Not Our First Rodeo

The largest public Retirement System in the USA, serving more than 1.5 million people. This company is a service-oriented public pension system providing retirement, healthcare, and related benefit programs for Texas public education employees, retirees, and their beneficiaries (“Participants”).

This client improves the retirement security of public education employees through our “best in class” investment management and delivery of pension and health care benefits.

This Case Study is the result of an interview with the Deputy Chief Information Officer for a Retirement System company.

Challenge(s)

Finding a Service Provider to provide hardware, software, and support services for their legacy mainframe.

• Eliminating the need and capital expense to purchase a new processor
• Requirement to stay on existing operating software release.
• Supporting future plans to transition off the Mainframe
• Flexible contract terms and conditions
• Need for improved disaster recovery.

Solution

An RFP was issued and solicited to qualified vendors for MFaaS to select the best value for the Retirement System and the State.

Blue Hill was the vendor of choice, and our solution included.

• Running on a dedicated CPU to mitigate the potential risk often posed by Third Party Software vendors when transitioning to an outsourced model.
• 24/7 fully managed services without requiring OS software upgrades.
• Providing a Dedicated Disaster Recovery environment, which at a minimum would reduce the RTO from 72 hours to 24 hours, with guaranteed availability and unlimited test time.

This would include the existing Software License Agreements with this institution’s existing data center, performance, availability, disaster recovery, tape backup, and security features that this institution’s business users require.

The Project would be completely turn-key and include Project Management, Planning and Migration services to ensure minimal downtime of the existing legacy application and services.

Continuing the Relationship

This Retirement System expanded the scope of services for Blue Hill to handle other operational duties including operational support of daily batch schedule processes, FTP operations, tape operations, security operations, infrastructure application support, and customer application support, as needed. The Technical Approach needed to demonstrate that the Respondent was able to competently perform all required services in accordance with the schedule and within the budget the Respondent provided.

Since this was the first time this client had looked at running their critical business systems outside of their data center environment, it was important to ensure the respondents could provide multiple examples to illustrate their ability to carry out the expected services, including:

• A detailed description of the technical approach for completing tasks.
• A communication and escalation plan
• A schedule of work and example project plan
• Quality Assurance / Quality Control procedures for performing the work.
• A minimum of three (3) examples of work demonstrating respondent’s ability to complete work like what is described in the Scope of Work
• Optional Features, Products, and Services important in determining what additional benefits were available, including Operations, Production Control, Security, and Staffing

Now that the migration is over, and we are running very smoothly, we have the opportunity to add services from Blue Hill as we need them, as people retire, like Operations. We like the flexible model.