25 percent cheaper is easy if you accept outages. The art is to save 25 percent and hold the 99.9 percent while you swap the provider under running operations.
First the honest arithmetic behind the number. 99.9 percent availability refers to normal operation, planned maintenance windows are excluded. But if the client allows only eight hours of unplanned downtime a year, the operational demands are high. The trick is to pull the long-running work forward: loading the new environment, reconciling the customizations, checking and testing, involving the developers, documentation and trainings. The actual downtime is then only the cutover itself. That does not happen on a Tuesday afternoon, and client, partner and internal support work hand in hand.
Three providers, one lesson
The path there went through three providers. The first was technically strong, firmly anchored in the parent group, and simply far too expensive. The second had competent contacts but delivered opaquely and below expectation. Exactly here the difference between a soft target commitment and a binding service level struck: officially we had little recourse, in fact it was constant escalation. We had no realistic chance to escalate up to the group leadership, because the operation in question was vanishingly small in that giant corporation. You have no voice when the service you need is not the provider’s main business.
So in the third step, deliberately small but fine. For this provider our mid-sized operation was a prize, the management sat at the negotiating table itself, and a smooth transition and a relaxed operation followed. The tender with five providers and a volume of around seven million euros confirmed in the end what the gut had suspected before: how far above the market the first provider had been. Hence the lion’s share of the 25 percent.
Never choose an operations partner by price and logo alone. Ask whether the service you need is its main business, and whether you are big enough to have a voice with it. If not, the finest commitments are non-binding.