Short clip: Why Churchill Downs fired its vendors

>> How do you deal with the issue of vendor management? I mean, a lot of companies and CIO's that I talk to, the critical path for them is finding vendors who they can actually partner with and then go down a path and rely upon, because their investing so much and building a network or building an ERP system.

>> That's actually an easy one. We fired all our vendors.

>> You fired all your vendors?

>> We have no vendors. We now have partners.

>> What's the difference between a vendor and a partner then?

>> A partnership is a give and take. My IT staff is not a very large staff, so from an R and D, just going out and trying to find new technologies and how we can help our business, is not, it's not an easy thing to do with all the other day job we have, right? So, what we do is rely on partners such as Cisco or EMC or Dell or HP to actually let us know what's happening out in the marketplace, bring this to us not in a pressure sales type thing, but more of an information sharing standpoint. And then them displaying skin in the game as well. Now it's not sales pricing, you're not going to get the cheapest price with a lot of these companies, but what you do get is access to information, access to thing that can actually help you do your job better.

>> What's a good example of where that partnership relationship has resulted in you being able to innovate?

>> Well, most partners do these executive briefings and they're difficult to get to, just taking the time out of your busy day, but they're so worth it. We did one with EMC out in the Boston area where we were trying to learn more about storage because we were relocating our CRM systems to our data center, and we needed a storage solution, but we also needed to go down the path of a disaster recovery platform in 2007. So we go, we have a conversation with EMC at their executive briefing center, and there's four things that we were able to do to solve real problems that we were focusing on that also takes care of 40 to 60 percent of a disaster recovery project that we have to do this year. Just by having that exposure to the girth of whatever they bring to the table we're able to go ahead and make those types of strategic decisions and say, all right, if we do this, we save costs here and we get a world class solution.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====