Every recent major innovative change in networking has ultimately been about operational efficiencies; about people time and not product costs.
Financially, IT is a study in capital versus operating expenditures. It’s a study in short term versus long term; in product cost versus people time.
The major innovative shifts in the industry – starting with cloud and moving on to SDN and devops – have really been about the latter – operations – despite the initial laser-focus on capital cost savings. That’s because over time, the bulk of the cost of any product, solution or service is always in people time. Whether measured in dollars or hours, most of the costs in IT are the result of configuration, management, upgrades and maintenance over time. Refresh cycles are generally the demesne of financial analysts and vendors, but they play heavily into the reasons why operational costs are almost always higher than capital costs. IT simply doesn’t replace its entire network or any large portion of its infrastructure often. There are very predictable cycles on which such events occur and in between, the operational costs are wracking up the bulk of the total cost of ownership.