Managing Technology for Multi-State Bank

The Client is a multi-state bank with over 500 employees and an IT staff of 40+ people. Heavy regulations force banks to stay at the forefront of technological change and constantly evolve, which often results in a constant shortage of human resources in IT. Since downtime cannot occur during business hours, most changes happen on the weekend, and with only 52 weekends in the year, IT is spread thin and faces a constant time crunch and heavy coordination between different departments.

• The Client was tasked with replacing the secondary WAN with a solution that was not utilizing the same telecom provider as the primary network. The process was time consuming since each vendor wanted to have a discovery meeting and IT had to explain their business and requirements. Many hours were spent interviewing providers who claimed they were fully diverse only to find out that portions of the network were shared.
• To assist with managing their voice and data services, IT utilized multiple telecom brokers to act as an extension of their team to help design, manage, and procure their services. They have found that while they did receive benefits from this augmentation, most brokers were focused on services with one or two telecom service providers and were not truly vendor agnostic.
• The Network team felt that they were spending significant time managing administrative aspects of their WAN and thought that they would benefit from a more proactive approach to contract management and technology updates.

IQ Wired implemented a Telecom and Technology Management (TTSM) solution comprised of software, staffing, and savings components. IQ Wired loaded 200+ telecom records from different telecom providers into a centralized web portal. IQ Wired then took the time to understand the Client’s policies and strategic direction via discussions with the CEO, CIO, and Networking team to gradually offload administrative telecom-related activities.

IQ Wired is the only company in Colorado to be selected as a member of the Alliance Partners, which is the best-of-breed consortium. Through this membership, IQ Wired has offered the Client access to over 350+ providers and demonstrated true vendor neutrality.

• A multi-vendor WAN topology where the secondary network was 100% diverse from the primary resulting in increased uptime for the bank’s network and IT department’s ability to provide better service to its internal and external customers.
• The Network team was freed from having to spend 2.5 hours per circuit to deploy new sites on any vendor. Due to IQ Wired’s involvement, the Client no longer has to sit on multiple calls with the service provider to get the circuits provisioned and saves additional time to review invoices for accuracy.
• Through proactive management, during the first year of engagement, $60K was generated in annual savings (11%). The bulk of these savings were from renegotiating a WAN contract mid-term while increasing bandwidth.