Most people’s reaction when told by their company that they will not be able to get into the office for the day, is not usually one of utter disappointment.
However, this is a serious issue. One of the major sticking points for end-users when resellers try to sell them business continuity is a lack of imagination. When preparing for a strike, be it from lightning, a terrorist threat or the RMT, the biggest challenge is getting the customer to buy into the scheme. But sadly, business continuity continues to be sold with all the same dull, plodding, self-important rhetoric that did so much to dissuade users from taking security – and indeed the millennium bug – sufficiently seriously.
For example, the senior vice-president of a global provider of managed service automation, who will remain anonymous, said: “The only way managed services providers can grow their business, stabilise revenue and improve customer retention is to embrace a business model based upon highly integrated remote monitoring and automation.”
This kind of arrogance and demanding language (the “only way”) is almost certainly enough to put most firms off buying anything, whether they are from a large enterprise or running their own SME.
This is a pity, because there are still substantial sales to be made with business continuity services at enterprise level, if channel players can create a convincing argument and find a subtle way of expressing it. Meanwhile, the SME is virgin territory, ripe for conquering as long as the services are packaged properly.
However, SMEs are often unwilling to pay. Most are frightened by the spiralling projections of the cost that business continuity and compliance will set them back. It is usually a case of, ‘Why should I pay for something I haven’t needed before?’.
The fog of confusion surrounding the actual guidelines and requirements for business continuity has also led many businesses to steer clear of the subject altogether, being unwilling to fork out for something which may, in the end, be obsolete, incorrect or unnecessary. It is very similar to the insurance sector and most resellers do not like feeling like insurance salesmen. Selling business continuity is selling something on the premise that, one day, there might be something that happens to the company that may cause a problem – hardly an easy sell despite the range of threats posed to businesses and the types of service that can be offered being huge.
Business continuity for enterprises, however, is more about logistical challenges. How can firms get staff, en masse, to co-ordinate themselves into a cohesive unit? This is something that only a decent service provider – such as Schlumberger or SunGard – who provide alternative infrastructures, can provide.
At the SME level, planning for continuity is about ‘best practices’. Small companies are more flexible and by nature can adapt to changes. People could easily adapt to an emergency by working from home, even without their laptop.
So continuity at the SME level is a question of best practice, which is a function requiring people skills. The provision of people skills and training are both low investment, high margin activities for the channel. Better still, these skills can be used to fine tune business processes even on days when terrorists and the RMT are lying low. In theory, there is no reason why business continuity cannot be sold to SMEs. VARs just have to be skillful in how they sell it.
Traditionally, the vertical markets most likely to buy business continuity services have been the banking and finance, retail, communications and manufacturing sectors. Each of these can be seriously affected by loss of availability to applications and data.
For all retailers, business continuity is a massive issue, argued Duncan Ellison, sales and marketing director at Sarian Systems. Particularly given that more and more companies are being pushed away from dedicated, reliable phone lines towards lower cost broadband services.
If the broadband connection goes down, then firms can say goodbye to critical communications, meaning that the store will be effectively unable to trade or do business, resulting in an immediate loss of sales and customers.
Ellison said: “On top of that, transaction speeds need to be maintained – research suggests that customers will look elsewhere if electronic point of sales transactions take more than seven seconds – so retailers’ business continuity strategies have to ensure that adequate bandwidth is retained, rather than simply providing basic connectivity.”
Even SMEs in retail can justify the expenditure. “For SMEs, most of which will see lower margins and may be more sensitive to any unforeseen external factors, the impact of communications downtime could be even more important,” he said. If someone bulldozes through BT’s copper wires, an SME could feasibly be without broadband for about 10 days, which could have a critical impact on its business operations.
However, many companies cannot afford to make a substantial investment in business continuity, which means that resellers need to look for other ways to make a sale.
One option is to offer a single wireless router with SIM card – essentially a one-off cost, as the SIM card could be pay-as-you-go – which will then take over in the event of any fixed-line failure. This way, SMEs do not have to break the bank in order to ensure that they retain some level of communications back-up.
John Banfield, director of Steeleye Technology, said: “SMEs are certainly interested in protecting applications and data. Our experience is that they will invest to protect critical messaging platforms, such as [Microsoft] Exchange, and databases such as their SQL Server and Oracle. Whether SMEs will invest in business continuity services really depends on the cost to them of disruption compared with the cost for the service.”
No business is too small to have a business continuity plan, nor measures to back that plan up. A good business continuity reseller will cater for the specific size and needs of each specific customer. Some business continuity providers will be too big for SMEs, but that will be the case in any industry or service sector.
Sentronex is one company having reasonable success providing business continuity services to SMEs in the banking and finance sector. It concentrates its efforts on people-centric disciplines, such as people management, time management and strategic planning.
Resellers should act as a go-between for clients and vendors, by choosing the right product or service for the right company, according to William Chadwick, head of communication at Sentronex.
“Often vendors do not take the time to find the best solution to a company’s requirements,” he said. “When a business needs a more personalised and specific solution, a reseller can be the ideal intermediary.”
The business continuity market, for SMEs, still needs to be defined, said Nick Turnbull, director of Marathon Technologies.
“Companies with 10 staff have very different needs from those with 500 – although, technically, both are SMEs,” he said. “Bigger businesses need a guarantee of constant, 24-hour, seven days a week uptime. But for the mid-market companies, 99.9 per cent availability or a reliable data recovery system might be enough.”
Size does not matter when it comes to fault tolerance, Turnbull added. It also depends on the market in which the business operates. For example, companies of all sizes in the banking sector should take measures to minimise downtime, as a systems failure could result in potentially disastrous financial losses for the company.
Applications such as Exchange or SQL are now critical to the continued operation of many businesses. As a result, applications that need some form of business continuity solution are more varied and more common across all businesses.
“This has pushed business continuity higher on all businesses’ list of priorities than it was 10 years ago,” Turnbull added.
Even a logistics giant such as SunGard is looking to work with the channel to address SMEs. Keith Tilley, UK managing director of SunGard Availability Services, said SMEs are now worth catering for.
“Traditionally business continuity was one of the last items on the IT budget checklist, but recent developments such as the introduction of the first British Standard BS 25999 for business continuity management have heightened the need for businesses of all sizes to prove their credentials,” he said. “This standard will act as a guide to all organisations as to which of their suppliers is equip-ped to cope in the event of a business interruption.”
This is a big issue for SMEs that supply to large businesses because those who do not meet requirements stand to lose out.
“In the wake of Standard BS 25999, and with every high-profile business outage, we have found a growing number of SMEs are asking about our scalable solutions and how they can be best implemented in their business at minimal cost,” Tilley added. “The SME market has huge growth potential.”
At SME level, continuity services may have to be about more down to earth issues than the threat of biblical scale floods or plagues. Smaller companies are generally more adaptable, so if people have to work from home for a few days, they can. Most of the important knowledge is in their heads, or on their laptop. However, they are prone to losses of productivity from more mundane sources such as paralysed equipment.
This is an area in which companies such as Xerox, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark are offering business continuity services.
Xerox recently launched its pro-active consumables management (PCM) scheme for the channel to offer clients. Most firms lose time and money when their consumables run out. Staff cannot work and they spend at least half a day sending out for more.
Xerox’s new Phaser 6110 printers are programmed to alert the de facto office manager when consumables run low, who gets a pop-up reminder on their screen to place an order with the local Xerox reseller.
It is also a business continuity tool for resellers and enables them to enjoy continuous revenue from supplying consumables, which is where all the real money seems to be in this part of the service market, according to Mark Anderson, product business manager, Xerox Europe, Office Group.
“It’s a great business continuity tool for the channel and end-users will appreciate it,” Anderson said.
Analysts seem to agree that this type of service is the most effective way to offer SMEs business continuity.
Louella Fernandez, support analyst at research firm Quocirca, said: “This type of management service is good for the channel, because it’s a cheap cost of sale. Business continuity is about offering services.”
At the small business level, most firms cannot afford to buy services they may never use. As such, the channel needs to think about supplying services that their customers will be able to make use of, even when disaster hasn’t struck.
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