1. Support

1. Programs

1. Register

1. Tech Info Library

1. Software

1. Documentation

1. Policies & Procedures

1. Best Practices

1. Product Lifecycle
2. Evaluate
3. Procure
4. Deploy
5. Operate
6. Extend
7. ITIL
8. Service Support
9. Service Delivery

1. Contact Support

Product Lifecycle: Evaluate

The Evaluate workflow describes approaches to assess Packeteer products' suitability and benefits in your own network environment.

In Evaluate, you answer some questions to see how helpful Packeteer products might be to you. You learn about the PacketShaper product, exploring a number of instructional resources, from high-level to fairly technical. You can pursue a hands-on evaluation, read how others have put Packeteer solutions to use, and/or calculate your potential return on investment (ROI).

Ask Yourself Some Questions

Take a few minutes to answer a few yes/no questions to see if you have a situation that could benefit from a PacketShaper. If you had some YESes, then continue on to find out more.

Learn More about Packeteer Products

Packeteer offers a continuum of literature, from high-level descriptions to technical details.

Examine a very brief summary of Packeteer products (only 100 words) to get oriented.

For a high-level, multimedia presentation on Packeteer's approach to Application Traffic Management, visit the Demo Room and click Packeteer System Overview.

For datasheets and their associated specifications, visit the corporate website's Resource Library and click on Datasheets.

To read other customers' experiences with Packeteer products, see Customer Testimonials.

For more in-depth papers about products, features, and benefits along with lots of examples, scroll down to look for the Technical Product Overviews (TPOs) in PacketGuide's Documents page. The papers listed below the TPOs are also worthwhile if you want even more technical detail.

To inspect the type of post-sales user instructions and documentation Packeteer offers (although it won't be of much assistance in this earlier stage of exploration), see PacketGuide.

Try Out a Packeteer Product

You can see an online product demonstration, get an in-person demonstration, or try out a product for yourself with a hands-on evaluation.

To see an online demonstration of the web-based user interfaces for each of the PacketShaper's modules, visit the Demo Room. You will find a separate presentation for each module. The first part of each presentation contains informational slides, but each has a demonstration using the product's actual user interface later in the presentation.

Call your nearest Packeteer office if you'd like to speak with someone to ask questions or to arrange a live product demo.

If you'd like to have a product evaluation unit on your own network for a few days for a hands-on evaluation, you will need to go through a qualification process. Call your nearest Packeteer office to start the process rolling. While waiting for the evaluation, you can examine the instructions Packeteer field personnel and partners use for an evaluation, The Evaluation Guide.

To schedule an evaluation of Packeteer's WAN Optimization solution with monitoring, shaping, compression, and acceleration capabilities, click here.

Calculate your Return on Investment (ROI)

You can assess the PacketShaper’s ROI in several ways:

• You can calculate the savings from avoiding service interruptions and help-desk calls.
• You can evaluate the savings associated with extending the useful life of current WAN bandwidth.
• You can look at the opportunity-cost savings of improving application performance, which, in turn, improves employee productivity.

Use any one of these examples, or a combination, as guidelines to calculate your own Packeteer ROI.

Service disruption avoidance (end user): Studies have shown that service interruptions typically cost $70 (USD) per hour per affected user. Assuming an hour of lost productivity per user, per month for a 20-user branch office, the monthly cost of service interruptions is $1,400. In this case, a PacketShaper 1700 pays for itself in 2-4 months, and a PacketShaper 3500 pays for itself in 3-12 months. (The price depends on the link size to be managed.)

Help-desk call avoidance: A service interruption or poor performance is likely to result in end-user calls to the IT help desk to report the problem. The resulting support costs vary depending on the severity of the problem. According to published studies, a mid-level desktop support technician costs $50 (USD) per hour, and a problem of moderate severity is typically resolved in 30 minutes. Assuming four moderate service interruptions per week resulting in two help-desk service calls per interruption, the monthly cost to the IT organization is $800 for a 20-person branch office. In this example, a PacketShaper 1700 pays for itself in 3-7 months, and a PacketShaper 3500 pays for itself in 4-21 months.

WAN upgrade avoidance: Assume you can delay upgrading a Frame Relay WAN from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps, at a savings of about $1,000 (USD) per month. International WAN link costs run anywhere from 5 to 25 times greater than U.S. domestic WAN links. For an international WAN link, upgrade avoidance can justify a PacketShaper 3500 in less than one month. For a US domestic WAN link, the ROI comes at 3-17 months.

For a company with 10 128 Kbps branch sites and a 100 Mbps main site, the ROI comes at about 7 months for PacketShaper compression. A savings of about $300 per site, per month is achieved by avoiding a 128 Kbps to 256 Kbps upgrade.

Application-performance optimization: Suppose a company with eight 256 Kbps branch sites recently spent $20 million USD deploying SAP, and the performance is unacceptable. Although harder to quantify, an investment in a PacketShaper to address the performance problems makes the $20 million investment successful.