I often get asked what the “strategic” value of Cisco Intersight is to our customers besides, of course, the simplicity and ease of use it offers. I agree, when you’re managing complex, distributed environments while facing pressure to optimize costs and enhance security, having quantifiable data about potential returns becomes essential for decision making. We strongly felt that rather than running the math ourselves, we would commission Forrester Consulting to interview our customers directly and conduct a comprehensive Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study.
Drawing from interviews with seven decision makers at six organizations across various industries, the study found that a composite enterprise based on interviewed customers achieved a 192% ROI with a net present value of $3.3 million over three years.1 These numbers represent real outcomes from organizations managing between 100 and 10,000 servers.
Key findings from the 2025 Forrester TEI study
The research identified four primary areas where Cisco Intersight delivered quantifiable business benefits:
- Improved uptime and resilience ($2.7M benefit): Organizations experienced a 50% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) through proactive fault detection and centralized visibility. One healthcare organization’s IT team reported waking up to find replacement parts already being delivered before they even knew a problem existed.
- Increased IT productivity ($1.7M benefit): Teams achieved an 80% reduction in infrastructure build and deployment times while avoiding the need to double their infrastructure staff size. One interviewed customer, a financial services company, maintained flat headcount while growing from $20 billion to $75 billion in revenue.
- Reduced time to value ($289K benefit): Using Intersight, infrastructure deployment accelerated dramatically, with an interviewed healthcare organization completing 27 domains across multiple data centers in just three hours. This speed enabled faster project execution and earlier returns on infrastructure investments.
- Reduced security and compliance risk ($267K benefit): Intersight helped reduce both the frequency and length of security breaches through proactive monitoring, automated compliance, and centralized visibility.
A deeper look at market realities
The study occurs against a backdrop of significant infrastructure challenges. With new AI workloads requiring specialized compute capabilities, multicloud strategies creating management complexity, and security threats escalating across distributed environments, traditional management approaches struggle to keep pace.
Infrastructure teams face mounting pressure to deliver more with existing resources. The research shows organizations before Intersight deployment struggled with:
- Scaling limitations: Manual processes created bottlenecks when rapid infrastructure expansion was needed.
- Visibility gaps: Managing five to six different interfaces made comprehensive oversight nearly impossible.
- Resource inefficiency: Valuable IT staff time was consumed by repetitive manual tasks instead of focused on strategic initiatives.
These challenges particularly impact compliance and security posture. As one healthcare organization noted, trying to track contracts, warranties, and security advisories across an expanding hardware base became increasingly problematic without centralized visibility.
Five critical areas of business impact
Enhanced operational resilience
The study found organizations cut downtime frequency and duration by over 70%. A senior infrastructure engineer in the travel and hospitality industry emphasized the value of single-pane-of-glass visibility: “The idea that we have a single pane of glass and I can manage our global fleet of hardware this easily was a huge selling point.”
Workforce optimization and satisfaction
Every organization interviewed estimated they would have needed to double their team size without Intersight. A financial services manager noted: “Every hour that I have my [team] work on something that could be automated or made easier through Intersight is an hour I get back that they can be doing the transformational work I need them to do.”
Accelerated deployment capabilities
Teams reported reducing domain deployment from over an hour to just 10 minutes. This speed enables prestaging infrastructure before hardware arrival and supports rapid response to business needs.
Strengthened security and compliance
Intersight reduced the risk of security breaches and lowered remediation costs through proactive monitoring, automated compliance, and centralized visibility. Its role in standardizing configurations and reducing manual errors also led to improved compliance with corporate policies and industry regulations, as automation allowed teams to meet audit requirements with confidence.
Cost-effective hardware management and future readiness
Organizations reported more cost-effective management of hardware investments. Intersight’s policy-driven automation and visibility allowed teams to optimize workloads, avoid over-provisioning, and make smarter decisions about hardware needs according to actual usage patterns. Furthermore, Intersight provides the flexibility to meet future demands, with interviewees noting its role in facilitating AI infrastructure expansion and edge computing requirements.
Infrastructure complexity is only growing
The research makes clear that infrastructure management will become more challenging, not less. AI workloads, edge computing expansion, and increasingly sophisticated security requirements demand management platforms capable of handling complexity at scale.
Organizations that establish robust infrastructure management capabilities now position themselves advantageously for future challenges. The alternative, attempting to manage growing complexity with legacy tools, creates operational risk and limits strategic agility.
Cisco Intersight helps your team not just keep up with these evolving demands but get ahead by simplifying operations while providing the visibility and automation needed for modern infrastructure management.
Ready to explore the complete analysis? Read the full Forrester TEI study on Cisco Intersight for a detailed methodology, comprehensive findings, and frameworks to evaluate the potential impact for your organization.
1 The Total Economic Impact™️ of Cisco Intersight: Cost Savings and Business Benefits Enabled by Intersight, Forrester, November 2025