Earls Restaurant and Bar  

Why Qwest

"Earls is a Canadian-based company and its about 60 restaurants strong. The majority of that business is done up in Canada, so we sort of forayed into the U.S. the last 10 years. This is a business of a million details, so a couple little things go awry, then youre basically scrambling throughout the whole day to try and solve those issues because any little thing can effect the way the whole day runs. With three locations; they all independently operate so that each person feels they have responsibility to the guests that come to their restaurant and, you know, the phone is a key part of that. It starts ringing at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning with, you know, suppliers trying to get their orders. You know, we run a pretty organized business so if something comes up that doesnt fit our routine, then it throws us off and we just sort of play catch-up for the rest of the day, so the phone plays a key piece of that.

We've been a customer of Qwest since basically our inception here in the state, which goes back about 11 years, and everything is sort of bridged together and if one lines busy, it just rolls to the next and it makes it really simple for us to never miss a call. And we dont run with really a voice mail system; we dont want to have any of our customers or suppliers call in and get routed to a voice mail; we want to handle everything on the fly, so its important that that Nortel system performs the way its supposed to. And I really feel that Qwest went above and beyond for us to ensure that. Were not a big business; were probably running total in all three restaurants maybe 15 lines of phone answering service, so in the scope of what Qwest probably handles on a day-to-day basis, Im sure 15 lines doesnt impact their whole experience that much, but for us its what we do every day, so that personalized experience for us really sort of changed the way that we moved forward with Qwest and its definitely strengthened that relationship and enhanced the experience that we have on a day-to-day basis when we come to work.

You know, you're sailing a ship and you need all hands on deck, and if theres one key component of running a ship is that you have to have great communications, and its pretty important in my role for sure that I pick a partner that can support that. I do that basically every day; Im dealing with partnerships, whether its on a supplier level, getting us beer that we need, or making sure that the phone system reaches out to the customers that are reaching out to us, it makes sense to have that great partnership with someone that can support us.

The services we get from Qwest on a daily basis: We picked the Nortel phone system because of our relationships in Canada; Nortel was the system that we used in Canada, so it was something that I already knew very well and wasnt something Id have to be retrained on, so it was an easy system for us to put into place; and then the DSL really runs our credit card processing which is--obviously when you are a guest and its time to get back to work or move on to the next event of your day, we dont want to be held up having to run credit card systems, so the DSL handles all that. Its a separate system from a regular Internet service, so we have a couple of routers that make sure that the credit cards usually go through in 10 to 12 seconds, credit cards are printing up and were able to get that guest on their way and not interrupt the rest of their day.

With suppliers, you sort of feel like you are not a big piece of their business and we definitely dont feel that way when we deal with Qwest.

Telecom would be something that—our hopes would be that we never have to worry about telecom because its something that you just expect to be there for you when you need it, and in our situation weve never had a--I dont believe I come in at the beginning of my day concerned about telecom; Im more concerned about 'Did the baker make the bread properly?' and 'Is everybody gonna show up on time?' Telecom for us is really something weve never really been on the front burner; its always been a situation where we come in comfortably every day and know that were gonna get great service."

Non-financial Benefits

"Rob Embry: I think it is fair to say that we could not be in business operating the way we are and where we want to go in terms of growing our business without the collaboration and the communication that the network provides us. We have engineering personnel on four continents; we have, you know, sales--both in-house salespeople and external reps that we deal with; we have strategic partners, and if we could no move the data, maintain essentially the central nervous system of the organism the way we do with the network, we could not function. It would be a whole lot easier to run multi-million dollar construction and engineering projects around the world if we didn't have it as a piece of strategic leverage. That's the way management looks at it--it's what makes keeping this very loose organization going in the same direction. I think that's probably the primary benefit of it and probably the hardest to quantify, but if we didn't have it, you'd know it.

SJeff Border: And one of the other intangibles is really options. We have options with this network, with these services. We have options that we know we're going to use but we haven't even started using yet. So those are really those intangibles, those that are really hard to measure that're really nice to have, that kind of gives you peace of mind as an IT guy.

Rob Embry: In terms of compliance, it's just the ability to basically hand the audit that the Cyber Center does of itself, with their external auditor, and give that to our compliance auditors and basically to say that "Here is a major secure data facility; we don't have to run it, we don't have to deal with the day-to-day operations of it. It's taken care of for us and it is secure, it is locked down, and our core data is secure because of it." Just makes the whole compliance conversation with our auditors much easier. If we were running our own data center, our life would be a lot more complicated."

Measurable Benefits

"Rob Embry: I think there's no doubt that if we weren't able to rely on Qwest's facilities and people, we would easily have to have two or maybe three times the IT head count we have simply because we would need more network people; we would need more facilities people; we would need more people on the first line, you know, in the middle of the night when equipment goes down. So I think that's why we run very lean and management would basically, if they're going to invest in head count, would prefer to invest in head count in the engineering and production facilities more than IT, and I understand why. So this has probably saved us from having to increase our head count in IT significantly. I think it's probably the single largest tangible benefit. It's also allowed us to probably do some standardization that would be a lot harder to do if we had a larger group and a more diffuse group.

Jeff Border: And that's just a huge cost savings. And even if IT did want to hire more folks, we would not necessarily want to hire just network guys--just run around playing with switches and circuits and monitor it and put out fires as they want. We really want to hire people who really, you know, enable the business more than just maintaining it."