This document discusses Montana State University's approach to supporting research networking with a lean CI staff. Key points: - MSU has a small IT budget and CI staff of 2 FTE to support research networking for over 16,000 students and faculty. - The NSF CCDNI program was critical for funding MSU's Bridger research network, providing 40% of the annual IT capital budget. - As an early adopter, MSU keeps its network architecture simple and leverages support from the national CI community rather than going it alone. - MSU partners with vendors like Cisco to help support its research networking beyond what its small staff could provide alone.