The CLIENT

A national outsourced IT service provider HQ’d in the Bay Area with offices across the United States owned by a global fortune 500 professional services firm.

The CHALLENGE

Early 2011 the client started a RFP process specifically seeking an enterprise dedicated/managed hosting provider that could serve as the backbone for their core production environment serving hundreds of SME’s across the country. They eventually settled on a provider (SAVVIS) and spent a little under a year attempting to establish a working platform to operate from. Unfortunately, though they were eventually able to bend the environment (and service provider) to do their bidding, the solution proved far more costly and less flexible than anticipated as new requirements crept into the roadmap.

A new team was brought on to assess if there was a way to simplify and centralize the production facilities, and after crunching numbers it was determined that at their scale significant cost savings and far more flexibility and control could be gained by bringing the solution back in-house leveraging a few regional optimized points of presence.

An engineer working for the client at the time, upon realizing the datacenter search process they were about to embark upon was no easy task given the timeline they were working with and their laundry list of needs, recommended to his team they call Open Spectrum.

The SOLUTION

After spending time working through the specific power, network, space, location, power density, ramped install and other required deal terms, we drafted a RFP document for the client and began reaching out to our ecosystem of relevant providers. Specific attention was paid to those that had multiple facilities under management within each of the required regions providing a far simpler process of only needing to negotiate deal terms with one company… specifically the Midwest, Northeast and Southwest.

After the first round of conversations, we compiled and presented the data giving our detailed objective advice as to what we thought the pros/cons were for each relevant option at the table. This data was then leveraged by the Director spear-heading the project to gain approval from his management team for location, budget, and timeframe.

Tours were scheduled of the final 2 providers who made it to the short list and when it was all said and done the client felt most confident with the facilities and team from Latisys, a national datacenter and managed service provider with datacenters in Ashburn, Chicago, Denver and Irvine.

The CLOSE

Latisys provided our client with everything they were hoping for from a provider in their flexibility on deal terms, expansion rights, pricing, and a unique and cost effective metro cross connect solution to the local Equinix IX providing them access to nearly every carrier present in the specific region without needing a physical presence in the building.

What would have taken the client at least 2 months of vetting and sourcing had they gone it alone only took us 2 weeks. The bulk of that time was invested in the conversation and contract negotiation with the provider to achieve the strongest value for our client possible.