This is a story of a fantastic win back for Atea and shows, that it not always comes down to pricing!

From 2012 to the beginning of 2018 Atea was delivering several managed client services to DSB – the Danish railroad. Besides onsite services all over Denmark, the scope was also Client Operations with SCCM as the engine for their around 6.000 PCs including antimalware management.

As DSB is a public customer, they needed to do a public tender and couldn’t just renew the contract. Atea was all the way to the finish line one of two service providers DSB negotiated with – that was going on for the better part of 2017. DSB had 550+ requirements a service provider needed to deliver on. From a quality and delivery perspective, Atea scored higher than the other service provider still in the run back then. The final decision was made by DSB late in the summer of 2017 on who was to be awarded the new contract. Unfortunately, Atea lost due to pricing – it was a big difference. This of course came as a shock for all of us as DSB has been a long-term customer with Atea. But we also know how complex the IT infrastructure at DSB is and how challenging it can be to deliver high-quality services to DSB.

The transition to the new service provider started in late 2017 and Atea was out of the DSB infrastructure by mid-2018. That was supposed to be it – so we thought.

Apparently, something did not go right for the new service provider DSB selected and in late January 2019 Atea got contacted by DSB asking if Atea would be able to help them quickly transitioning from the other service provider. As Atea is service minded and loved the idea of having DSB back as a customer we responded positively.

DSB had a wish for Atea taking over as fast as possible. While a team was working on the contract with DSB, another team immediately started the transition. One could say we were building the plane while we at the same time were flying it… 😊

Two months later, on April 1, the contract was ready based on a SKI02.22 award (a Danish public frame agreement), and we went live with operations!!!

The contract is for 3+3+3 years and the service scope is what we call Client Operations PLUS as we still have 400+ requirements to live up to and some of them exceed the normal Client Operations services. For example, related to security services where both Rapid7 and Avecto are part of the solution. SCCM is deployed in Azure as DSB has a cloud first strategy.

Pricing you may ask – well, that is the beauty of it, it ended up very close to the pricing we gave back in 2017.

The lesson here is that services can be sold so cheap that a service provider cannot afford to deliver – high-quality services come at a price.