Organisations Putting Customer Service First In Business Continuity Planning

Customer support, email, phone systems top list of IT services for which continuity assurance is most critical

PALO ALTO, CA—May 16, 2006—SteelEye Technology, Inc. today released additional results from its first annual market survey, the SteelEye Technology Business Continuity (BC) Index. According to the research findings, organisations are prioritising in particular the protection of customer-centric IT services in their plans to assure BC. Respondents ranked customer support as the top service to protect, with email and phone systems also ranking among the top four.

As a group, respondents chose customer support as the most important IT service to include in a BC plan, resulting in an average score of 1.6 (1= more important; 5= least important). Email (1.8) and phone systems (1.9) were also top priorities; only corporate financial systems (1.7) were prioritised above those choices.

Among the largest organisations with more than 25,000 employees, as might be expected given shareholder demands, corporate financial systems were rated as more important, averaging a score of 1.4. However, customer support (1.5), phone systems (1.6) and email (1.8) rounded out the top four concerns and the largest organisation actually rated these services importance even more highly than did smaller enterprises.

“A lot of people might have guessed that the primary focus among IT services companies would be order processing or the like – the assumption being that the only thing businesses really care about is the cash register,” noted Bob Williamson, Vice President for SteelEye Technology. “But our survey results show that this is not the case at all – and all the talk about focusing on the customer is in fact being carried out as part of operational planning. IT leaders are obviously demonstrating alignment with the business goal of customer-centricity.”

Deployed worldwide in cooperation with Continuity Central (http://www.continuitycentral.com) and answered by both C-level executives and IT technicians with active roles in their organisations’ business continuity strategies, the SteelEye BC Index examines adoption levels of various server technologies, delves into priorities and costs for implementing BC initiatives and provides a view into common BC practices.

Findings from the SteelEye BC Index released earlier this year showed that 73% of organisations have formalised BC plans in place, and as many as 45% have been prompted to invoke them. The largest slice of surveyed organisations (32%) also reported that anything more than four consecutive hours of downtime could be disastrous for their organisations.

SteelEye’s flagship product, LifeKeeper, provides LAN and WAN-based, end-to-end protection of critical resources and enables companies of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. Viewed by industry experts as best in class, the product most recently garnered LinuxWorld’s 2005 Product Excellence Award for Best Clustering Solution.

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Note to editors
The full results of the 2006 SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index are now available. Please contact Omarketing if you are interested in previewing the statistics, including findings segmented by geography, industry and organisation size. Tel +44 (0)20 8255 5225 email rose@omarketing.co.uk

About SteelEye Technology
SteelEye is a leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows. The SteelEye LifeKeeper family of application-focused data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, and enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. To complement its software solutions, SteelEye also provides a full range of high availability consulting and professional services to assist organisations with the assessment, design and implementation of solutions for ensuring High Availability within their environments. To learn more about SteelEye, visit www.steeleye.com. We are the High Availability Experts.

Trademark Notice
SteelEye Technology, SteelEye and LifeKeeper are registered trademarks of SteelEye Technology, Inc. All 3rd party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contact

Hannah Knowles / Rose Ross
Omarketing (for SteelEye EMEA)
+44 (0)20 8255 5225
Hannah@omarketing.co.uk / Rose@omarketing.co.uk

John Banfield
SteelEye Technology
+44 (0) 1223 208701
John.Banfield@SteelEye.com

This release was published on openPR.