We’re glad you asked!

At $4000 for 10 devices, over 18 months of ownership Playbook is costing you $22 per device per month. That’s $7 more than a Zune pass.

The median salary for a network engineer in the US is $70,000. People who work with firewalls tend to make more than that, but, let’s just stipulate: an hour of network engineering time is worth $33 (not fully loaded).

So: if avoiding complicated phone calls with applications people in your company, being able to instantly find the right firewalls to change, submitting changes to a web-based console, and pushing the changes with a single click might save you a half hour in a typical month, Playbook costs you: zero.

We could go on to make a case for traceable rules simplifying your controls audits, or that ticketing and documentation will make your group far more agile and responsive and “the good cops” to the rest of your IT group, but we’ll rest our case here.

Last updated on September 17, 2009 by Thomas Ptacek