Transactis

The Customer

Transactis works with banks and their merchants to transform traditional paper-based billing, payment, and coupon transactions to smarter electronic interactions that are more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly. Since 2001, Transactis is a leading provider of forward-thinking electronic bill payment and processing (EBPP) solutions, including BillMail, the patent-pending, secure e-mail billing platform, and BillerExpress^TM, a suite of EBPP solutions sold by banks to small and mid-size treasury clients.

The Challenge

In a down economy, Transactis is enjoying its greatest success ever, as multiple clients nationwide are making the decision to move from paper-based bills to electronic bills to reduce postage, paper, and print costs along with taking advantage of “green” initiatives. For IT infrastructure support, the company had been using Windstream Hosted Solutions along with another firm, outsourcing IT and data center functions. But Transactis’ rapid growth meant it needed to expand its IT functions quickly, and the other firm was not up to the task.

“We took a look at the other company’s offerings and said, ‘wow, that will not meet our long term growth needs,’” said Chuck Kelso, Transactis’ chief operating officer. Kelso realized that to scale his organization and keep up with its rapid growth, he needed higher level support from a partner that could provide more sophisticated offerings and grow with him. He got that from Windstream Hosted Solutions.

The Solution

Kelso was impressed by Windstream Hosted Solutions’ “Hi-Touch” consultancy services, and its full range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. “We really loved how they treated us, and all the different services they had, which is different from a typical data center, where they give you a rack, power and Internet service, and basically say, ‘don’t bother us any more,’” Kelso said.

Working with Windstream Hosted Solutions’ experts, Kelso and Transactis consolidated and outsourced their infrastructure, covering the full range of managed production, storage and security services, with around-the-clock support and industry-leading SLAs.

The original Transactis environment was fully dedicated and in one location. With a rapidly expanding business, Kelso needed the ability to deploy new infrastructure on the fly in hours instead of days.

“We move very quickly, and we need the ability to add environments on the fly as we gain new clients,” Kelso said. “If we brought in another hardware server, it could take us up to 20 days to requisition it and configure it. With Windstream Hosted Solutions’ VMware-based virtualization solution, we can configure a new environment, start to finish, in less than four hours. That kind of scalability has translated into significant gains in efficiency and revenue for Transactis.

The cooperative partnership between Kelso and Windstream Hosted Solutions includes ongoing strategy sessions to help meet Transactis’ constantly changing requirements. “We’ve grown again, so we went to them last month and said, ‘Here’s our needs,’ Kelso explained. “We sat down with the sales engineer and account manager and asked what they could help us with. We came up with a laundry list, and broke it into three phases. We updated some firewalls and switches for openers. I’ve been in other data centers where, unless you specifically request it, they don’t do those kind of reviews with you.” Windstream Hosted Solutions’ “Hi-Touch” approach ensures that the changing needs of customers like Transactis are continuously taken into account.

Kelso sits down with his trusted Windstream Hosted Solutions account manager and sales engineer on a regular basis to discuss what’s next. “We say, ‘Here’s where we’re growing, here are our pain points…these are must-haves, how can you guys help us,’ Kelso said. “And they’re very, very good at that.”

Kelso noted that he’s reviewed offers from several other data center companies to transfer his account; “It doesn’t make sense to switch,” Kelso said. “They don’t have the level of service that Windstream Hosted Solutions does. When it’s the lifeblood of your business, what’s it worth it to you?”