The Total Economic Impact™ Of The NetBrain Platform

Reduced Troubleshooting Effort

Evidence and data. Interviewees said NetBrain helped their organizations reduce the effort required to triage and diagnose network incidents. In their prior state, NOC personnel and network engineers moved among monitoring platforms, command-line interfaces, configuration repositories, vendor-specific tools, and static diagrams to identify affected devices, reconstruct network paths, compare device states, and determine whether the network was contributing to an issue. These manual investigations often required multiple engineers, extended escalations, and substantial reliance on senior staff with deep institutional knowledge.

Interviewees said NetBrain provides dynamic and live topology and device context, automated path tracing, configuration comparisons, and reusable diagnostic intents that helped their teams identify the likely fault domain and prepare more informed escalations.

• The network operations director for the higher education institution explained the before and after scenario for troubleshooting incidents: “Before, a person would spend 35 to 45 minutes going device by device and doing show commands. With NetBrain, they can run the path trace and health checks and get that down to about 5 to 10 minutes.”

• The CISO for the financial services firm described: “I would say it has reduced our mean time to resolution by at least 50%. You can see the fault, isolate where it is, and get to the device instead of going through everything manually.”

• The network engineer for the energy conglomerate shared: “We use the dashboard to help identify where the problem is, so we don’t have to go through all the devices manually. It helps us narrow down where the issue is and get to the right device faster.”

• The IT infrastructure engineer for the healthcare services provider explained: “Something that might have taken two people half a day can now take one person about an hour. You can look at the path, compare the configurations, and see what changed instead of logging into every device.”

Modeling and assumptions. The model captures labor saved during routine incident triage, diagnosis, and root cause isolation. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Prior to deploying NetBrain, the composite organization experiences 300 troubleshooting incidents per month.

• For a typical incident in the prior state, a network FTE expended 3 hours on average to remediate such an incident.

• With the use of NetBrain, the net autoresolution of troubleshooting incidents is 8% in Year 1, 9% in Year 2, and 10% by Year 3 based on the effectiveness ramp of the NetBrain platform. The remaining incidents required less manual investigation because engineers could access relevant network context and diagnostic data more quickly.

• Network FTEs, or the NOC, still need to be involved in resolving the balance of the troubleshooting incidents that are not autoresolved.

• The effective reduction in MTTR with NetBrain for troubleshooting incidents is 55% in Year 1, 62.5% in Year 2, and 70% by Year 3 based on the effectiveness ramp.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for FTEs working on network troubleshooting is $62.

• The combined time savings computed for this benefit implies that the composite organization frees up the equivalent of 2.6 network or NOC (L1-L2) FTEs in Year 1, 3.0 in Year 2, and 3.3 in Year 3 for redeployment for higher-value-added work.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The volume and complexity of network incidents.

• The amount of troubleshooting effort in the prior environment.

• The skill levels and adoption rates of network engineers, NOC personnel, and other NetBrain users.

• The maturity and coverage of automated troubleshooting workflows and operational integrations, including the proportion of incidents that NetBrain can automatically diagnose or prevalidate.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of nearly $980,000.

Revenue Protection From Reduced Network Downtime

Evidence and data. Several interviewees also noted that NetBrain helped their organizations reduce the business impact of significant network disruptions by shortening the time required to diagnose, isolate, and resolve the underlying issue. In the prior state, regional, site-level, or application-path incidents could disrupt revenue-generating operations while network teams manually reconstructed paths, correlated alerts across tools, inspected devices, and coordinated escalations with internal teams or service providers. Unlike routine troubleshooting activities, these events were business-critical, and extended remediation times increased the duration of operational disruption and the amount of revenue exposed.

Deploying NetBrain enabled automated path analysis, real-time topology and dependency context, incident-specific diagnostics, and integrations with monitoring, logging, and ticketing systems that helped their teams identify the affected fault domain and escalate incidents with more complete information. These capabilities reduced the duration of significant network disruption events rather than the frequency with which they occurred. This benefit values the business impact of reduced downtime and does not include the network team labor savings quantified in the preceding benefit.

• The second network engineer for the public safety department explained: “We have a few P1/P2 incidents per year; it is hard to say exactly how many. NetBrain did not change how often they happen, but it made the root cause analysis and resolution much faster. These incidents are typically enterprisewide.”

• The IT infrastructure engineer for the healthcare services provider relayed their organization’s experience: “We had approximately 60 P1/P2 or materially user-impacting network incidents per year before NetBrain. The number of incidents has not really changed, but we resolve them faster now. The impact can be enterprisewide, regional, application-specific, or limited to a smaller group of users.”

• The CISO for the financial services firm noted, “Most of our outages are site-level, often related to weather or connectivity, and NetBrain helps us isolate the fault much faster.”

• The network engineer for the energy conglomerate explained the process for resolving significant events and the impact from NetBrain: “The NOC can look at the dashboard, see what’s going on, and give us more information when they escalate it. When something goes wrong, we can get to the problem faster instead of having people logging into devices and trying to figure out where it is.”

Modeling and assumptions. The model quantifies the business impact when NetBrain reduces the duration of significant network downtime. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite experiences 60 significant network downtime events per year.

• The average downtime for such events is 5.7 hours. Applying the same effective MTTR reduction as Benefit A results in 3.2 hours of avoided downtime per event in Year 1, 3.6 hours in Year 2, and 4 hours in Year 3.

• The average blast radius, or regional impact, of such downtime events is 20%.

• Based on continuous global operations, the composite generates $580,000 of revenue per hour.

• The total revenue protected with NetBrain is $22.3 million in Year 1, $25.1 million in Year 2, and $27.8 million in Year 3, or 0.45%, 0.50%, and 0.56% of overall composite revenues, respectively.

• To determine the net financial impact for the composite, Forrester converts the revenue at risk into operating profits. Forrester assumes that the operating margin for the composite’s industry is 10%.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The frequency and duration of significant network disruptions.

• The average event blast radius.

• The organization’s revenue profile and the industry’s operating margin.

• The organization’s incident-response skills and processes in the prior state.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $4.9 million.

Change Automation Time Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees said significant network configuration changes were resource-intensive before adopting NetBrain because engineers had to prepare commands, access devices individually, execute updates through the CLI, and manually verify configurations and service health. Differences in device models, vendors, operating systems, and software versions further complicated bulk configuration updates, code upgrades, ACL and routing changes, and other enterprise-scale activities. These processes required substantial engineering effort, extended change windows, and after-hours work, while repetitive manual execution limited the network team’s capacity for other operational and modernization priorities.

NetBrain enabled network teams at the interviewees’ organizations to convert repeatable change activities into standardized workflows using reusable runbook templates, centralized bulk execution, and automated pre- and post-change validation. Engineers could apply changes across groups of devices, monitor execution, confirm the intended results, and support rollback without performing the entire process device by device.

• The IT infrastructure engineer for the healthcare services provider explained: “If you have 100 switches and it takes 5 minutes per switch, that is 500 minutes. With NetBrain, you can push it out to all 100 switches in less than 30 minutes.”

• The first network engineer for the public safety department relayed their experience: “If I had to make a change to 50 devices, manually that would take days. With NetBrain, I can push it to all 50 devices in less than 30 minutes.”

• The CISO for the financial services firm noted: “Without NetBrain, the Zero Trust deployment would have taken six people about two weeks. We got it done in three days.”

• The network operations director for the higher education institution observed: “Previously, I would have had three engineers working overnight to do the code upgrades. Now we schedule it, let NetBrain do the work unattended, and spend about 1 to 2 hours validating it afterward.”

Modeling and assumptions. The model captures the time savings for performing network configuration changes across the devices deployed. Potential avoided downtime from configuration-related incidents is not quantified in the model. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• For modeling simplicity, Forrester normalizes these recurring activities into 26 annual change events, with effort calibrated to device-level manual execution and validation. Stated differently, there will likely be many more events during a year that involve a subset of the 5,000 network devices.

• Before NetBrain, it takes 6 minutes of FTE time for an average configuration change per device.

• The effective reduction in change execution and validation with NetBrain for network configuration changes is 68% in Year 1, 76.5% in Year 2, and 85% by Year 3 based on the effectiveness ramp.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for a network engineer FTE is $71.

• The composite’s productivity adjustment factor is 80% for this cohort of impacted FTEs, which reflects that not all time saved translates into productive work.

• The combined time savings computed for this benefit implies that the composite organization frees up the equivalent of 4.3 network FTEs in Year 1, 4.8 in Year 2, and 5.3 in Year 3 for proactive and higher-value-added work.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The frequency and scale of significant network change events.

• The amount of manual effort required in the prior environment and the skill levels of the organization’s network team.

• The proportion of change activities that are suitable for automation.

• The complexity and consistency of the network environment.

• The maturity of change templates, runbooks, and validation workflows.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of under $1.3 million.

Network Team Productivity-Driven Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees said NetBrain enabled their organizations to increase the capacity of existing network teams without expanding headcount in proportion to network growth and complexity. In the prior state, their engineers spent substantial time researching devices and configurations, responding to routine requests, onboarding new infrastructure, recreating established procedures, and escalating work to senior personnel with specialized knowledge. As networks expanded across devices, sites, vendors, and cloud environments, these day-to-day demands constrained their teams’ ability to complete modernization projects and other higher-value activities without adding staff or contractors.

NetBrain provided the interviewees’ organizations with a shared source of network context, reusable runbooks, standardized operational workflows, searchable device and configuration data, and self-service capabilities that reduced manual research and dependence on senior engineers. These capabilities enabled less-experienced personnel to perform more operational tasks, reduced interruptions to senior staff, accelerated the onboarding of devices and sites, and allowed network teams to redeploy capacity to strategic work.

• The CISO for the financial services firm observed: “Without NetBrain, I would probably need two more people to do what we are doing today. For the people who use it every day, I would say the productivity improvement is about 50%.”

• The network engineer for the energy conglomerate provided a slightly different context (coming from a large enterprise): “Without NetBrain, we would probably need three to five more contractors for the work we are doing. NetBrain lets the team focus on other priorities instead of having contractors or engineers doing that work manually.”

• The second network engineer for the public safety department noted: “Before, you needed a senior engineer to do a lot of this work. Now a junior engineer can use the automation, get the information, and handle things that would have been escalated before.” In terms of staffing capacity, they added: “Without NetBrain, I would say we would need one or two more people. It is like having another engineer helping the team.”

• The IT infrastructure engineer for the healthcare services provider explained: “A task that might have taken multiple engineers can now be done by one engineer. That frees the other engineers to work on other priorities.”

Modeling and assumptions. This benefit captures structural productivity gains not explicitly modeled in the troubleshooting and change automation benefits above. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite’s network team comprises 30 FTEs before NetBrain is deployed.

• The gross improvement in productivity for the network operations team with NetBrain is 25%. The net improvement in team productivity is 20% in Year 1, 22.5% in Year 2, and 25% in Year 3 based on the effectiveness ramp.

• Row D3 calculates the number of network operations team FTEs that can be assigned to higher-value tasks at a holistic level.

• To account for the productivity impact of Benefits A and C, Forrester applies a 50% overlap adjustment, reducing the FTE redeployment savings in row D3.

• The blended fully burdened annual salary for network FTEs is $162,000 (60% network engineers and 40% senior network engineers/architects).

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The size and composition of the network team, coupled with the size, complexity and growth of the organization’s network environment.

• The amount of manual effort required in the prior environment, closely tied to the skill levels of the network operations personnel.

• The proportion of released capacity that can be effectively redeployed.

• The degree of overlap with other quantified benefits despite the adjustment applied in the model.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $1.2 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Benefits that provide value for the interviewees’ organizations but are not quantified for this study include:

• Improved network visibility through live network context. NetBrain’s device and topology, path, and state provided dynamic visibility into network topology, dependencies, paths, configurations, and device state, establishing a current source of truth for the network. This foundational capability enabled the quantified benefits associated with troubleshooting, change validation, network team productivity, and reduced downtime exposure, but it was not assigned separate financial value. The network operations director at the higher education institution said, “The ability to see the entire network and normalize the network was the biggest thing for us.” This benefit could be quantified through longitudinal measures of network-model completeness, data accuracy, documentation currency, and the operational decisions attributable specifically to improved visibility rather than to the troubleshooting, change automation, and productivity improvements already modeled.

• Reduced risk of downtime from network configuration changes. Interviewees said NetBrain’s change templates, automated pre- and post-change validation, real-time execution monitoring, configuration comparisons, and rollback capabilities improved confidence that network changes would not disrupt services. The evidence varied: one interviewee recalled a few change-related incidents per year and reported that NetBrain reduced their frequency or duration, while another reported no prior configuration-caused outages but still valued NetBrain for validating changes, simplifying rollback, and shortening maintenance windows. This benefit could be quantified through data on change-related P1/P2 incidents, failed-change rates, rollback frequency, service-impact duration, and the business scope of affected changes, but the interviewees did not provide sufficiently consistent pre- and post-NetBrain event data to model this value credibly.

• Stronger operational confidence and cross-team collaboration. NetBrain gave the interviewees’ organizations’ network, application, server, security, operations, and other technology teams a shared view of network paths, dependencies, and operating conditions. Interviewees said this common context reduced ambiguity, supported more informed incident handoffs, and helped teams establish whether the network was contributing to an issue without requiring every stakeholder to interpret device-level CLI output. The network operations director at the higher education institution said, “We can export the map and give the other team the data so they can see exactly what we are seeing.” This benefit could be quantified by tracking cross-team escalations, incident reassignment rates, duplicated investigative effort, and delays specifically attributable to incomplete or conflicting network context, although isolating these effects from the modeled troubleshooting savings would require detailed workflow and ticket-level analysis.

• Reduced dependence on tribal knowledge and senior specialists. NetBrain’s reusable runbooks, standardized workflows, searchable network information, and automated data collection helped the interviewees’ organizations codify knowledge that had previously resided with individual senior engineers. Interviewees said these capabilities supported knowledge transfer, enabled less-experienced personnel to perform more advanced operational activities, and reduced organizational exposure when experienced employees were unavailable or left the organization. The network operations director at the higher education institution said, “The runbook gives the technician the commands to run and the information to collect, so the technician does not have to know everything the engineer knows.” This benefit could be quantified through changes in escalation patterns, time to proficiency, succession and continuity risk, and the cost of replacing or transferring knowledge from senior engineers, although these outcomes would require multiyear workforce data and could overlap with the network team productivity benefit.

• Improved configuration governance, security, and compliance confidence. NetBrain helped interviewees’ organizations assess configuration drift, identify vulnerable or noncompliant devices, validate approved settings, and maintain greater consistency across heterogeneous networks. These capabilities improved confidence in network governance, security posture, and audit readiness, particularly for regulated and mission-critical organizations, but interviewees were not able to provide consistent financial data concerning avoided audit effort, security events, or compliance failures. The CISO for the financial services firm described the underlying complexity: “For SOC 2, I need to show that the configurations are being monitored and that we know when something changes.” This benefit could be quantified by tracking configuration-drift rates, remediation backlogs, audit findings, control-testing effort, and losses avoided from configuration-related security or compliance events, although credible valuation would require sufficient historical event data and attribution of outcomes specifically to NetBrain.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement the NetBrain platform and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Future potential to expand to Agentic AI network operations. Interviewees discussed interest in applying newer NetBrain AI capabilities to simplify network research, generate documentation, interact with network data conversationally, and help less-experienced personnel initiate diagnostic or remediation workflows. Because some of these capabilities were newly released or still being evaluated during the interviews, interviewees’ organizations had not yet established measurable outcomes, but the capabilities created future potential to extend automation and network expertise to a broader population of users.

• Ability to extend automation to new operational use cases and teams. Interviewees described opportunities to codify additional engineering knowledge into reusable intents, runbooks, dashboards, and self-service workflows as organizational needs changed. This provided a foundation for expanding automation beyond the core network team to adjacent infrastructure, security, operations, audiovisual, and facilities teams without requiring those users to develop deep network expertise. The second network engineer for the public safety department explained, “Once you build the automation, you can keep expanding it and letting other teams use it.”

• Greater flexibility to support evolving multivendor environments. NetBrain’s vendor-agnostic approach gave the interviewees’ organizations the ability to incorporate legacy equipment, newer network technologies, cloud infrastructure, and devices from different manufacturers without adopting a separate operational platform for each environment. This positioned these organizations to change infrastructure vendors, modernize hardware, or retain selected legacy technologies without replacing their network automation and observability layer. As a network operations director for the higher education institution put it: “We don’t want to be locked into one vendor. We have Cisco, F5, Palo Alto, and older equipment, and NetBrain lets us manage all of it.”

• Adaptability through future integrations and modular expansion. NetBrain’s integrations with monitoring, logging, IT service management, security, virtualization, and infrastructure systems enabled interviewees’ organizations to incorporate the platform into changing operational ecosystems rather than treating it as an isolated tool. Its modular structure also allowed these organizations to expand from mapping and troubleshooting into preventive automation, change management, and application assurance as their operational maturity and priorities evolved.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).