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After you hear out a variety of vendors and create your shortlist, it's time to do your homework. Talk to the finance people in your organization and ask them to do analyses of your finalists. If that's not an option, consult an analyst firm whose mission is tracking companies.

"Vendor viability and reputation are major considerations that can't be ignored," says Jerald Murphy, senior vice president and service director, Global Networking Strategies, with Meta Group. He recommends making a decision-support matrix containing criteria weighted to align with business priorities.

Criteria include price, performance, maintenance, reliability, ease of use, vendor viability and vendor reputation, Murphy says, adding "Our experience with clients has shown that in the campus environment, overall absolute performance is rarely a deciding factor, since even the poorest-performing switches usually exceed the business performance requirements."

TCO & ROI To Go

TCO and ROI should also be components of your proposal. TCO considerations include:

• Current network management costs as well as costs of managing upgrades and additional features.

• Product upgrades. How easy will it be to upgrade products down the road? How expensive will it be to add additional features?

• Equipment support. How difficult and costly will it be to support the equipment, especially if the vendor has grown by acquisition and has multiple user interfaces?

• Vendor's track record. Consider the track record of the vendor for supporting new technologies and for doing it in a manner that complies with standards. Smaller vendors may be more committed to and focused on their specialties and more dedicated to standards.

Also consider how committed a prospective vendor is to partnering with other suppliers. If your networking vendor has its own VoIP offering, for example, it's not going to have much incentive to play nice with another vendor's VoIP gear.

As for ROI, opinions differ as to whether this is a factor in major infrastructure upgrades (see "Can Infrastructure ROI Be Calculated? Maybe," below).

Monitor network utilization to establish trends showing time till you exceed capacity. Present data saying, "If current trends continue, users will start to experience problems with their applications in X amount of time." A value add here would be input from other groups that will help you quantify potential future growth.

If things are broken, it's too late to be proactive. Slowdowns pinned to exceeding network capacity mean an upgrade is needed. Period. If you're lucky, the slowdowns are gradual, and you'll have a chance to act before things get really bad.

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that stay on the cutting edge. Given economics and a more conservative business climate, that's less common now than in the past.

Other Scenarios

• End of life. Sometimes vendors stop supporting equipment and software--Microsoft does this with its OSs. This doesn't mean the gear stops working, but it does give you an incentive to consider an upgrade based on spiraling repair and replacement costs.

• Market forces meet management headaches. As the per-megabit price of bandwidth comes down, upgrading so you have some headroom and don't have to manage bandwidth as closely becomes more attractive.

Sometimes, a few of these planets will come into serendipitous alignment.

Bottom line: Propose an upgrade, warning of the consequences of inaction. Make a strong case. Good management will pay attention even without cut-and-dried ROI.

Peter Morrissey is a full-time faculty member of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and a contributing editor and columnist for Network Computing. Write to him at ppmorris@syr.edu.

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