BoardDocs  

Business need

" The business challenges we were facing were, basically, we had to grow, and we had a budget kind of service with another company. And what we wanted to do was be able to support our very fast growth, which is 50 to 75 percent per year, be able to meet our customers' needs, and also add some services we didn't have. Specifically, we wanted people to be able to put hands on servers if we ever had a problem.

And while our other service was good and it was reliable, it just didn't give us the level of service that we needed. So really what we were looking for was a more comprehensive service that was offered that met many of our needs. And some of those needs were, specifically, we wanted someone to be able to touch the servers; we wanted kind of an all-in-one package solution where we didn't have to manage multiple vendors; and then we also wanted the ability to grow, so we needed that bandwidth and that kind of upward scalability that we were looking for.

Things also that we were looking to do were to make sure that the bandwidth of the organization that we went with was big enough--multiple peering points, things like that--so that our customers all over the country are able to get good high-speed access. That was important.

I think we were at something like 45 megabits per second before and we were looking for really a lot more speed. And the other thing we were looking for [was] it had to be up 100 percent of the time, so we needed, you know, SLAs that would guarantee that we would have the service up. We can't go down; it's gotta be up.

These are [municipality] meetings, this is public information, it's accessed 24 hours a day. Folks meet at the weirdest times, and since we're covering all the time zones in the United States, it was important that we found someone who could stay up and give us the bandwidth we needed. "

Customer service

" Customer service at Qwest is actually probably one of the best parts.

You can—anybody can put technology together and it's pretty ubiquitous these days, but customer service is really what makes the difference, and I think that's probably the main reason we'll stick with Qwest for the long term.

We have a main point of contact; this person, I don't think, sleeps. Keeps his cell phone by his desk; we can call or e-mail pretty much 24 hours a day and he'll know the person within Qwest to route the problem to. So what's good is Qwest is a big company; he makes it small for us and he makes it personal. One of the first things he asked was what does our company do, what are we about, and he's kind of become almost a little extension of our company. So that account rep, the person we talk to--not the salesperson, but the kind of technical contact — has done awesome. I mean very good. Let's us know before he goes on vacation, has another person there; it's really like he works with us.

And when we bring new people on, they're able to integrate into that really quickly. And if we open up a ticket, we're able to go online to check the status of that ticket and make amendments to it; we can copy and paste specifics in for things like firewall upgrades or things so they get it exactly right. So the customer service has been very, very good--I would say exemplary—even though you're working with different people.

You've got, you know, the cyber center people, who are really awesome. One of the things that we were really looking for was someone to put their hands on a server quickly. Usually I know you have an SLA, but usually that person's standing in front of a server on the phone with us in 10 or 15 minutes, which is really good after a phone call.

And then you have a totally different group that handles managed firewall, you know? And what's nice is we make one phone call and it seems to get to the right place where we can get that done.

So we've been very impressed with the customer service, and really when it shines is when something goes wrong—and something always goes wrong. And you know, it could be our fault, it could be Qwest's fault, and they really step up to the plate to make sure that those services are up and they're running quickly."

Why Qwest

"After we put out the RFP, we spoke with several customers and Qwest really rose to the top for several reasons.

The primary reason was they had—they were able to address all the needs themselves internally.

They didn't have to partner with anyone else to do things like put hands on the server or support the software. So other vendors we talked to in the process of evaluating the RFPs, they would actually have a third party on the line. 'Well, we can do all this, but not this part, so we're bringing in this partner,' which made us a little uneasy. We really wanted centralized building, a single point of contact, and Qwest gave us that single point of contact pretty early on and allowed us to really fit the business needs that we needed extensively.

Some of the things that rose to the top were the managed services, specifically with regard to firewall services and VPN; that's important to us because we provide two services that we really need—one is our back-end back office solutions, which require things like phone service, require back office networking. You know, we host e-mail on our side, the collaborative groupware we do. All those things needed to be managed, and Qwest was able to do that.

And then we had external needs for, of course, our customers, and Qwest was able to do that, too—manage a cluster of servers, help install and manage things like fiber disk arrays, give us backup services.

So Qwest really gave us the whole body of what we were looking for where the other vendors really weren't. And it was kind of surprising, too, because the other vendors were large, you know? And I didn't expect a Baby Bell to be able to be as responsive as they were, but they did a really good job.

One of the big concerns we had with the selection process was the ability for us to be able to—or the ability for the vendor to be able to support our technologies, and those include Sun servers and Domino on Sun. We did find a lot of vendors who had experience in Domino, including IBM, but we didn't find a lot of folks who had expertise on Sun.

Now we weren't married to the Sun platform--we had options to look at things like AIX—but Sun really gave us the best combination of power and performance so that—we're a green company, so we were looking for the fewest number of watts, greatest amount of power as far as processing power we could get.

Sun gave us that, and Qwest stepped up pretty early and said 'Yeah, we have the Sun expertise' and we were able to verify that, and also the Domino expertise.

That's a hard combination to find, Domino and Sun on one platform. Even IBM tech support, a lot of times, we can't rely on them. So it turned out that Qwest was able to deliver that, and that was another reason why we decided ultimately to go with Qwest. "