Datashield, the disaster recovery arm of Thorn EMI’s Datasolve Ltd, has added British Petroleum’s Fastbak disaster recovery operations to its portfolio. British Petroleum acquired Fastbak from the Thomas Cook travel organisation early in 1989, and integrated the company’s business with its own Information Services division which subsequently assumed the Fastbak name. Datasolve has bought the IBM-based business for an undisclosed sum, but it hasn’t taken British Petroleum’s interests in DEC VAX disaster recovery. The oil company teamed up with consultants Alkemi Ltd to provide DEC-based back-up, training, and risk analysis, and the two companies operate from a base in Harlow, Essex. They invested over UKP2m in DEC hardware, and provide a range of tape and disk storage, along with extensive Ethernet communications (CI No 1,223). Fastbak’s IBM-based facilities are located in Peterborough, and the warm standby service covers 10,200 square feet. The site houses an 4381 and 3081K, and Fastbak had planned to introduce a 3090-200E and additional disk capacity during 1990, as well as 3390 controllers (CI No 1,287). Ten-year old Datashield has over 90 clients in the UK, and it is planning an UKP8m investment over the next few years to complement its recent upgrade to an IBM 3090 380J. The company believes that the disaster recovery market is growing at 25% per annum, and it sees that growth accelerating with the advent of new communications such as fibre optics, wide band services, and satellite links. John Kirby, Datashield’s general manager, says that peer pressure and demands of bodies such as the Bank of England will increase the demand for disaster recovery. Datasolve’s Financial Services division has announced the acquisition of Taxmaster software from National Westminster’s subsidiary, Centre-File. It is a two module personal computer based product for corporation tax calculations. The basic module is automates corporate tax compliance tasks and also caters for tax accounts, provisional liabilities, deferred tax and reconciliations. The Group Taxmaster module automates the calculation of group relief and the offset of advance corporation tax.
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