Amid Chaos, Vendors' Contingency Plans WorkedAmid Chaos, Vendors' Contingency Plans Worked

While emergency crews mobilized within minutes of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, technology vendors charged with keeping their customers' businesses up and running were enacting their own contingency plans.

IBM immediately established an emergency command center to help its more than 1,200 customers in lower Manhattan. Because of the scope of the disaster in New York, the center was staffed with about 10 times the number of people that would normally be assigned to emergency service duty. "We were ad-libbing," says Todd Gordon, IBM's VP and general manager for business-continuity services. Customers' requirements varied depending on their proximity to Ground Zero, he says. Many companies near the site had to shut down their systems due to problems caused by dust and heat. Businesses farther away suffered the effects of widespread disruption of communication networks.

At a command center that storage specialist EMC Corp. established in Hopkinton, Mass., teams drawn from engineering, customer-service, and logistics staff worked to solve the most pressing needs of the vendor's 25 World Trade Center customers and the additional dozen or so in the immediate vicinity. In opening the center, the company called on plans drawn up for Y2K emergencies, says Joseph Walton, senior VP of global services.

Command-center staffers also were able to access customer records to proactively determine which systems would need replacing. Within hours of the tragedy, more than 1,000 EMC drives were being trucked to New York. At the same time, the company used its remote-support technology to shut down hardware at locations where the temperature exceeded 140 degrees.

Compaq had contracts with more than 230 accounts in the towers and the surrounding three ZIP codes. The vendor set up its command center in New Jersey. It's one of several scattered around the country that the computer maker can instantly switch from normal to emergency operations. "There are dedicated lines established in advance that we can switch over to if need be," says Bruce Saulnier, director of business continuity solutions. Compaq placed one of its used and refurbished equipment centers on around-the-clock duty. In one case, a VAX server from Asia was located to replace an out-of-production system one customer had lost.

Sun Microsystems had about 70 customers in the Trade Center and about 500 more in the immediate area. But the company faced challenges in helping clients because the offices it used to serve New York City also were in the Trade Center. Its employees who worked there survived, but the vendor had to move dozens of workers into the area from other sites.

"The message [from Sun execs] was do whatever was necessary to help. A lot of what we did was complimentary, such as data-center assessments," says Kevin Coyne, director of business operations at Sun Enterprise Services. Within 24 hours, Sun was plucking equipment from its manufacturing line and sending it to customers affected by the blasts.

The events of Sept. 11 "challenged all conventional notions about business continuity," EMC's Walton says. "It's something that we never could have imagined."