Many IT managers see little need for network management system (NMS) tools and believe vendors and analysts exaggerate the cost of network downtime, according to some industry experts.

John Earley, managing director of remote management specialist Optimised Networks, believes that there is still a vibrant market for NMSs among FTSE 100 companies, which can lose a lot of money when network crashes occur, but he argues that smaller firms rarely measure the cost of downtime and so do not see the value in this type of software.

"Most small and medium firms do not record or report downtime and even with the free NMS software you find online, there are costs associated with the time it takes to get it up and running and administer it," said Earley. "Most don't bother to implement it." Earley also believes that analysts and vendors have produced unrealistic figures for the cost of network downtime, and that managed service providers have been charging companies too much to prevent downtime.

A survey of 80 large US companies conducted by analyst firm Infonetics last year indicated they had an average of 501 hours of network downtime per year, and this cost them almost four percent of their revenue, totalling millions of dollars. In separate research, analyst Gartner estimated the hourly cost of network downtime for large corporates was $42,000, with a typical business experiencing an average of 87 hours of downtime a year, resulting in total losses exceeding $3.6m.

"IT suppliers quote the cost of downtime per employee per hour, but (these figures are) unfathomable, and people do not believe them," said Earley.

Optimised Networks plans to introduce an offshore remote management service in February, which can monitor four hardware and four logical elements on a company's server for £20 per month. Most managers only want to monitor basic elements such as disk array, interface and specific ports to see if they are operating, according to the firm.