Outback Steakhouse  

Customer service

"When youre on our side of the house everything is driven around the account team. And you see classic ones that are very good and then you see the ones that arent so good and you know who they are. And what youre really looking for is that extension of what you do. You want somebody whos your advocate within their company. And I think what we feel we have is an advocate within Qwest."

Measurable Benefits

"Well the results of this project, the way its changed our business is its opened up a lot of opportunities for us. We have now the capability to centralize and make the data available at a much lower level of detail than we were able to do before. Were able to backup things at the restaurants that we werent able to do before. And were going to simplify our environment because of this capability. Were going to do a lot more things centrally from our organization to be able to maintain that and manage that for the restaurant side of the house. And really take a lot of the technology issues away from the restaurants and let them do what they do, which is serve food and serve our customers.

Were in an area where disaster recovery is a pretty big item. We have to be able to provide services to our customers no matter whats going on in the Tampa Bay area. So from a disaster recovery aspect what we looked at is can we have not only the data center that we have in the local area, but now weve actually built another data center with Qwest in Chicago. And were actually replicating data pretty much real time between those two facilities. So from a disaster recovery standpoint, if something were to happen to the facility in Florida within a couple of hours we can be back up and running on the Chicago facility and our customers dont know the difference. Thats a big deal for us from disaster recovery standpoint. From a business continuity standpoint obviously what were looking at is we dont want the restaurants to be affected by that. The restaurants are sitting out there. Theyve got their customers to serve. They dont want to be bothered. These guys are not technologists. Theyre restaurant operators. And they dont want to be worried about the technology. So we try to take as much of that away from them as possible to make sure that from a business continuity standpoint if something were to happen in Tampa the accounting facilities, the finance facilities, operation facilities are all able to be relocated and the operation is still up and running."