Downtime costs ignored by businesses

European businesses are losing millions of dollars as a result of the high number of computer crashes.

The research, conducted by Trend Consulting, showed that at a 50,000-employee company, an increase in shut down of machines of 0.1 per cent per year is equivalent to a loss of 50 person years of productivity.

The survey was commissioned by Hewlett Packard, Oracle and BMC Software, all of which have vested commercial interests through their participation in system availability guarantee programs.

The report revealed that 60 per cent of companies questioned did not know the specific cost of systems downtime for their business.

Results also revealed that while companies considered internet applications to be the way forward, more than half did not recognise the need to upgrade infrastructure to support the applications.

Only 33 per cent of companies said they were planning to place essential applications on the internet and therefore recognised the need to improve their infrastructure, including support, as they moved to electronic trading.

About 60 per cent said lack of security was the main reason for not implementing internet systems in the short term.

Peter van der Fluit, marketing director for enterprise systems and software group at HP, said: 'This research confirms what we thought has been happening in the field. Companies are developing internet systems as information silos. They are not linking new sites to their essential systems, nor are they providing fail-safe support for these systems.'

Andy Bailey, product alliances and services marketing manager at Oracle, added: 'If systems are not available, the application or the information isn't available, so companies aren't open for business and the competition is just a click away.'

Across Europe, 399 senior IT managers in large and medium-sized enterprises contributed to the report's findings.