Alcohol Monitoring Systems  

Why Qwest?

"The reason that we chose Qwest when we looked at our criteria and we were comparing against the different vendors was that Qwest had a good financial statement. Some of the other folks had some interesting financial statements, but they weren't really as solid as what we preferred, and our CEO, when he looked at that, his main thought was 'I don't want to get into a situation where I have to move again. I want to be in a situation where I'm with a good, financially stable organization.' And he also wanted someone that would allow us to grow. And the nice thing that Qwest did is when we took the tour of their center, they showed us how much we could grow, and that growth was a lot more than what we will probably be doing anytime soon, but it was amazing to see how much open space we could grow into and that they would allocate for us. So you know, it hit the major two criteria that we really wanted which was the financial and the ability to grow--and then price, of course. Our CEO, he is a CPA; he looks at that bottom line and the Qwest folks were right in the price that he was willing to pay, so that was great. And they were very competitive; I mean, we were surprised almost how competitive Qwest was. "

Implementation

"After we chose Qwest and we started moving forward with our implementation, the things that we got from Qwest as services that were really huge for us was we did get our own project manager. We decided to go ahead and let Qwest handle the whole project. We basically used a Qwest movement service and we had them help us with, you know, teardown of our old facility and activities and then move it. And of course, when they did the move it was just fantastic because they were in at 8:00 a.m. and they were out by noon, and my team took over at noon and we had everything back up and running and normal by 3:00 in the afternoon. And this is on a Saturday, so that was great, too, that we could work on a Saturday and do that because most of our employees are basically home on the weekends. But as we moved forward through that process, there was step check-ins with our Qwest manager for that project and you know, it just--everything was very, very smooth and we accomplished, you know, our project and our move, and then they also helped us move and shift some of our equipment from the home office over to our new CyberCenter location. So it was very successful and it was very easy for us. I had only two other people besides myself working with the Qwest team that day and it was just amazing that it only took two of my folks and we didn't have to bring in a whole group of folks to help us. Qwest really was very fast and very efficient. "

Overview of Solution

"Well, the full Qwest solution that we settled on was the Qwest CyberCenter where we're basically using two racks of--and they're not the normal Qwest racks; we actually had to get specialized racks through Qwest. We also have with the Qwest folks two redundant Internet connections; we have a high-speed 100-meg QMOE line that connects our other two data center locations back into the Qwest location. And inside that location we moved a lot of hardware. Inside those two racks is our full test and development system. As we build systems, we have to make sure it's going to handle our workload, and our workload we handle at our production site, but the test site is where we do a lot of stress testing, so we have to, you know, come in there and say 'Okay, we're gonna handle 10,000 calls in a four-hour period.' And within that stressing, we also are going to connect back into the database, which does not live there at the CyberCenter--it actually lives remotely--to make sure that we get all 10,000 of those transactions into the database in a timely manner. So the CyberCenter really gave us the ability to grow, house our solution, and it also gave us the ability to test across a wide variety of products and make sure that we could, you know, use all those things. And the product that oftentimes I overlook, which was the move product from Qwest, was just amazing also with that, you know, half-a-day movement of all of our equipment and getting it racked and set up and running. So those are the products that we used from Qwest and they were very, very good. "

Non-financial Benefits

"The non-financial benefits that we've seen by using the Qwest solution--I have to say number one and foremost has probably been the reliability issue. One of the things that we encountered as we were at our old vendor was that they would call us and tell us 'Oh, you're using 10 percent more power than you should be in your rack.' And my solution to that was 'Well, why don't you give me a proposal to put more power into my rack', and they basically--really seemed like I was giving them the solutions instead of me saying 'I'm having this problem; can you give me a solution?' So with Qwest, the intangible that we received was a lot of reliability. And we did boost the power and Qwest folks are checking the power, and the Qwest folks told us 'If you get into a certain, you know, issue, we will recommend adding more power to your rack.' I'm not the one that's now giving the solutions; I'm now getting solutions, so that's great. But we moved there for one huge reason and one benefit for me, and that was so I did not have to have a worry that I've got reliability issues going on with power, with cooling, and with 'Do I have enough space? Can I expand my rack?' That's now all Qwest's issues, and they were very kind in telling me that, you know, they will keep an eye on those things for me and they will be watching our rack and they'll be monitoring it for us. So I don't have to worry about those things; I've got now a data center that somebody else is managing and taking care of for me, and the only thing I have to know is that when I get into an issue, they're gonna be coming to me with a solution. "