Client
Client is a multi-state bank with over 500 employees and an IT staff of 40+. Heavy regulations force banks to stay on the forefront of technological change and constantly evolve driving a constant shortage of human resources in IT. Because downtime can’t 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
Challenges
- Client was tasked with replacing secondary WAN with a solution that was not utilizing 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 in 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, at different points 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 get benefit from this augmentation, most brokers were focused on services with one or two telecom service providers and were not truly vendor agnostic
- Network team felt that they were spending significant time managing administrative aspects of their WAN and thought that they would benefit from more proactive approach of contract management and technology updates
Solution
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 Client’s policies and strategic direction via discussions with CEO, CIO and Networking team to gradually offload administrative telecom-related activities.
Why IQ Wired
IQ Wired is the only company in Colorado selected to be 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
Results
- A multi-vendor WAN topology where secondary network was 100% diverse from primary resulting in increased uptime for bank’s network and IT department’s ability to provide better service to its internal and external customers
- Freed network team from having to spend 2.5 hours per circuit to deploy new sites on any vendor. Because of IQ Wired involvement, 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 first year of engagement, generated $60K in annual savings (11%). Bulk of these savings were from renegotiating a WAN contract mid-term while increasing bandwidth