Trends in the Value Selling of Software
By Tom Cissell

It’s Getting Harder to Justify Infrastructure Improvements Without Using Benefits from Operations
Since the internet bubble burst, infrastructure replacements and upgrades have been harder to sell because of greater demand for justifications.  This has created a trend towards lumping business applications with the infrastructure components so that the total package can be justified largely on the benefits of the applications.  However, the structure of the buying process doesn’t always permit this bundling.  And, more and more, the business applications themselves need increasingly rigorous justifications and cannot dilute their benefits by using a portion of them to justify infrastructure.

Some people try to justify their infrastructure solutions based on the enablement of new or improved applications that would not otherwise be available to the enterprise on the old infrastructure.  But this is really the same thing as using the applications to justify the infrastructure and these arguments are frequently weakened by charges of double dipping, i.e. using the same benefits to separately justify two initiatives.

Infrastructure improvements do indeed produce benefits of their own such as lower ongoing support costs, reduced maintenance fees, value of convergence, etc.  However, the benefits are not always sufficient to offset the cost.