IBM disaster recovery center buzzes after attacks

Caroline Humer

NEW YORK: As rescue crews sorted through the rubble at the World Trade Center
site, employees from retail brokerage Tucker Anthony Inc. were in the midst of
moving to a bucolic setting 40 miles (65 km) away in the woods of New York
state.

Tucker Anthony had about 300 employees in 1 World Financial Center, across
the street from the two World Trade Center towers that were hit by hijacked
airplanes on Sept. 11 and then collapsed, leaving a total of more than 6,500
people dead or missing.

In the weeks following the disaster, the brokerage firm's ability to access
critical data and rebuild its systems underscored the disaster recovery
business's evolution from a simple insurance policy for back-up equipment to one
focusing on highly orchestrated emergency services.

Tucker Anthony turned to International Business Machines Corp., which has
3,000 employees working on recovery efforts after the attacks in both Washington
D.C. and the Pentagon, including a team helping federal and local agencies.

This kind of work, called business continuity and recovery, is part of IBM's
$33 billion global services business, which has become an increasing percentage
of the Armonk, NY-based computer giant's $88 billion in total revenues in 2000.

In turn, it has made IBM the envy of some other computer makers, such as
Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. Indeed, Hewlett and Compaq said on
Sept. 4 that they would merge in part to beef up their services offering.

From phones to desks to computers

IBM's disaster recovery team provides a range of services and hardware, from
restoring networks, to laptop and desktop computers, to providing temporary
workspace to shipping out new replacement equipment, said Todd Gordon, IBM's
business continuity and recovery services general manager.

With many financial customers both in the World Trade Center and in
neighboring buildings, IBM began fielding calls before the World Trade Center
buildings had even collapsed.

"We got our first call at 9:10," Gordon explained, just 22 minutes
after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The first tower toppled within
the hour.

As the day went on, customers with contracts and those who did not want help
with everything from figuring out how to get in touch with their employees to
how to patch their data back together. In some cases, he said, the needs were
more dramatic.

It was "Help, I'm out of business. Do you have a place we can go?"
Gordon said.

For Tucker Anthony, and about two dozen other companies, that place ended up
being IBM's 175,000-square-foot (16,260-square-meter) building in the hills just
north of the New York-New Jersey border. Ever since, that normally quiet
recovery center has been buzzing with adrenaline.

Behind door no. 3, tucker Anthony

Behind one of the doors in the four-story complex is Tucker Anthony's
600-square-foot (55-square-meter) suite where the company is rebuilding its
front-office data, including human resources, operations and accounting records.

A handful of technical employees have made the trek there for 10 days, but
the company hopes to close its make-shift center and move to a temporary
location in downtown Manhattan during the week of Sept. 24, said Tucker
Anthony's Paul Stringer, who heads the technology operations at the site.

Stringer, who works in the windowless data room, said the company's recovery
plan, set up 4 years ago, worked as hoped. The company backed up its data daily
and had the tapes picked up early that morning by data storage firm Iron
Mountain Inc

"(Iron Mountain) sends the data up to IBM. We meet them up here. They
load the tapes and we try to start up transmission services," Stringer
explained.

Analysts like IBM’s broader outsourcing

IBM wasn't the only company helping businesses based in the financial
district relocate and reconfigure.

Wayne, Pennsylvania-based SunGard Data Systems and Rosemont, Illinois-based
Comdisco Inc., which recently filed for banktrupcy, both said they had at least
two dozen customers they were working with after the attacks.

IBM declined to break out revenues for the business continuity division. The
business is set up like the insurance business - customers pay monthly fees of
$100 a month to $1 million for a recovery plan. After the disaster occurs, IBM
then charges a daily fee for using the location, said business continuity and
recovery services general manager Todd Gordon.

Gary Helmig, an analyst at SoundView Technology says that IBM's emphasis on
providing a broad range of services, including disaster recovery, will benefit
the company going forward.

"Comdisco and a Sungard will be providing recovery services but they
don't provide the total outsourcing of the data center," Helmig explained.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.