Financial Services Institution
Not Our First Rodeo
This financial services institution is one of the largest of its kind in the United States.
Challenges
Running on a dedicated CPU to mitigate the potential risk often posed by Third Party Software vendors when transitioning to an outsourced model
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
- Blue Hill solution provided DASD and tape replication for an improved RTO of 4 hours and an improved RPO of 5 minutes
- Guaranteed availability
- Unlimited test time
Improving responsiveness by transitioning from physical tape to Virtual Tape
Providing additional support capabilities in a flexible manner; i.e., as employees retired, then providing those services
Ensuring a consistency and dedication to responsive services
- Blue Hill’s goal is always to act as an extension of the customer IT team
Support required as their plans formulated to transition off the Mainframe over time, including termination for convenience options and flexible renewal terms
- Additional flexibility includes decremental pricing which also provides predictable pricing options and helps reduce ongoing monthly charges as applications are systematically moved off the Mainframe
Seeking the Services that represented the best value
Building a trusted relationship with a partner who would deliver seamless support to meet their current needs, and being responsive to their needs that may change over time.
Needed to be fully migrated within 90 days
Vendor Considerations
This financial services institution selected 4 vendors to participate in the RFP process: two large well-known vendors, and two mid-sized vendors.
“We started with 4 vendors, and wanted to pursue the 2 smaller mid-size vendors because we wanted good customer services, and a partnership.”
“I learned about Blue Hill through Gartner. We had a consultation with Gartner who gave us your name, and one other competitor.”
“We had 4 bids, and you guys won. That had to do with who you are – you were not the cheapest, but you were not the most expensive by far.”
“We were looking for just the right size data center, MFaaS vendor …You guys have a niche that I think you do a real good job at it.”
“Although the other vendors seemed like they knew what they were doing, we felt more comfortable with Blue Hill. We liked your location, it seemed more solid. And we were impressed with your operation. Although the other vendors could have done the job, but Blue Hill was more polished and definitely a better fit.”
Visit at Blue Hill Headquarters
“Our visit to your data center in Pearl River went very well.”
“…[A]nd your comment as we were walking out the door at Blue Hill was, you can call any of our customers, PERIOD. Of course, you would need to let them know we would be calling, and I understood that, but the fact that you had a 100% reference rate was extremely impressive.”
Solution
An RFP was issued and solicited to qualified vendors for MFaaS.
The minimum requirements and scope of this project was to provide the necessary hardware, software, and services for this institution’s Legacy Mainframe Services that were in place. 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.
As an optional service, this client requested the Respondents to provide additional scope 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.
Evaluation Criteria
Qualifications and Experience: company’s organization, ability to perform, and past performance
Key Personnel Qualifications and Experience
Technical Approach
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 similar to 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.
The Selection Process
“When dealing with the vendors, I just wanted the facts, not a lot of marketing fluff.”
“We don’t have our own technical team, and so we needed to rely on the vendor for that support.”
“It was absolutely helpful initially meeting with John Lalli, your COO, and Tom Laudati, CTO, especially because we had not experienced this before, and you can imagine we had a lot of questions. They both impressed me that they were very confident in Blue Hill’s cutover capabilities. And Tom took the time to methodically go through the actual scenario, what would be happening, explaining what we would go through, how we would get there, the number of dry runs we would have, all of that.”
“When we down selected to 2 vendors, we decided to spend a full day with each vendor, and Blue Hill was one of them.”
Transition Planning
“From a planning standpoint, I wanted the plan to be flawless, especially in order to communicate it overall to my executives, so they understood we were all doing a bang-up job, and not to worry.”
“Sometimes there is trepidation on the part of management to do a migration, but it was very well planned out with no surprises.”
“Extreme planning makes it go a lot better too, I think that’s what both teams did.”
“Negotiating with the Third Party software vendors was difficult, but Blue Hill had some good negotiating tactics, having dealt with this type of situation before.”
Results
“My team tells me that all of the Blue Hill team is very responsive, and we really appreciate that.”
“We have plans to get off the Mainframe in 3-5 years. Currently our people supporting the Mainframe are aging out and retiring. Our staff is now smaller, but not our workloads, and the Mainframe is arguably our most important workload.”
Flexibility and Cost Effectiveness
“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.”
“From the very beginning we talked about our staff members who wanted to retire but didn’t want to let go of their jobs, and I understand that, but I also want to make it possible for them to do that. As we are transitioning our staff, we will ask Blue Hill to provide those additional services. This flexibility lets us add services as we need them, which makes it more cost efficient.”
Seamless Ongoing Support
“Not too many vendors have that kind of attitude anymore, and that’s what we were looking for, a vendor with the same expectations of providing quality, responsive services. And that’s what we got with Blue Hill.”
“This whole experience and working with Blue Hill has been really great. Blue Hill wasn’t the cheapest, but we feel you guys do provide the best value for us.”
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