROI? What are the major factors in determining whether how much you throw into your network will turn out to be profitable over the course of a few months or years?

Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler and Associates, tackles this issue on our upcoming seminar "Networking for Small to Midsize Businesses: Designing and Managing an Enterprise-Class Network." Metzler, who moderates the event, offers step-by-step instructions for adding up the value of your network investments.

For instance, he lays out the difference between hard savings and soft savings. Hard savings, according to Metzler, is money that your company currently spends, but will be able to cease spending as a result of the project you want to implement. Soft savings deal more with benefits of implementing a project - for instance, making a team more productive and therefore saving money over the long run through efficiency.

Metzler also shows you how to break down the cost components of your network into capital equipment, people and facilities, giving you clear examples of what expenditure falls into each category. Finally, he goes through the process of figuring out annualized rates of return.

In addition to Metzler's ROI tutorial, McData, a presenter at the event, offers a way to tally up the ROI of storage investments. With the company's help, you'll be able to determine if a storage-area network is the right investment for your small to midsize business. Based on several factors, including application downtime, storage utilization, management efficiencies and use of backup resources, you can decide the risk factors involved.

Also on the tour to help you figure out how to best use your precious resources are Cisco, IBM, Gateway, and Virtela. Together, they will cover a wide array of topics, including IP telephony, wireless integration, security, VPNs and multimedia services.

The goal of this event, which is a joint effort with PC World Conferences, is to help you set the course for you small to midsize network and to realize that in implementing these technologies you can help boost the ROI of your efforts.
Register now for "Networking for Small to Midsize Businesses: Designing and Managing an Enterprise-Class Network

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