Scribe Healthcare Technologies, Inc.  

Business Need

"We have been in business for about six years now and had been at one colocation provider with one service provider and one telecom provider for those entire six years. Over the past year, I would say, we had some extreme displeasure with our telecom provider, which then also translated into some extreme displeasure with our colocation provider because our business is rapidly growing and we had chosen our previous vendor because they had lots of expansion capability--so they said. And when we came to expand significantly in the fall of 2006, they told us they were out of power and they didn't know when we would be able to get power. And so we were in a crisis situation because we had taken on significant new customers which would require us to expand our data center and had no way to be able to do that. We needed to expand primarily in our existing colocation center, and then because we were growing so quickly, we also needed to have a disaster recovery site, and the current vendor that we were with also was unable to give us any timeframe in which they could have space in their colocation centers there. So we just began to look for a new provider."

Why Qwest

"Primarily because of cost. They came back with a very competitive bundle of services for both the colocation and the Internet connectivity--location because they had a location that was in Chicago, actually, in the same building that we were already in, which meant that the downtime that we would suffer for moving from one provider to another would be a lot less than it would have if we'd gone with some other players.

Their competency and reputation--we met with the president of the region and his entire sales staff. The whole team that was put together to take care of us was extremely first class and that made us feel very, very comfortable that we were going to get taken care of.

They also had availability in locations that we wanted to be in; we were looking at either Denver or Dallas. And we have a large customer in Denver, and so they had space there that made it very easy for us to move in or to plan to move into Denver. And they had a nice package of combined offerings. Today, we look at primarily the colocation space, power, and the Internet, but they had storage capability, they had management capabilities that we could look at as we grow to get into that were very fairly valued, and we thought that overall, they would be the best partner to grow with."

Customer Service

"Awesome--in one word. Our primary sales rep, all the people in the Chicago center, all the people in Denver who manage all the projects, they've all been really great to work with. They're very quick to work with you on providing solutions to your particular needs, from high-level network design questions and thoughts, equipment that we could potentially use in the situation, all the way down to providing you cables when we had a situation where we had a set of bad cables--we were working with another telecom provider to hook up to our cage--and they went out from their stash and pulled a couple of cables and gave us those and made sure that we were all working just fine. They stood right by us in every situation to make sure that we got done what we needed to get done."