Scale & Buy: Owning a big IT budget is a bit like sudden fame. At first, it’s great – everyone wants to be your friend, you get perks and freebies, and feel like a rock star. And then you realize:
The support structure is not yet there, the pace is maddening, and the challenges escalate dramatically. Where it took you a year to find 3 data center locations or a few network circuits, you now need to find 30 in the next 6 months. What do you do?
Some buyers get married to a few strategic providers and rely on them for scale. It’s an expensive band-aid – we often wind up seeing contracts at 2x market rates because supposedly strategic partners forgot to build in a scale discount structure or failed to adjust for market conditions.
Others take the opposite tack – leave in-depth planning and due diligence aside and just take the lowest cost bid. Sometimes you get lucky.
Most of the time, something blows up – resulting in an embarrassing outage, a delayed loss, a cable cut that takes out your supposedly redundant network.
And through it all, you’re hounded by sales to the point where you turn off your phone and fill up your spam folder and still feel under siege. We used to have an analyst test question that asked potential RampRate consultants to find costs for some commodity in an obscure place – a rack in Wichita or IP transit in Asia.
Most of them Googled some analyst reports or published quotes. But the most diligent called up a couple of providers for a quote. And years later they’re still getting follow-up requests from salespeople that never take a lead out of the pipeline.
- Budgets, like fame, may be fleeting – you need to manage them well today to keep your job
- Many of your new friends aren’t really your friends
- With all the attention, you don’t have the time for what got you there in the first place
This is especially a problem in high-growth fast-scaling companies.
The support structure is not yet there, the pace is maddening, and the challenges escalate dramatically. Where it took you a year to find 3 data center locations or a few network circuits, you now need to find 30 in the next 6 months. What do you do?
Some buyers get married to a few strategic providers and rely on them for scale. It’s an expensive band-aid – we often wind up seeing contracts at 2x market rates because supposedly strategic partners forgot to build in a scale discount structure or failed to adjust for market conditions.
Others take the opposite tack – leave in-depth planning and due diligence aside and just take the lowest cost bid. Sometimes you get lucky.
Most of the time, something blows up – resulting in an embarrassing outage, a delayed loss, a cable cut that takes out your supposedly redundant network.
And through it all, you’re hounded by sales to the point where you turn off your phone and fill up your spam folder and still feel under siege. We used to have an analyst test question that asked potential RampRate consultants to find costs for some commodity in an obscure place – a rack in Wichita or IP transit in Asia.
Most of them Googled some analyst reports or published quotes. But the most diligent called up a couple of providers for a quote. And years later they’re still getting follow-up requests from salespeople that never take a lead out of the pipeline.
Scale & Buy Global IT Infrastructure
So what’s the answer? Find a stunt double, a stand-in – someone who will take the worst of your job and leave you to the parts you love. Find someone who’ll take on the incessant sales calls, freeing your day up for something better. Find someone who’ll navigate the right balance between price, risk, and performance of your IT infrastructure the way that you would if you had infinite time and access to all the available data about technologies and providers at your fingertips. Find someone who will be objective and won’t accept box seats or expensive dinners, but will make decisions based purely on data. We hope you find us.
