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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction CYA Strategy Gorilla vs. Guerrilla Executive Summary Can Infrastructure ROI Be Calculated? Maybe Epoll Results

How do you measure the ROI of an infrastructure upgrade, particularly when you're talking about the backbone, which serves virtually every asset on the network? IT executives and consultants are deeply divided.

Many companies don't even try to measure the returns because, they say, there is no direct payback, only the indirect and virtually incalculable benefit that each application enjoys. In a midsize or large business, with hundreds of applications and many thousands of IT assets, you could easily erase any benefit in time spent doing the math.

Even so, ROI is in vogue today, and some corporate managers won't accept no as an answer. And of course, consultants are only too eager to offer ways to make the case. One suggestion is to estimate improvements in uptime. Uptime is seldom rewarded in an enterprise, but its benefits become clear when the network belches. Estimate the cost of previous outages, and you will be on your way to justifying a backbone upgrade. Be sure to amortize the cost of the upgrade over the number of years you expect to keep the upgraded gear, and compare the annualized expense to the avoided downtime. Keep in mind that as applications become more complex, the environment changes, inevitably leading to unforeseen difficulties.

A new project that requires more network horsepower also could do the justification trick. Does your company plan to adopt VoIP and an aggregated voice/data network? Such an upgrade might be impossible without modernizing the backbone first. Now, the ROI calculation can be rolled into that project plan, but be sure to prorate the backbone's cost if VoIP isn't the only benefactor of the upgrade.

Although it may also be intuitive to give a new backbone credit for faster response times, this approach speaks to the ever-elusive and always messy metric of end-user productivity. Do shorter waits for an e-mail message to pop up really make employees more productive? Any such ROI metric will seem forced, so we suggest avoiding that argument altogether unless the project is done in partnership with a business leader who understands the workflow and can credibly state that response-time improvements will yield a concrete business benefit. --David Joachim