Earlier this year we spent some time with Enterprise Strategy Group reviewing the TCO models we’ve built for our products based on feedback from our customers and partners.  We chose ESG as they have a proven method for understanding, validating, quantifying, and modeling the economic value propositions of many different technology products and solutions so were a good fit for our Distributed Services Platform.  ESG took our TCO data, case studies, and, most importantly, conducted in-depth interviews with Pensando users to better understand and quantify the outcomes experienced by organizations using our products.  We’re very thankful that a broad range of our customers were willing to be interviewed as part of the process and it’s gratifying to see that their findings align with what we’re seeing both in testing and in real-world environments.

For those of you that want to get to the details as fast as possible, here’s ESG’s summary:

ESG reviewed the Pensando Distributed Services Platform and conducted a series of interviews with Pensando enterprise and service provider customers. We uncovered economic benefit in the following categories for organizations using Pensando services: Enterprises, carriers, and cloud service providers (CSPs) face similar networking, storage, and security challenges. CSPs, however, may be harder pressed in some areas given their diverse customers, workloads, and security requirements. Traditionally, enterprises operate data centers with “scale-up” IT infrastructure architecture―a complex resource model that is CPU-centric and includes TAP networks, switches, and security appliances. Eventually this approach restricts performance and/or scale, and lack of full network visibility inhibits troubleshooting and optimization.  Add to the mix data growth, data security/privacy regulations, and skills shortages, and IT complexity soars. Too often the result is delayed problem resolution, network downtime, low server efficiency, security gaps, and high compliance costs. Carriers and CSPs have embraced a “scale-out” approach, which enables services to be run on homogeneous, industry-standard server hardware. The challenge is that spinning up network or security functions on the generic servers employed by carriers and CSPs burns CPU resources and is generally less efficient and performant than specialty hardware. Pensando helps offload the CPU and provides an isolated control point for the servers that can be managed by the CSP or carrier, independent of the OS or software running on the server. Enterprises have recognized the value of a simplified, cloud-like approach and are working toward that goal. Pensando allows them to minimize or eliminate appliances and virtual appliance products from multiple vendors and still modernize their data centers into a more cloud-like model.

ESG’s analysis found that Pensando’s scale-out software-defined services approach enabled organizations to centralize management, simplify administration, and optimize performance. Qualitative and quantitative findings confirmed that the Pensando Distributed Services Platform allowed customers to consolidate network monitoring, eliminate appliances, reduce network downtime, increase server utilization efficiency, and improve security. While at first glance it might seem expensive to implement Pensando hardware and software into each data center server, ESG’s modeled scenarios demonstrate significant savings for both traditional enterprises and cloud service providers, and conversations with real-world customers confirm that. ESG analysis revealed a 64% three-year TCO savings for a cloud services provider with 20,000 servers looking to Pensando to provide network monitoring and management, core network services, security policy management and enforcement, and data encryption. ESG found that an enterprise with 2,000 servers could save 84% over three years by consolidating network monitoring, east-west firewalls, load balancers, and microsegmentation under Pensando.

If you want a to see all the details as well as get your hands on some broader ESG research around what matters to IT organizations today, the entire document can be found here.  We also have an overview of the benefits seen by a financial services customer here.