Success

We provide invaluable information and real world data transaction intelligence that delivers a highly granular and precise sense of actual market prices, and a better understanding about services providers, enabling our clients to realize incomparable business success.

View Example Client Success Stories:

• Shared Services Benchmark – High Tech
• DC Operations Benchmark – Financial Services
• Distributed Computing Benchmark – Financial Services
• Desktop Support Outsourcing
• Shared Services Benchmark – Media
• Social Video Media Network
• Insurance carrier disaster recovery (DR) services
• Games Developer converts to MMO – global payment processing
• Global payments network – digital entertainment & royalty payments
• Revolutionizing the digital payments marketplace

Shared Services Benchmark – High Tech

Synopsis: A Fortune 50 software IT Supplier engaged RampRate to perform an in-depth benchmark and sourcing analysis of its external providers of IT services, using RampRate’s Service Provider Intelligence Index (SPY IndexT). This review include a thorough analysis of the costs, service levels, and contract terms for data center operations (including hosting and co-location), managed services, back-up services, networking & connectivity, and Internet bandwidth utilization. It also examined, for key vendors, the suite of services offered, bundling of services offered, standard and best-in-class service levels, list price for individual services and bundled service packages, average actual prices for individual services and bundled service packages, and operational costs for services provided. The client used RampRate’s analysis to compare its internal operational costs and service levels against the market. It also restructured its internal chargeback model to reduce undesirable behavior from internal customers.

Result: It was found reductions of 12-47% would be realized through mid-contract negotiation, while increasing services levels 22%.

Data Center Operations Benchmark – Financial Services

Synopsis: A Fortune 50 financial services provider engaged RampRate to perform an in-depth benchmark of its in-house data center services, using RampRate’s Service Provider Intelligence Index (SPY IndexT) to identify areas of potential savings. The benchmark revealed that contrary to initial assumptions, labor was one of the lowest-cost items compared to market and peers, while data center space was the least cost-effective. As a result of the benchmark, the client established a deep, repeatable process for measuring data center operational efficiency and a reporting structure to use for management updates.

Result: It was found reductions of 12-47% would be realized through mid-contract negotiation/outsourcing, while increasing services levels 22%.

Distributed Computing Benchmark – Financial Services

Synopsis: A Fortune 50 financial services provider used RampRate’s services to provide a point-in-time financial comparison against its internal costs in 7 key data centers, as well as on-demand storage utilities and server management. In conjunction with this activity, RampRate analyzed CPU utilization metrics to assess the efficacy of the client’s distributed computing operations. As a result of the project, the client focused its efforts on improved measurement of utilization beyond CPU to include I/O and storage while validating the fact that its data center operations were competitive with market medians for the region.

Result: It was found reductions of 19-26% would be realized through mid-contract negotiation, while increasing services levels 74%.

Desktop Support Outsourcing

Synopsis: A leading book publisher engaged RampRate to advise and manage the RFP process for its global desktop outsourcing initiative. RampRate created / edited the RFP document, supplied financial targets, and managed the due diligence process, drastically accelerating evaluation time. The client chose to not follow RampRate’s recommendations due to a strategic relationship with one of the target vendors; however this decision has led to ongoing issues during the implementation phase.

Result: It would found reductions of 7-31% would be realized through mid-contract negotiation, while increasing services levels 22%. Project was done within 6 weeks of kickoff.

Shared Services Benchmark – Media & Entertainment

Synopsis: A top movie studio approached RampRate to examine its current relationship with its corporate parent’s internal services organization. RampRate identified significant financial deficiencies that could be resolved by pursuing an outsourced model; however, the services were kept in-house for strategic reasons. RampRate significantly revised the SLA to ensure that the high costs were offset by strong service level commitments.

Result: It would found reductions of 9-23% would be realized through mid-contract negotiation, while increasing services levels 64%. The corporate division used this data to reduce their division operating bill from shared services over $13mm/year.

Major international insurance carrier evaluating various IT Suppliers to provide disaster recovery (DR) services

Scope: Sourcing Review / Selection
Geography: North America

Situation
A leading international insurance services provider consisting over 5,000 companies servicing clients in over 1150 countries suffered from excessive cost over runs and redundancies from their incumbent disaster recovery services provider. The firm instigated a significant cost cutting and restructuring program with a greater focus on improving the quality of service terms they currently received while reducing the overall costs and integrating disparate facilities into one, regionally accessible location with the ability to hot site facilities to different time zones with preferential priority. This program included both sourcing and IT Supplier selection functions through a proprietary evaluation and selection process.

Approach and Solution
RampRate met with our client to determine their exact needs and requirements. Additionally, RampRate evaluated the incumbent IT Suppliers former and proposed contract. RampRate formulated a complex evaluation matrix to organize every aspect of the services agreement to compare the historical agreement to the newly proposed agreement providing for an extremely illuminating valuation and comparison between the service offerings, terms, conditions and pricing. RampRate then engaged two additional tier-one disaster recovery IT Suppliers and evaluated their proposed offerings side by side.

Result
By way of RampRate’s side-by-side proposal evaluation methodology, the insurance company was ultimately able to conclude how disproportionate the various service offerings each IT Supplier supplied. During the course of the evaluation, RampRate was successful at negotiating better terms, conditions and rates from all three IT Suppliers and negotiated over $4M in annual savings from the IT Supplier ultimately selected.

Social Video Media Network experiencing growing pains required technical stability consulting

Scope: Technology / process consulting
Geography: North America
Situation
A leading social media network was experiencing difficulties managing explosive growth in subscriptions which caused numerous system failures and outages resulting in lost subscribers. As an entirely venture-financed entity with no significant revenues, the company was lost opportunities to acquire new subscribers and considerable sums of money from advertising and promotion activities.

Approach and Solution
RampRate conducted a thorough assessment of the company’s operational state including all technology infrastructure, personnel, policy, processes and procedures. RampRate identified numerous deficiencies and developed a step-by-step process to remedy the systemic failures plaguing the company and its user base.

Result
Within 30 days of the implementation of RampRate’s proposed corrective actions, the company stabilized it’s platform and met its target of 1,000,000 subscribers 6 months ahead of schedule.

Popular Video Games Developer converting their popular console-based games to massive multi-player online versions with global payment processing

Scope: Electronic payments sourcing
Geography: Global

Situation
A leading video games developer in the United States endeavored to transform their popular console games into online MMO-style versions complete with subscription-based electronic payments. The engagement required a multi-national effort to locate and evaluate nearly every payment processing IT Supplier for potential consideration.

Approach and Solution
RampRate conducted an exhaustive study of 75+ electronic payments providers globally; evaluating them on over 100 different criteria required by our client. By developing a common evaluation criteria methodology, the participating IT Suppliers were evaluated side-by-side and considered for final participation in the selection process.

Result
From the 45+ qualified vendors, the field was quickly narrowed to 6 based on weighting criteria supplied by RampRate’s client. The short-list was narrowed to 6 companies within two weeks and three IT Suppliers were ultimately selected based on their various strengths, product offerings and geographic positioning.

Global electronic payments network considering entrée into digital entertainment & royalty payments required market research

Scope: Strategic research of global digital entertainment market
Geography: Global

Situation
A global leader in electronic payments processing and credit / debit issuance required a global market study of the state of all forms of digital entertainment media to evaluate a new product to simplify global purchases of digital entertainment and media.

Approach and Solution
RampRate conducted a thorough evaluation of the current and future state of the digital entertainment and media marketplace and developed a complete digital media value chain and ecosystem to anticipate the future state of all economic drivers supporting the current and future marketplace. Additionally, RampRate conducted one-on-one interviews with executive-level industry experts in a double-blind format to gauge their industry expertise and opinion to substantiate the primary research developed.

Result
RampRate completed its market research in record time and under budget. Throughout the process, RampRate were able to update the client daily with reviews helping them formulate their business model / planning on the fly. The result of the RampRate market research study helped the client prioritize it’s global top-10 projects prior to their IPO.

Strategic business planning for a well-known entity aimed at revolutionizing the digital payments marketplace

Scope: Strategic research of global digital entertainment market
Geography: Global

Situation
A stealth startup required strategic business and financial planning services to develop and evolve a method to accelerate electronic payments across a wide variety of digital entertainment media.

Approach and Solution
RampRate conducted a examination of the entire entertainment industry across all platforms (physical, digital, mobile, games, events, ticketing, etc.) culminating in a revolutionary new digital payments paradigm. The project concluded with the development of a strategic business and financial plan, investment presentations and participation instruments.

Result
RampRate completed its evaluation and supportive materials resulting in a joint-venture between the client and one of the largest, global mobile handset providers. The company is currently in the process of completing its technology development and expects to launch its service in mid-2008.

Client: Major Motion Picture Entertainment Company
Services: Consulting – Infrastructure Analysis, In-source versus Outsource
Customer Pain:
The Client was evaluating a company-wide IT Services consolidation that would require all US divisions to consolidate their IT infrastructures under an internal Shared Services environment. The Client felt that this environment would reduce their services and increase their costs. They were already using Shared Services for a portion of their IT needs and were unsatisfied with the quality of delivery.

Solution:
The Client contracted RampRate to provide a high level analysis of the current Shared Services and build a model comparing that environment to market norms.

Service:
RampRate worked with a cross-department group of executives including developers, infrastructure experts, hosting experts and finance executives to achieve a complete understanding of:

• the client’s environment
• the services being provided by Shared Services
• Shared Service’s capabilities
• the internal cost structure of Shared Services
• the Client’s needs
• the Client’s budget

RampRate leveraged our SPY database to build a Market Comparison for pricing, business terms, governance/escalation procedures and SLAs. A Services GAP model, Cost analysis and Financial model were built.

The GAP model detailed the difference between the business terms, governance/escalation procedures and SLAs available from IT outsourcing providers and those offered by Shared Services. The Cost analysis examined Shared Services internal cost structure and compared it to market averages. The Financial model projected and compared the five year costs of Shared Services against outsourcing. The project demonstrated the following results:

• Shared Services was not providing Market Service Levels
• Shared Services was not generating sufficient ROI

To meet Market Service Levels Shared Services costs would exceed Market Norms

• Shared Services was not positioned to provide the specialized IT services needed by an international motion picture entertainment company
• Client ROI The full project was completed and presented within 90 days from contract execution. The Client used the Market Comparison to support their opposition to the consolidation plan enabling them to maintain a more independent IT infrastructure

Client: iFilm
Case Summary: Since its inception in 1998, iFilm has pioneered the online video market, providing one of the top destinations for professional and user-generated content, while becoming the first ad supported video site with strong revenues and profits. Starting in 2001, the company used RampRate’s Sourcing Advisory services to save millions of dollars and months of time in negotiating market-leading contracts for hosting and content delivery, ensuring that it could stay focused on the core business and keep exploring new frontiers while remaining strongly profitable. iFilm’s hard work and creativity paid off as Viacom acquired the company in the fall of 2005 and made it part of the MTV family. As the acquisition was finalized, RampRate helped iFilm make a great first impression by reducing its content delivery costs by 51.7% over an already market-leading rate offered to it just weeks earlier. The new deal ensured that iFilm could stay with its current trusted provider after the merger and demonstrated that a company doesn’t need size to get a great deal on IT services – it just needs a great advisor.

Client: Audible
Case Summary: When RampRate started examining Audible.com’s co-location relationship, the leading online distributor of spoken-word audio was confident that it had the best deal possible from its long-term vendor.

RampRate’s data-driven analysis quickly found that wasn’t the case, providing the market information needed to reshape Audible’s deal, save it big money, and put in place service metrics and guarantees that had long been lacking. Within two weeks RampRate had:

• Realigned the IT Supplier relationship, reducing total costs 46 percent
• Evaluated the deal’s non-financial aspects, demonstrating the strategic value in Audible’s IT Supplier relationship
• Added service-level and business-term conditions that will guarantee service quality and improve the company’s ability to evaluate its vendor