* Users seem blasé about WLAN business case
Despite all the industry banter about ROI and TCO, it appears that enterprises acknowledge – and can live with – the fact that some product and technology investments provide soft benefits that are challenging to measure or don’t really require hard financial justification.
Consider wireless LANs, for example. Last week, I pointed out some high-level findings of a recent wireless survey I helped conduct in conjunction with Webtorials, a networking-education Web site, and survey sponsor Nortel.
One interesting data point was that the respondents seemed fairly unconcerned with calculating a WLAN ROI. Less than a quarter of the 600-plus respondents (22%) said they had calculated a WLAN ROI, though more than half had already installed WLANs or were in the process of doing so. The others had either been unable to calculate an ROI or simply hadn’t tried.
In addition, capital and operations costs ranked fairly low on user WLAN worry lists.
After the economic dregs of 2001 and 2002, can businesses really be so cavalier as to not do the ROI/TCO math?
Well, when it comes to WLANs, perhaps they can. Improving the productivity of mobile knowledge workers was the driver chosen by the most survey respondents (86%) for installing a WLAN. How do you really put a price tag on “accessibility”?
If locally mobile employees can close a deal or respond faster to existing customers because of wireless technology, these gains add up. But without every wireless user recording every task they complete wirelessly and entering it into some kind of database that could be analyzed, how does an organization actually measure such strides?
Enterprises know that if they reduce at least some cabling costs with wireless (still a big motivator) and they combine voice and data not only on the wired network but also on the wireless network, they’ve saved money.
Apparently, organizations seeking to deploy wireless consider that enough hard justification to move forward. A full 53% of the respondents have already installed or are in the process of installing WLANs, and another 35% said they will deploy them within two years.
