When the network needs a refresh, you need to convince the money people to fund new technologies.

10 Ways to Sell Upper Management on a Network Upgrade

By Leslie T. ONeill

The days of deploying new equipment for the sake of having the latest and greatest ended when the Internet bubble burst. Nevertheless, there are many legitimate reasons for upgrading your companys enterprise network. The trick is selling those reasons to the executives holding your companys purse strings. When you know its time for a network upgrade, you need to have more than the technical facts you need to arm yourself with a rock-solid business case. Start with these 10 ways to sell the members of your upper-management team on the network upgrade. 1. Know your numbers Its no secret: No matter how promising a technology may be, if it doesnt result in a tangible financial benefit to your business, it wont get a green light from upper management. So when you propose a network upgrade, make sure that its business case is strong enough to clearly show what it will do for the company. For instance, how much money will the upgrade save or earn your company? How will it help employees become more productive? Know up front what the technologys positive ROI (return on investment) will be. 2. Run new, revenue-generating applications and cost-saving services. Simply put, old networks cant run next-generation applications at least, not efficiently enough to satisfy customers or employees. If your company is looking to offer customers Web 2.0 services or cut costs with a VoIP implementation, you need a modern enterprise to handle the greater bandwidth requirements, QoS (quality of service) functions, and additional traffic that will be generated by both next-generation applications and voice services. 3. Protect the business with tightened enterprise security. Security threats continue to evolve, and so should your security measures. Any network upgrade should include advanced security measures that protect new applications, such as Web 2.0 communications tools and VoIP, to ensure the most impenetrable borders possible. But security threats come

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from inside an organization as well as outside, so a security system must be upgraded to continue to prevent data theft including a companys proprietary information and fraud from disgruntled employees. 4. Save money through reduced power consumption. The push toward making IT more ecologically friendly is both good for the planet and good for your business. If its your datacenter youre overhauling, choose energy-efficient servers, such as Sun Microsystems Inc.s Sun Fire/ SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 boxes or Dells Energy Smart PowerEdge servers. Also, choose other datacenter equipment, such as fans, that reduces the amount of power your company consumes and pays for. In his blog, David Douglas, Sun Microsystems vice president of Eco Responsibility, advised readers to make the most of their efficiency projects by factoring energy savings into the ROI on capital improvements. 5. Increase employee productivity. The primary reason to upgrade a LAN is to gain greater performance from your client/server applications. When you applications run faster, your organizations employees can accomplish more work in a day. According to Cisco Systems Inc., a CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computeraided modeling) applications task that takes five minutes to execute with a 10BaseT hub could execute in just one minute with a 10 Mbps Ethernet 10/100 switch. 6. Increase network capacity. Speeds and feeds still have a place in selling a network upgrade. Quite simply, without increased capacity, an organization cant use new and big applications, such as VoIP, which promise to both cut costs and help make workers more productive. 7. Make the network more reliable. From financial institutions to retail outlets to academic outposts, almost every organization today relies on its network to do business. And when the network is the business, downtime will certainly lose your company revenue and quite likely scare off customers. A network upgrade can make the enterprise more reliable and decrease costly downtime. 8. Ensure ongoing vendor support. If your network devices have been around long enough, theyre probably nearing the end of their useful life. When devices become outdated, vendors stop supporting them with necessary software patches, technical support and replacements for failed parts. A network upgrade will include fresh vendor support, and you may be able to negotiate less-expensive support contracts with your IT providers.

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9. Refresh and hone network design. A network upgrade is an opportunity to revisit and improve the design of the enterprise. This is a great time to make your network more modular, for instance, which would allow you to ease further changes into your network in stages. It also allows you to better tune IT functionality to the needs of each site within your company. 10. Simplify network management. Upgrading the network is also a chance to simplify network management with, for instance, powerful automated tools and a unified interface, which will make it more cost-effective and efficient.

Sources: http://www.edrawsoft.com/Modular-Network-Design.php http://www.explabs.com/media/pdf/wp_web_2_security.pdf http://blogs.sun.com/enviro/ http://www.networkworld.com/research/2007/072307-network-upgrade.html?page=1 http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/smbiz/languide/p2.html http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=features&pathtype=purchase&sku=3C15500

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