IDC’s 21-page Business Value Solution Brief, The Business Value of Forward Networks (doc #US52128624, June 2024), quantifies how the vendor’s network-digital-twin platform turns insight into hard cash. 

IDC interviewed enterprises that had run Forward Enterprise for roughly three years and mapped their operational KPIs to its Business Value model, converting them into annualised dollars and full-time-equivalent (FTE) hours.
$14.2 million in average annual benefits, broken down into $7.7 M from greater stability and reliability, $2.9 M from staff productivity and $3.6 M from other operational efficiencies.

95.8 FTEs worth of time returned each year.

33 % fewer unplanned-downtime incidents and 55 % faster mean-time-to-repair, preventing about 180 000 hours of lost productivity.

Incident-response teams work 34 % faster; compliance/audit tasks 10 % faster.

Network deployments finish 71 % sooner; change-planning/testing is 36 % faster; production fixes arrive 44 % faster.

Forward Enterprise builds a mathematically exact, continuously updated digital twin of multi-vendor, hybrid-cloud networks. Engineers query reachability, policy and configuration drift in seconds and run “what-if” simulations before changes. This eliminates manual CLI hunts, shortens root-cause analysis, prevents misconfigurations and surfaces licence waste, underpinning the monetised savings above.

Customers also reported quicker security investigations (thanks to instant path analysis), smoother cloud migrations, clearer executive-level reporting and higher team morale as reactive “fire-fighting” declined.

IDC concludes that the platform typically pays for itself in under twelve months and then delivers a durable, measurable ROI. For organisations wrestling with complex, hybrid networks, a digital-twin strategy emerges as both an operations accelerator and a business enabler, aligning network health with broader risk-reduction and growth objectives.