When a Customer Wants a New Provider

What happens when your vendor outgrows you as a customer? This customer had a strong relationship
with their service provider for 15+ years, but over time realized they were becoming the smaller fish in
the big pond, which translated into high costs and less flexibility.

This customer provides comprehensive services to hospital-based physicians in many states across the
country. Their mission is to provide professionally qualified and experienced teams to help clients
achieve efficiency, profitability, and sustainable success.

Although there were no customer service issues, the Senior IT Management team was concerned that
their current vendor may not be providing the most cost-effective solution. This was essential to ensure
the customer was meeting their commitment to their clients, helping their clients to achieve efficiency,
profitability, and sustainable success, and enabling them to remain competitive in the marketplace.

It was decided to begin a project to determine if there was another service provider who could provide
excellent service, at a lower cost, with minimal risk.

Finding the Right Service Provider

An internal review resulted in the formulation of a requirements document and determination of all
critical criteria. The customer asked each vendor specific questions (in addition to their requirements
document response) such as:

• Are you the outsourcer or a third party that’s going to subcontract to another outsourcer?
• Do you have deep talent specific to platform environments?

The search began with an initial list of ten vendors. It was quickly narrowed down to five vendors, and
responses with budgetary pricing were then requested. This eliminated all but three service providers:
the incumbent, another Tier-1, and Blue Hill. Whether a vendor was a “Tier 1”, or “Tier 2” considered
provider was of less importance to this customer’s management than finding a service provider with
specific platform expertise and experience, with good financials, and with a business plan supporting
longevity to ensure that they would be in business for a while.

It was very important and part of the due diligence process to find a service provider
partner with a culture that matched ours. Our service provider partner must always
go above and beyond and must continually strive to provide good service. In my dual
reporting and responsibility role to both the business unit and to the IT corporate side,
this is extremely important.

From Contract Through Migration

Blue Hill’s flexibility during the contract phase (even using the customer’s existing contract template)
made things simpler, provided a quicker turnaround and enabled the agreement to get to the contract
signing quickly. This flexibility saved time, effort, and expense since there were no Terms and Conditions
changed. During the migration process, a lot of detailed planning occurred beginning with a standard
plan that was fine-tuned as required.

Challenge(s)

• Paying too much to another Service Provider and not receiving personalized care and
  attention
• During the fifteen years of service, this mid-tier provider had been acquired by a Tier-1
  provider.
• The applications running on the mainframe delivered critical business services to their
  customers, and they were looking for a partner that would deliver the specific services at a
  more affordable cost with personal care.

Solution

Blue Hill’s mainframe hosted solution included dedicated Account Management and access to key staff
members, which provided more personalized care and attention.

• Received 50% savings with improved quality of service.
• A trusted company to maintain the mainframe data center environment, (running VM/VSE),
  including a secure and fault tolerant hosting facility.
• Blue Hill’s flexibility enabled an approach to cut down on how long it took to finalize a
  contract. From the time the decision was made to choose Blue Hill as the new partner, it
  was three months to finalize the contract, complete the transition and migration, and be up
  and fully operational.
• During the migration process, a lot of detailed planning occurred beginning with a standard plan that was fine-tuned as required.

Blue Hill met my expectations. Blue Hill’s process is built upon a “classic data
center” model methodology, and classic methodologies work. Time has proven
that a partnership relationship works very well. From a technical standpoint, the
Blue Hill team has shown very good technical skills, there’s no question about it.
The outcome was exactly as we planned and prepared for, a migration that was
transparent and non-disruptive to the business! …and our annual expenditures
decreased by over 50%.