Business continuity keeps companies talking

The historic market town of Basingstoke is home to one of Britain's best kept secrets: UK software and IT bellwether GemaTech.

The company is at the forefront of a new raft of technologies in the burgeoning business continuity market.

Sharing the town with other IT luminaries IBM, Motorola and BT, GemaTech is at the vanguard of a raft of new firms specialising in this vital field.

Other top UK firms in the space include ICM, Office Shadow, Xenium and Neverfail Group, based just up the road in Theale, Reading.

A business community emerges

The firms are part of a community to bless any knowledge economy. Moreover, each is working together at industry group level to further the potential of the IT sector, as partners and members of the UK-based Business Continuity Institute.

The BCI was set up in 1994 to promote the 'art and science' of business continuity management and to support fellow BCM practitioners in a forum-type environment.

Forging links

The terrorist incidents in London, Madrid, Istanbul and New York more are still fresh in the collective business consciousness.

The Institute has since forged links with the British Standards Institute and other industry bodies.

In the current climate of heightened and tightened security, industry partners and competitors alike are pooling their collective resources to better address real risks.

Protecting telecoms

GemaTech specialises in resilient telecoms systems and has an R&D sister company, CallTech International.

Both are subsidiaries of Telinvest Limited, a UK investment company formed in 1997 to fund and develop innovative telecoms and IT technologies in the sector.

"The phone is as business critical as it has always been," says GemaTech's Chick.

His firm's main IT solution, BCM, helps companies to instanteously re-route critical telephone calls, as well as numbers, faxes and data, to any other location in an emergency.

Transferring telecoms traffic to other devices such as mobile phones is now possible.

"All re-routed calls can also be monitored, recorded and managed with full call statistics and automatic call distribution functions”.

Many hands make light work

GemaTech has more recently developed a cut-down version of the software, dubbed BCM Lite, which is more of a no-frills version which handles re-routing of all telecoms calls to other locations.

So far, according to Chick, sales of the Lite version are booming and look set to continue being a commercial winner for the firm.

Business is booming

According to IT assurance company ICM, business is also booming.

The company has seen revenues from business continuity grow 16% during 2005, while profits are up 24% already this year.

Strong order books reflect an increased awareness of business continuity.

Financial services demand is high

For Neverfail Group, the financial services sector is proving a real result for their high-availability Microsoft-based software, as CEO Neil Robertson explains:

"Whether it’s loss of revenue, loss of reputation, or loss of customers, downtime negatively affects every company. However, financial services companies have obligations that extend beyond their customers, including compliance with a myriad of governmental agencies"

A little knowledge

UK companies specializing in this area do not know everything there is to know about how to make businesses less risky in the future, particularly as the cost of IT hardware and infrastructure has plummeted.

As GemaTech's managing director Graham Chick concluded, reluctantly:

"There's always room for more competition. The potential size of the market can only get bigger as more and more people who've been sitting on the fence, saying 'it'll never happen to me', finally take real, practical steps."