l Network Complexity: Growing spread and complexity of networks makes manageability difficult. In case the IT infrastructure is geographically distributed in a totally heterogeneous environment, there can be total IT management chaos. In that case, a good network management tool from a central location is necessary.

l Improving Network Infrastructure Performance: In organizations where infrastructure deployment has reached critical mass, network management tool is necessary to see the entire infrastructure in one view to improve the performance of the various network elements.

l Moving Towards E-business: In case, enterprises are automating their supply chains or their retail network, network complexity increases manifold. NM tools are then imperative to efficiently manage this complexity.

l Monitoring Network Traffic: CEOs and CFOs are increasingly demanding information on the nature of network traffic from network managers and CIOs. When CIOs need to distinguish business traffic and monitor the infrastructure, NM tool is a good buy.

l Policy-based Management: In some cases, to meet growing organizational demands, policy-based management is the only solution that will allow organizations to prioritize networking resources such as bandwidth, application access and security clearance based on individual users. These policy-based management tools will have to be self deploying, self configuring and self healing, automatically discovering any changes taking place in the network infrastructure and dynamically building and altering policies for accessing resources based on needs.

l Optimal Network Utilization: NM tools could give the ability to monitor and configure the network so as to optimally utilize it. It is essential once organizations go beyond monitoring, but are looking at areas like OS and image management on a network.

l RoI Factor: Vendors need to take care of the approach in addressing RoI. The RoI factor depends on how important network-based applications are to an organization. If all the branches are connected to the network, then RoI is far easier to calculate.

l Available Skillsets: In US and Europe, a huge variable is the cost of manpower, which is high. By contrast, the cost of manpower is not an issue in India. Here, it is the gap between skills and technology. It is the absence of necessary skill-sets to manage the network that often drives NM adoption.

l Increasing Cost Sensitivity: With increasing cost awareness, CIOs should go for service-level driven network management through appearance of the ITIL framework and ITSM (IT service management) philosophy; as well as network management beyond devices. There is an increased focus on adaptive infrastructure to suit business demands; better integration into performance management systems; and charge back systems.

l Service-level Agreements (SLAs): CIOs should focus more on vendors with end-to-end service level commitments rather than islands of guarantees.