n Top-down Approach: When going for an enterprise network management solution, the solution alone is not the most important criteria; getting the top management’s approval is far more important. This is because enterprise management involves standardization, configuration, control, testing, and staffing, among other things. Enterprise management becomes difficult if individual groups have their own agenda and criteria. This is mainly due to the fact that individual groups tend to develop their own systems.

n Systematic Approach: The solution to work well one has to have a systematic approach. The components of such an approach would be—business focus, end-to-end management capability, strong service-level agreements, scalability and flexibility, legacy support, standards support, vendor neutrality, and integration ability.

n Understanding Organizational Needs: The buying decision delves on first understanding the organizations’ networks, systems, and applications, and keeping the business objective in mind as enterprise network management involves four levels of action—inactive, reactive, proactive, and preemptive. And the solution will depend on the level of action to be taken.

n User-friendly Products: Another point that can be considered is looking for user-friendly products. There are both point solutions and framework solutions. Depending on the type of usage, the solution can be procured. A couple of years back big enterprise frame work vendors like HP and CA were offering total suits, but today they have also software scaled down to the point solutions. Further point product companies are offering more capabilities.

n Check on RoI: Return on investment (RoI) is of utmost importance. And the vendors have realized this and they have RoI calculators or quick evaluations of network performance showing quick deliver results. One can ask for the live product demo and also these parameters.

n Look for Effective Solution: The network management model should have the scope for performance measurement and a tighter functioning of the network. Scalability is an important consideration. Moreover, the solution should be able to support the existing and emerging standards. For a network management solution to be effective, one needs to spend considerable time at the design stage. And one has to plan the deployment to address the pain areas first.

n Remote Management Services: Today, many service providers can offer network management services through their network operations center (NOC). This NOC has state-of-the-art NMS implemented for managing large networks of customers. Outsourced network management services is becoming very popular as it provides very cost-effective NMS solution with best of breed NMS software and best technical expertise in the industry. The NOC services also offer SLAs for network uptime and performance.

n Quality Support: Incorporating tools in network management practice, which address both present and past performance, allows one to have better performance analyses and being proactive. Go to vendors or integrators who can provide better support and assistance.

n Documentation Needed: Organizations do not realize that network management investments should focus on the IT operational aspects of organizational, process, and service development, and so documentation becomes important. These are not capital expenditures, but would definitely mean a little expenditure.