HCL's response, at 100-plus pages, laid out the strongest operational and reporting response of all the vendors, but pricing was higher than iNOC's and PerformanceIT's, and HCL didn't specifically address some of TacDoh's service-level management concerns.
HCL, which has 25 offices in 14 countries and is based in India, was the only vendor that planned to continue to use the management applications TacDoh's in-house staff supports. This raised the overall TacDoh IT budget by missing a reduction the rest of the vendors took. It did, however, make for redundant and distributed data collection as HCL uses OpenView in its NOC, letting it leverage the existing hardware and software architecture.
The RFI contained a requirements analysis and solution overview, but we never got the feeling that HCL was particularly focused on TacDoh's needs. The requirements were nothing more than a reorganization of the RFI we submitted, and the solutions suggested missed the mark. The responses were very detailed, explaining what tools were to be used, the roles and behaviors governing the relationship and what metrics were to be gathered, but HCL didn't directly answer some requirements.
For example, we specified that branches were to experience 99.9 percent uptime and no more than 2 seconds in network latency. But nothing in the 100-page response spoke directly to these thresholds. There was detailed SLA governance documented, with ongoing feedback built in to guide and align service delivery and expectations; all good, but not on point. Further, we would have expected some push back, like we got from NetProactive, about being held responsible for the WAN circuit providers, but HCL didn't address this.
This isn't to say that HCL appeared lax or unable to perform; we just didn't see our specific concerns addressed and didn't get that warm and fuzzy feeling that TacDoh would receive VIP treatment.
HCL did break its regular service into very organized responsibility areas. The engineering services, which include capacity planning, add an additional $12,000 per month to the bill. It's possible that if a network engineer is left on the TacDoh IT staff this charge could be partially mitigated, but not totally eliminated because other engineering services likely will be required.
In general, HCL's SLA management was organized, but not very detailed. It appears from the RFI response that HCL has procedures in place to track the SLAs that TacDoh cares about, but the answer is short on specifics. We asked how the charges and service levels would deal with acts of God, for instance, or the dreaded NTF, but there was no response.
We got lots of talk about how well-organized HCL's NOC was, less about the service it was to provide. For example, the NOC supports two Internet connections, with the second having a direct satellite uplink to Thailand ISP ThaiCom, to avoid any catastrophes.
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HCL's response, at 100-plus pages, laid out the strongest operational and reporting response of all the vendors, but pricing was higher than iNOC's and PerformanceIT's, and HCL didn't specifically address some of TacDoh's service-level management concerns. 
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