Technical champion
A director or lead who will spend about three hours a week and defend the result internally.
Proof of Value
One domain. 45 days. A decision.
A pilot is not a product demo; it must prove willingness to buy. Ours starts with your baseline, measures eight things, and ends with BUY, EXTEND or STOP in front of the person who signs. Time it to the date you need the evidence: an audit, a contract renewal, a migration wave or a budget cycle.
Entry criteria
Eight things in place before kickoff
Three never move into week 0: the economic buyer met and committed to the business review, success criteria signed, and the decision date on the calendar.
Economic buyer
The person who can sign, met before kickoff, present at the business review.
The problem in your words
The incident, change or redundancy story and who felt it.
Baseline
Investigation time, tools per investigation, escalation rate, time to resolve, change-validation time, ticket volumes.
Written success criteria
Scorecard targets and the value method (cost per outage hour, realization factor) agreed with your finance lead and signed in week 0.
Purchase process
Security review, procurement, legal, budget cycle and paper process mapped. REAP’s NDA, pilot SOW, order form and DPA come with the security packet, so your legal team reviews them in weeks 0–4.
Commercial hypothesis
Price band, deployment model and term; pilot option A or B chosen.
Decision date
The week-6 business review on the calendar at kickoff.
The 45-day plan
Week by week
W0
Baseline and success plan
Baseline worksheet; scorecard with targets; mutual action plan; security packet; week-0 data request. Kickoff with your champion and economic buyer.
W1
Connect, discover, context
Connector deployed; discovery of in-scope devices; physical and logical topology; configuration ingestion; ITSM and telemetry connected. Output: Network Context Report.
W2
Incident intelligence
Replay of 5–10 historical incidents with known root cause: REAP is given the ticket, the timeline and the devices, not the cause, and investigates from current state, your configuration archive and the logs you provide; where the evidence no longer exists, the replay is scored Inconclusive and reported. Live incidents as they occur; time to answer logged. Output: Incident Validation Report.
W3
Proactive assurance
Resilience and posture findings, active/standby sync, running/startup drift, contextual CVE (opens in a new tab) exposure, security-configuration posture, and backup-path capacity where interface history is available, reviewed with your architect, then a 15-minute readout to your economic buyer. Output: Resilience & Posture Findings Report.
W4
Workflow automation and change verification
Two or three SOPs compiled into runbooks under approval; one real change window compared before and after from snapshots, configuration diff and path traces, with the outcome (Verified, Degraded, Rolled back or Inconclusive) and the evidence written to the ticket. Output: Automation & Change Report.
W5
Measurement and economics
Before/after across eight categories; the value model on your baseline reviewed with your champion. Output: Economic ROI Model.
W6
Business review and decision
Forty-five minutes with the economic buyer, answering four questions: what did REAP find that you did not know; what did it do faster or better; what capacity or risk is that worth; and what does production cost against that value. Decision: BUY, EXTEND (one named gap, at most three weeks) or STOP.
The scorecard
Eight measured categories
| Category | What we measure | Default target (agreed per pilot) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Context completeness | Devices discovered; topology accuracy (links and L3 adjacencies confirmed by your architect); integrations operational | ≥95% discovered · ≥90% topology accuracy · ITSM and telemetry live by day 7 |
| 2. Diagnosis quality | Correct or materially useful root cause on replayed incidents; evidence traceability; blast-radius accuracy | ≥80% correct/useful · ≥90% traceable |
| 3. Time to answer | Time to detect; P50 and P95 from trigger to an evidence-backed diagnosis | Detect: design target under 4 minutes · evidence-backed answer: P50 agreed per pilot · P95 reported |
| 4. Human effort | Engineer-minutes per investigation; tools touched | ≥50% reduction on validated incident classes · tools 6 → 1–2 |
| 5. Prevention | Previously unknown material risks confirmed by you | ≥3 confirmed findings |
| 6. Automation & change verification | Runbooks live under approval; changes verified with a recorded outcome; unapproved actions | 2–3 runbooks live · 1 real change verified pre/post · 0 unapproved actions |
| 7. Economics | Annualized value on your baseline versus the proposed subscription | At least three times the proposed subscription |
| 8. Trust | Conclusions accepted by senior engineers; willingness to reference | ≥80% accepted · willingness to reference recorded (reference rights belong to option B, not option A) |
The business criterion, agreed in writing before kickoff. If REAP meets at least five of the six technical and operational objectives and demonstrates annualized value of at least three times the proposed subscription, you sign the order form, agreed in form at kickoff, within ten business days of the business review; the pilot fee is credited in full when it is signed within 30 days. Security review of the production deployment and legal review of the order form run during the pilot, so the decision is not followed by months of paperwork.
What we ask for in week 0
Data that makes the pilot real
| We ask for | Why | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| One year of network tickets | Recurring work, incident classes, false positives | Prioritized automation backlog; triage and copilot workflows |
| Device configurations (switch, router, AP, firewall; SD-WAN where the platform is supported) | Real policies, vendor syntax, drift and change patterns | Posture, CVE (opens in a new tab) impact analysis, before-and-after change evidence |
| Topology diagram and asset list | Device, site, dependency and path context | Topology-aware troubleshooting, blast radius, CMDB enrichment |
| Runbooks and escalation logic | Current human steps and decision points | Guided workflows and executable runbooks |
| Cloud and on-prem connectivity | Hybrid paths and SD-WAN/cloud boundaries | Cloud-to-site visibility, hybrid triage |
| Audit scope, where applicable | Controls, evidence needs, audit effort | Posture findings and evidence for the controls you agree with us |
Commercial options
Committed on both sides
What REAP commits
Founders at your kickoff and your business review; a named solutions engineer for the 45 days; two working sessions a week; an issue log you can read at any time; and a STOP decision respected as a real outcome.
A · Paid proof of value
A fixed fee sized to scope, invoiced at kickoff and credited in full against the first annual subscription when the order is signed within 30 days of the business review. The default for enterprise pilots.
B · Lighthouse exchange
The fee waived in exchange for logo rights, a case study, two reference calls per quarter and weekly structured product feedback, with the same decision date and business criterion. For segment-defining accounts, which can also take a design-partner seat for the Change Assurance or Resilience Assurance capabilities that are In development.
C · Partner-led pilot
An MSP or integrator runs the pilot across three to five of its customers over 60 days at partner pricing, with REAP enablement and the pilot kit. Operators switch between customer estates from one console; per-operator customer scoping is confirmed with REAP before the pilot.
What you take away
Six artifacts, whatever you decide
Network Context ReportIncident Validation ReportResilience & Posture Findings ReportAutomation & Change ReportEconomic ROI ModelMutual Production Deployment Plan (or a Stop memo)
If the decision is BUY, the Mutual Production Deployment Plan sets production scope, dates, owners and order-form terms before signature, so contracting runs alongside the business review rather than after it.
Scope standard: one production domain, 50–250 devices, two or three vendors on REAP’s supported list (confirmed at scoping), one or two sites, ITSM plus one telemetry source plus configuration access. Read-only credentials by default; write access only for the agreed runbooks, approval-gated. Production auto-remediation is out of scope.
Start with your baseline.
Send the week-0 worksheet back and we schedule kickoff, or start smaller and bring us your last P1. Taking this to your CIO? Ask for the champion kit: a one-page brief, the business-case template your economic buyer sees in week 6, the security-packet request and the 45-day plan with the mutual action plan.