ETS-Lindgren  

Why Qwest

"Rob Embry: Well, let me back into it. One of the final three, if you will, we had serious questions about their financial stability. A piece of what we wanted in terms of the offering was not just the data capability, but also essentially colocation facilities. The one that had financial issues we also did not particularly—we were not particularly impressed with their colocation facilities. Whereas the Qwest facilities we thought were just absolutely first class; they provided what we need and also provided us a solution that executive management was interested in terms of alterability and compliance and security. The other major vendor was able to provide that, but we viewed them—after dealing with them, after asking questions and doing some comparisons, decided that they had some issues in terms of customer service that Qwest basically handled better—and since we're in the situation of if something goes down in the middle of the night in China, we have to be able to solve it. We thought Qwest was gonna do a better job of providing us that global reach than the other two of the final three.

Jeff Border: Right. ETS-Lindgren was looking for kind of a package. Not only did we need the technology, so we wanted to leapfrog up to an MPLS-based cloud and get away from leased lines and kind of the old-fashioned way of doing this. We also wanted an integrated solution with that colocated data center. ETS-Lindgren is gonna do it a little differently; we weren't going to set up our own data center, but we were going to actually colocate it and have Qwest—or we would have liked to have had our global network vendor actually provide that service as part of the bundle. And that's been fantastic. We're able actually to have that physically in one of our operating cities so that if we physically needed to be there, we could go to that data center, that colocated data center, and be there, although that hasn't been that necessary because it's such a well-run facility. But it was really that package that we were looking for. And other vendors kind of thought about that colocation idea as kind of a second thought, you know? It's like `Well, we can kind of sub this off for you."

Rob Embry: "We can put a rack in behind our switch" kind of a thing.

Jeff Border: It didn't appear to us to be a very integrated type of solution. We wanted to make sure that when we put a loop—an extra loop, which we've done—at our colocated data center, that we could get it almost at the drop of a hat and with very high quality of 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."