ICL yesterday announced its entry into the disaster recovery market with its two portfolios serving what ICL likes to call the disaster survival business, catering for ICL mainframe users. According to a Price Waterhouse survey, one in 1,000 companies risks suffering a computer disaster from fire, flood, theft and acts of malice, while ICL believes that about 60% of businesses have no recovery plan should they fall prey to such an incident. Disaster recovery falls into several different categories: contingency planning when companies assess their risk and draw up their plan, flying restart, offering an instant restart when companies (usually in the financial sector) switch to a dedicated standby computer on another site, hot restart which provides 24-hour recovery through the use of a vendor’s computer, mobile restart offering a 48-hour restart during which time a computer will arrive operating from the back of a van, and cold restart which provides the temporary use of a computer room. There are more than 20 suppliers offer-ing disaster recovery in the UK, eight of which, such as Sherwood Computers Plc and NMW Plc, target ICL users. However, ICL says that none of them cover the full spectrum of requirements from consultancy to restart services. ICL is providing two service portfolios: Contingency Management and Recovery Management – both of which conform to the British Standards Institute and Computer Services Association standards. Within the Contingency Management portfolio there are four services: evaluation for risk assessment and avoidance, strategy for drawing up which programs are critical to the business, planning which is the point when the restart method is selected, and review which is a particularly pertinent service for businesses wishing to switch from their current supplier to ICL. Within the Recovery Management portfolio, ICL is currently offering hot restart services for which a typical subscription rate would be UKP20,000 depending on the level of service and the power of computer required. Mobile and cold back-up restart will be added to the portfolio at the end of the year, as will disaster survival services for ICL’s DRS/6000 Unix box. Although the service is based in the UK, ICL would be happy to fulfil the requests of any continental client should it be asked to do so. The company says it is not targeting any particular niche sectors with this new service and believes that by 1994 the disaster recovery market for ICL kit in the UK will be worth UKP24m.
First time buyers
It declined to reveal its projected market share. So far ICL has signed up four companies for its disaster recovery services all of which are first time buyers in the market: Barclays Financial Services (which has been working with ICL since 1988 on disaster recovery and whose strategy provides a template for ICL’s services), the British Broadcasting Corp, Computer Management Group’s Computer Processing Services, and Reed Business Publishing. As for the sale of STC’s Computer Field Maintenance subsidiary to Granada Group Plc four years ago, ICL maintains, rather weakly, that this does not reflect either an about-turn in STC’s strategy or a lack of foresight within the STC group. For ICL considers the sale of that subsidiary irrelevant to yesterday’s announcement because at the time ICL was not organised to provide third party maintenance, whereas today it says that clearly it is, through its Customer Services Organisation.
