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Vendor Management
So, Faircloth devised his own plan: He found a vacant data center in town to rent, where vendors could work on configuring the gear before the move to the new facility. There was no time to order equipment racks, but Las Vegas has no shortage of banquet tables, so the installers spread out their networking gear like a high-tech buffet.
"I had to get them all in the same room working together," Faircloth says. "I had EMC, Cisco and Dell in different corners. The vendors were stepping on each other's toes."
Faircloth soon discovered that getting vendors to work together was one of his biggest headaches -- a change from the casino business, where vendors enjoy lucrative business for years to come and bend over backward to be helpful. "When you do a deal with a casino, they want to hold your hand until you're 100% supported," Faircloth says.
At the institute, Faircloth was dealing with half a dozen major vendors. One provider that he won't name installed the gear and left before the CIO could blink.
"How do you turn this thing on?" Faircloth wondered. "They left an 800 number. That's not acceptable."
Faircloth found himself on the phone with the CEO of at least one supplier. The installer who flew home wound up flying back to Las Vegas a couple of days later.
"Vendors were mad at me," Faircloth says. "I want implementers. At first these guys just wanted to install and leave; they couldn't hit McCarran Airport fast enough. They didn't go through IT training and the users' side. [I said],'You can't leave until we're up and running and we can support this.'"
Then, one Friday in September 2005, the Nevada Cancer Institute closed its small clinic in Las Vegas and spent the weekend moving into the new facility. On Monday the new building greeted its first patients. There was even a fireworks show.
"We put in some more hours than we thought we might," Faircloth says. "You just manage your problems until you're up and running. It's the third or fourth data center I've put together or moved in my career. No one thought we could do it in two weeks."
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