RETURN ON INVESTMENT
a comprehensive case study comparing Self-Managed, IT Support on time & material basis and NetStar’s Managed Care.

This document is a comparative study of different methods you can employ to manage your IT infrastructure. For the purpose of comparison, we look at three different options in which you can manage your IT infrastructure- manage it yourself (Self-managed), manage through an IT support vendor charging you on a “Time and Material” basis or you can rely on NetStar’s Managed Care. The document discusses various facts related to achievable hard dollar savings and soft ROI benefits for each option. For illustration purpose, we will present a case study of a typical small or medium business having 40 user desktops, three servers (one Mail server, one Database server and one File/print server), one firewall, one router, two switches and one network printer. Below you will find a detailed analysis of the options available to you

Self-managed
Consider a case in which you decide to manage your IT network by hiring your own full-time staff which comprise a decent network or IT administrator. It will cost you between $40,000 and $60,000 depending on your location and the local labor rates. For this illustration, we will fix this cost at an average of $45,000. Additional costs for staff including benefits, sick and vacation leaves plus 7.5% payroll tax is about $12,975. Furthermore, you will need to purchase IT management system and required hardware; we assume its onetime cost $10,000. You staff training on the management software would cost you $2,500 more. In sum, you end up spending $60,475 annually and about $10,000 as one-time expense.

IT support on Time & Material basis
Suppose you decide on a third-party vendor to manage your IT infrastructure on a Time & Material basis. They would charge you approximately $125 per hour with an average call time of 1.5 hour per call and $45 towards travel charges. Assuming one call logged per server per month, a total of eight calls for workstations per month and an additional two calls per month to attend to problems related to Firewall, Switches and Network Printers. You end up spending $3,022.50 per month or $36.270.00 annually on this option. In this model, on an average 40% of the IT issues are managed by the vendor, the balance being handled by end users themselves.

NetStar’s Managed Care
NetStar’s Managed Care services would include proactive monitoring of your Servers and manages your Mail Sever and Database Server. It carries out preventive maintenance on your Desktops along with maintaining Network devices for optimal performance. End-users can call on toll-free number to inform us their day-today operational issues, which would be attended by our expert help desk staff. We charge for our Full services $25 per month per Desktop, $250 per month per Server (which includes your Database Server and Mail Server), $50 per month for Network devices, $75 per month per Firewall, and $50 per month per Network printer aggregating our total annual charges to $23,700.