The Total Economic Impact™ Of VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations

Business Benefits Enabled By VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations

A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study Commissioned By VMware, April 2024

Managing a complex and ever-growing network requires a high degree of visibility into what changes and communications are occurring. Network engineers and administrators cannot strengthen, secure, and scale a network that they cannot see. VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations monitors and maps overall network topology for VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware NSX to help organizations become less reactive and more forward-looking in their network management capabilities.

VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations helps organizations gain end-to-end visibility across their virtual and physical networks. This increased visibility allows their customers to become more efficient in monitoring, optimizing, and securing network infrastructure across cloud environments. VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations decreases the manual processes typically involved when managing and scaling an organization’s network, facilitating activities such as application discovery, workload migration, troubleshooting, and network segmentation planning.

VMware commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the benefits and potential financial impact enterprises may realize by deploying VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.1

icon

Benefits present value (BPV)

$3.86M

icon

Reduction in network outages

50%

To better understand the benefits and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four representatives with experience using VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization.

VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations

VMware Aria Operations for Networks – a component of VMware Cloud Foundation – provides Network Operations capabilities including network visibility, application discovery, and network troubleshooting. VMware Aria Operations for Networks works with VMware NSX, also a component of VMware Cloud Foundation, to build an optimized, highly available, and secure network infrastructure. VMware Cloud Foundation helps organizations modernize their infrastructure and implement a highly efficient cloud operating model that provides the scale and agility of public cloud with the security and performance of private cloud. VMware Cloud Foundation is designed to cater to a wide variety of business needs with a fully integrated set of capabilities delivered in a private cloud environment.

Prior to using VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations, interviewees said that they struggled to understand how various parts of their network were “talking” to one another, which made segmentation planning and firewall rule creation difficult. Gaining this type of network visibility demanded many hours of work and, even after much time and effort, often yielded questionably accurate results. Troubleshooting network issues was also a challenge, since it was hard to pinpoint where a given issue was occurring within the network.

After the investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations, the interviewees cited how the overall improvement in network visibility — including visibility on VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware NSX, certified public clouds, and virtual and physical networks — helped their organizations become proactive in consolidating and streamlining their network infrastructure. Notable improvements in time to resolution and troubleshooting were identified as key benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • Increased network mapping efficiency by over 80%. Before implementing VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations, the composite organization spent a lot of time creating virtual machine (VM) topology to understand what was happening within its network. When the composite uses VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations to visualize network connections with flow mapping, it significantly reduces the time needed to create affinity diagrams, which in turn helps it proactively address issues or security vulnerabilities. These increased network mapping efficiencies are worth $1.7 million over three years.
  • Decreased network outages by as much as 50%. VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations reduces outages at the composite organization. This solution allows the composite to improve the performance of its network and decrease outages, saving $1.1 million over three years.
  • Reduced time spent monitoring their network by over 75%. The composite organization needs to monitor its network to optimize performance, understand application dependencies, improve security, and maintain compliance standards. By cutting down on the amount of effort needed for these activities, VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations helps the composite save valuable time for its network engineers and administrators. Reducing the time spent monitoring its network provides the composite with $846,000 in value over three years.
  • Decreased troubleshooting time by 90%. Identifying where a given network issue is occurring is often half the battle when it comes to troubleshooting. VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations helped the composite organization root out issues quickly, cutting down on the time network engineers spent diagnosing problems by pinpointing the source of the network issue for a faster resolution. This provided $221,000 in value over three years.

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

  • Enabling digitization and workload migration. Through mapping, application discovery, and an overall improved understanding of their network, interviewees’ organizations migrated portions of their organizations’ networks to the cloud in a smart and efficient way.
  • Breaking down siloes and improving collaboration. Interviewees said that by providing visibility across different types of cloud environments, VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations unified their disparate IT groups under a common network view. The platform gave users at the interviewees’ organizations the ability to understand network overlaps and commonalities and allowed for equity in network visibility — executives, managers, and engineers all received access to the data within VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.
  • Forged a strong partnership with VMware. Interviewees’ organizations took advantage of VMware’s openness to receiving feedback and engaging in a dialogue about challenges, product capabilities, and roadmaps for future product updates.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $3.86 million over three years.

“Enablement of digital transformation is huge for us right now. We are working to digitally transform our infrastructure as a whole, whether it’s virtual infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or VMware services on the cloud. We are moving toward a 100% digital enterprise, and this product facilitates that.”

Network administrator and engineer, aviation

“It’s all about visibility. A lot of the time, when you’re dealing with a complex network, you don’t necessarily have a ton of visibility. But now we do. We’re able to run a query and say, ‘Hey, why can’t this device talk to this device?’”

IT infrastructure and security manager, chemical

Key Statistics

  • icon icon

    Increase in network mapping efficiency

    81%
  • icon icon

    Reduction in network monitoring time

    75%
  • icon icon

    Reduction in network outages

    50%
  • icon icon

    Reduction in troubleshooting time

    90%
  • icon icon
  • icon icon
  • icon icon
  • icon icon

Benefits (Three-Year)

Increased network mapping efficiency Decreased network outages Reduced time spent monitoring network Improved troubleshooting

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.

The objective of the framework is to identify the benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed VMware stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed four representatives at organizations using VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations to obtain data with respect to benefits and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. Financial Model Framework

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. Case Study

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by VMware and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential benefits that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Network Operations.

VMware reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

VMware provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Leigh Greene

Cookie Preferences

Accept Cookies

A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions (data inputs, website navigation), so you don’t have to re-enter data when you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.

Behavioral information collected by our web analytics vendor is used to analyze data pertaining to visitor trends, plan website enhancements, and measure overall website effectiveness. We may also use cookies or web beacons to help us offer you products, programs, or services that may be of interest to you and to deliver relevant advertising. We may use third-party advertising companies to help tailor website content to users or to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may also employ cookies and web beacons to measure advertising effectiveness.

Please accept cookies and the collection of behavioral information to receive full functionality and enhance your experience. If you decline cookies, some features of the website may not function normally.

Please see our Privacy Policy for more information.