Global Inputs Tab

Selected Inputs

Question

Sample Answers/Hints

Global Inputs

Cost of Capital

What is the approximate interest rate on corporate or government bonds (commercial paper) that the company uses? {what is the customer's cost to borrow money, all CFO's will know this}

Common "risk free" interest rates are in the 4-9% range, though companies frequently base their cost of capital on the rate they can get by investing their money in internal company projects, in which case, the rate could be higher than 9%.

Annual Growth Rate

What is your company's annual revenue growth rate?

Smaller successful companies usually have higher growth rates (10-25%) while larger companies have less market share to take, and have lower growth rates (5-15%).

Current network uptime

What is your current network uptime?

When answering this question, focus on the critical areas of your business, such as those that provide service to direct sales channels (online, call centers, e-chat centers), marketing (global websites), and core operations (order and service fulfillment).

For your reference:

Cost of NOC Employees

Total # of NOC Engineer FTEs

How many IT engineers do you have working in your Network Operations Center?

If the customer has some part-time employees or contractors, have them translate them into full-time employee (FTE) equivalents in terms of cost.

Average yearly cost per NOC Engineer

What is your average annual cost for an IT employee?

Remind them to include the total cost including salary, benefits, perks, training, travel, and general overhead.

Total # of NOC Manager FTEs

How many IT managers do you have in your Network Operations Center?

This number is generally much lower than the # of NOC engineers, generally in a ratio of one IT Manager for every 5-20 NOC engineers.

Average yearly cost per NOC Manager

What is your average annual cost for an IT Manager?

Remind them to include the total cost including salary, benefits, perks, training, travel, and general overhead.

NOC Benefits Tab

Selected Inputs

Question

Sample Answers/Hints

Reduce Time Spent on Remediation Workflows

Avg # of network related support tickets per day

On average, how many support tickets does the customer have per day?

They could look up the number of tickets from January 1 to December 31 (or some other arbitrary period) then divide by 365 (or the arbitrary number of days in that period).

Average time (minutes) per support ticket

On average, how many minutes does a support tech spend on a ticket?

Similar to above, try to take a snapshot period (1 year ideally) and find the average time per ticket for that period.

% reduction in time for remediation workflows

This refers to the reduction in time that a NOC Engineer needs to remediate a network issue.

This will be an estimate, based on the pain points the customer has, which would be addressed by the features that Cisco NOAS provides, typically 30% or less.

Reduce Time Spent on Network Device Monitoring

# of WAN/LAN devices actively monitored

How many WAN/LAN devices are actively monitored?

Frequently, the IT department designates someone to check on devices.

# of checks per day for WAN/LAN devices

How many times per day are the WAN/LAN devices checked?

If the check occurs every other day, then, use 0.5.

Avg. time (minutes) per WAN/LAN device check

What is the average time to check a WAN/LAN device?

Be sure to include the IT person\92s idle time --such as watching screen for errors.

% reduction in time to check WAN/LAN devices

By what % would the WAN/LAN device checks be reduced?

The reduction comes from automation tools that eliminate manual checks to be done.

Freed Up Capacity for IT Managers

% of NOC Manager's time spent on network incidents

What percentage of a NOC Manager\92s time is currently spent dealing with network incidents?

The remainder of a NOC Manager\92s time would be spent managing their team, communicating ting with other groups, etc.

Cost of Downtime & Turnover Tab

Selected Inputs

Question

Sample Answers/Hints

Reduce Cost of Downtime to Business

Avg. cost of downtime per hour

Could you estimate the average cost of downtime per hour?

When answering this question, think of the critical areas of your business, and the amount of sales you make or product you create/deliver/provide during an hour, and consider that you have a global market.

Additionally, the cost of downtime could include the lost productivity of your workers or for service providers, not delivering on services and incurring penalties for missing SLA agreements.

One way to determine this number is by figuring out the smallest unit of sale or deliverable for the business, and how often a sale is done or how long it take deliver the product or service. Then translate that information into a one-hour period.
For example, if a car is assembled in 4 min. and generates $20k in revenue, then the cost of 1hr of downtime would be $300k.

% Reduction in network downtime

What percentage reduction in downtime do you expect to achieve by using the Cisco IA for Networks solution?

This figure will be agreed upon by Cisco and the customer and depends upon the customer\92s current network environment and is typically around 30%.

Reduce Training Time Through Better Institutional Memory

Average turnover rate in NOC

What is your average turnover rate in your NOC?

To arrive at the %, you need to identify out how often an employee leaves the company vs. how many employees you have.

For example, assuming you maintain 20 employees in your NOC and one employee leaves the company every 3 months. This equates to 4 employees per year, or a turnover rate of 20% (4 / 20).

Another way to calculate would be to divide 1 year by the average employee tenure. If the average tenure of NOC employees is 4 years, the turnover rate is 25% (1 / 4)

Average # of months to onboard new employee

What is the average amount of time to train or onboard a new employee?

Training a new employee takes some time, even if they performed the exact same function at a previous company or job. This ballpark estimate should include training and knowledge capture/transfer for the employee to be able to perform their job without extensive help from peers.

% Reduction in onboarding time

What % reduction in onboarding time would you expect by having your entire network operations flow mapped out?

The % reduction comes from eliminating the need for new employees to learn everything by digging through documentation. The default 8% saves 1 week out of the current estimated 3 months for onboarding.

Model Details

The Model projects benefits of the Cisco IA for Networks solution over a 5 year timeframe, and breaks them down by NOC Benefits and Reduced Downtime & Less Costly Turnover. It provides yearly subcategory totals in the grey shaded lines and project totals in the green shaded line. And finally, the right most column sums the benefits to be gained over the 5 years.

NOC Benefits

Remediation Workflows

Refers to benefits from speeding up the manual and automated workflow remediation process for addressing network issues.

Network Device Monitoring

Refers to the reduced time to monitor network devices such a servers, networked attached storage, and communications systems.

Time on Network Incidents

This refers to \93recaptured\94 time that NOC Managers can spend on higher level tasks, such as strategic projects, so the actual [long-term] company benefit may be larger than the straight translation of cost of employee time.

Total NOC Benefits

Summation of the above three benefits.

Cost of Downtime & Turnover

Downtime To Business

Represents the benefits from a reduction in downtime. This would likely provide the largest benefit to a customer.

Training Time for NOC Employees

This refers to the shortened learning curve for a new NOC employee to learn the existing workflows, network topology, etc.

Total Reduction in Cost

Summation of the above two benefits.

Total

Total Project Impact

This refers to the summation of the above five benefits. Note that the benefits in years two through five are discounted by the cost of capital, to provide the net present value of those benefits.

In other words, a dollar a year from now, is less valuable than a dollar today, since I would be able to invest a dollar today, and have more than a dollar a year from now\85