* Forrester study quantifies ROI for Streamcore customer
It can be hard to put a number on gains associated with IT projects. But it’s always interesting to hear when a company goes through the effort to quantify its investment returns and shares what it discovers. In times like these, when every IT dollar spent is scrutinized, it’s especially comforting to see a project yield big dividends – in this case a WAN optimization project.
The details come from Streamcore, which last week published the results of an ROI study conducted by Forrester Research. Streamcore didn’t reveal the company by name, but said it’s a large European insurance company with 160 sites and a 300-person IT staff.
At the insurance company, 20 of the IT staff take part in network and system related activities, and eight of those are involved in the monitoring and reporting of network performance. The company spent approximately $3 million per year in total network services.
Forrester’s study calculated the end-user productivity gains achieved by boosting the performance of Citrix applications. The research firm used its Total Economic Impact (TEI) methodology to measure costs, cost reductions, risks and the value of Streamcore’s technology in increasing the effectiveness of business processes.
In a nutshell, the insurance company reports a 144% ROI with a 13-month payback period for the initial deployment of the project. The total five-year reduced network and network operations costs were $2.5 million on average. Total user productivity gains were $2 million for the period, Streamcore says.“In turbulent times, network teams are under pressure to do more with fewer resources, both financial and human, without impairing service levels,” said Christophe Peretou, Streamcore’s vice president of operations, in a statement. “This study will help them build their case as Streamcore is a perfect tool to address this type of challenge.”
Streamcore’s flagship StreamGroomer appliances are designed to speed the performance of applications, including VoIP, by means such as QoS, VoIP control, compression and load balancing over WAN links. Streamcore says its products can lower network operating costs by downgrading over-provisioned Internet links, postponing bandwidth upgrades, and receiving credits from network service providers for service-level agreement breeches, for example.
“While the Forrester study was limited, tallying only the productivity gains for Citrix applications, companies should consider the broader productivity gains that can be achieved when the performance of all critical business applications are improved,” Peretou said.
