If IT groups are to be the strategic business partners their companies need, they require solutions that can improve infrastructure life cycle management in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and heightened security threats.
To quantify the value of such solutions, Cisco recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ analysis of Cisco Intersight. The comprehensive study found that for a composite organization, Intersight delivered 192% return on investment (ROI) and a payback period of less than six months, along with significant tangible benefits to IT and businesses.
Cisco Intersight overview
Cisco Intersight is a cloud-native IT operations platform for infrastructure life cycle management. It provides IT teams with comprehensive visibility, control, and automation capabilities for Cisco’s portfolio of compute solutions for data centers, colocation facilities, and edge environments based on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS). Intersight also integrates with leading operating systems, storage providers, hypervisors, and third-party IT service management and security tools.
Intersight’s unified, policy-driven approach to infrastructure management helps IT groups automate numerous tasks and, as Forrester found, free up time to dedicate to strategic projects.
| Forrester study quantifies the benefits of Cisco Intersight A composite organization using Cisco Intersight achieved:192% ROI and payback in less than six months$3.3M net present value over three years$2.7M from improved uptime and resilience 50% reduction in mean time to resolution $1.7M from increased IT productivity$267K benefit from decreased time to value due to faster project execution and earlier return on infrastructure investments |
Forrester Total Economic Impact study findings
The analyst firm conducted detailed interviews with IT decision-makers and Intersight users at six organizations, from which it created one composite organization: a multinational technology-driven company with $10 billion in annual revenue, 120 branch locations, and a team of six engineers managing its 1,000 servers deployed in several centralized data centers as well as across distributed edge environments.
Overall, Forrester found that the composite organization realized $5 million in benefits from Cisco Intersight over three years, resulting in a 192% ROI on its investment of $1.7 million. Those savings came from several areas:
- Improved uptime and resilience: $2.7 million in benefits, including a 50% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) of infrastructure issues, thanks to features such as automatic log collection and proactive return material authorization. A senior infrastructure domain architect who took part in the Forrester study explained one of the benefits this way: “We wake up in the morning, and someone’s knocking on the door to get into the data center with a part. We didn’t even know there was a problem yet.”
- Increased IT productivity: $1.7M in benefits. Another senior infrastructure architect, in a healthcare organization, estimated that Intersight had reduced the infrastructure build time by 80%, saving “hundreds of hours alone just in the build-out.” The ability to preconfigure entire data centers has enabled the organization to stand up environments in an hour or two once equipment arrives. The company rolled out 27 domains across multiple data centers in just three hours.
- Decreased time to value: Faster project execution means earlier returns on infrastructure investments, delivering a $267,000 benefit.
Strategic benefits of Cisco Intersight
The study found that Intersight also provides other business value, such as more-cost-effective hardware management. The platform enables greater optimization of workloads, Forrester found, leading to reduced overprovisioning and more informed hardware decisions based on usage patterns.
Intersight also improves compliance with corporate policies and industry regulations, by standardizing configurations, reducing manual errors, and improving real-time visibility into infrastructure health.
In addition, automating repetitive tasks and reducing hands-on management time increases IT job satisfaction. Intersight gives IT teams the time they need for focusing on higher-skilled, transformational work that firmly embeds IT as a strategic partner in the organization.
A compute manager for a financial services firm said, “Every hour that I have my guys work on something that could be automated or made easier through Intersight is an hour I get back that they can be doing the transformational work I need them to do.”
Cisco Intersight helps organizations simplify IT operations to increase uptime, improve productivity, and reduce risk. Learn more by downloading the free study The Total Economic Impact™ of Cisco Intersight.
