October Computerworld Research Report

A few days ago Computerworld released a MarketVibe report (sponsored by Infoblox) that showed a strong correlation between an organization’s size and the amount spent per IP address to manage the network.  One would think that with more users that costs per user would actually decline as additional IP addresses are added against fixed or even slightly increasing IT expenses.  That wasn’t the case in this survey.  Costs per IP address were actually notably higher at large enterprises:

The annual cost to manage each IP address is directly correlated with organization size. Enterprise organizations have higher costs per IP address, with an average of $9.19 annually. SMB organizations, on the other hand, report an average annual cost of $7.12 for each IP address. The overall annual average among all organization sizes is $8.10.  – Computerworld MarketVibe Report, Oct. 2008

This suggests that the larger enterprise networks are having problems with scale, complexity and availability challenges, and have to invest more in order to keep up.  This is a warning signal to large enterprises embarking on virtualization, consolidation or even cloud initiatives; the network that they will be leveraging may end up consuming more expenses than the net savings.  One answer is investments in network management and automation systems. 

According to the Computerworld report just published this month, larger enterprises are leading the way in those investments; yet the adoption is still very low.

Two-thirds of respondents (66%) are currently using basic software tools like spreadsheets for IP address management. Other applications used for IP address management include IPAM software (19%) and IPAM appliances (10%). While respondents in enterprise organizations are significantly more likely than SMB organizations to be using IPAM software (27% vs. 13%) and IPAM appliances (17% vs. 5%), usage of spreadsheets at enterprise organizations is still high, at 63%.