Return on Investment (ROI) in a Real-World Network

For retail, the challenges begin prior to the store opening for business. Setting up the
network infrastructure – IP subnet provisioning – is the major challenge for these
businesses. With Wi-Fi expected for corporate users, visitors and even retail customers,
IP address management needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever
before. Large retail environments need to allocate and release thousands of IP addresses
each day as customers enter and leave stores.

Today, every business environment is leveraging the operational benefits of
virtualization. While server and desktop virtual machines (VMs) benefit the business,
their presence increases the demand for IP addresses thus adding to the management
burden. Manual IP address management in today’s fast-paced, virtualized environments
is not only highly complex and enormously time consuming but also prone to human
error. And, as we shall see, the cost of home-grown automated IP address management
can be substantial and have its own problems and limitations.

Executive Summary
Automated, Efficient, and Reliable IP Address Management
After converting from existing methods, all three of the customers profiled benefitted
from the agility provided by the EfficientIP solution, and were afforded more robust
business continuity as a direct result of automation and reduction or elimination of
human error in this important infrastructure area.

Implementing EfficientIP’s solution delivered benefits that included:

• Scalability to support large remote sites’ infrastructure
  
• Automation of IPAM with DNS & DHCP (thus limiting risk of error)
  
• Dramatic time & cost savings
  
• Increased network service continuity

Tolly evaluated two ROI studies conducted by EfficientIP customers and detailed the
results later in this paper. In one case, a large customer with some 60,000 IP addresses
under management calculated its potential savings when moving to EfficientIP. In
another, a smaller customer with some 8,800 IP addresses under management
projected its savings. See “Key Takeaways” for projected ROI summaries for both
scenarios.