Partners In Perseverance

Throughout that fateful day and over the ensuing weeks,as the entire nation agonized over the human toll and devastation inflicted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center,solution providers gave their role new meaning. They offered customers their extra office space and helped them find new headquarters. They provided supplies, telephones, computer equipment, clothing, food and transportation. Price was never mentioned, and payment was often refused.

Likewise, IT vendors flew equipment into New York, and distributors opened warehouses and ran delivery fleets around the clock. In most cases, extra charges were dropped, and creative credit was extended.

Now, a year later, with the rubble cleared from Ground Zero, solution providers reflected on the tragic events of Sept. 11 and took stock of the deeper relationships they formed with partners and customers in the wake of the catastrophe. They also pondered the personal and economic challenges wrought by the disaster, as well as the new sense of preparedness that has emerged nationwide.

"If there was anything to feel good about, it was seeing New Yorkers shatter that stereotype of being hardened, fast-talking and selfish," said Steve Israel, executive vice president at AMC, whose headquarters sits on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. "Solution providers showed they had as big a heart as anyone. It was gratifying to see people band together."

And some of that goodwill was returned over the past year. Though most solution providers said their dealings with vendors and distributors haven't changed much, they noted that the kindness they showed to customers has helped them form closer ties, resulting in more consulting opportunities, increased sales of disaster-recovery and business-continuity solutions, and a better understanding of each other's businesses.

"The folks we worked with during Sept. 11 began looking at us as partners instead of vendors because we didn't charge some of them or become too concerned with the cost structure of our services," said Todd Pekats, director of professional services at the New York office of Neartek, a storage integration and consulting firm. "We consumed ourselves with helping them. They viewed us as partners who took the time to help them through a traumatic situation."

Pekats, who witnessed the World Trade Center destruction firsthand and aided emergency workers (see sidebar, page 20), helped customers that had lost data get up and running again. Today, he's adamant that his clients employ best practices for disaster recovery with any technology solution they choose.

"In the past, I'd talk about designing solutions around disaster avoidance. Today, I design the plans around recovery," Pekats said. "While all of the other elements are important, they're not as important as being able to recover data in a timely manner."

Recovery, indeed, has remained at the top of everyone's minds over the 12 months since the Sept. 11 attacks, as business for high-tech companies across the country has remained flat or inched up at best (see story, page 30). In the weeks immediately after the disaster, companies that already had been postponing IT projects because of the lingering recession took additional austerity measures, with many canceling solution implementations outright.

The unstable economy, the ruin in downtown Manhattan, corporate fraud and the floundering stock market hit New York-area solution providers particularly hard. And despite getting a lift from customer relationships that were cemented following the attacks, many of those solution providers said they need more help to revive their businesses.

At Digitask, a Unix and Open VMS specialist based on East 42nd Street in New York, business has been "very slow" since the attacks, said President Marlene Brill. "Before 9/11 things were looking bleak, and after 9/11 they became bleak," she said. "I've seen some of the best companies, including my competitors, go out of business. I don't know if you can blame that on the economy, the psychological trauma of the attacks or the corporate fraud that has sent the market into a tailspin.

"Customers are glad we were and are there for them, but it's back to business as usual," Brill added. "Everyone's so price-conscious. There doesn't seem to be much loyalty."

Craig Spitzer, CEO of Alliance Consulting, just wants business to return to normal. Alliance had offices on the 102nd floor of One World Trade Center, and seven employees died when the edifice collapsed. The solution provider moved its New York operations to its Philadelphia office but has since reopened a Manhattan location on West 22nd Street.

"We won't move our offices out of New York City," Spitzer said during a recent visit to Ground Zero. "New York City has always been the place where we want to have our roots."

Still, Spitzer wishes the city and state would do more to steer business to smaller companies that have chosen to stay in the Big Apple. Much of the IT business related to the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan has gone to large consulting firms or companies without a strong New York presence, he noted. And his phone calls and letters to state and city officials haven't been answered.

"Our elected officials should be helping us to stay and thrive in New York City," Spitzer said as he pointed to trucks and workers on the site where Alliance's office once was. "Sometimes I think the only business that's thriving in New York City is construction."

Other New York solution providers, however, have seen an uptick in sales in since the events of Sept. 11. Chris Cangero, vice president at Epoch Data, located at Sixth Avenue and West 30th Street, said the solution provider's disaster-recovery and business-continuity sales doubled in the months following the attacks, and that growth has since ebbed to about 50 percent. Document management and mirroring solutions, as well as consulting business, also have been brisk in the SMB space, he said.

Epoch had three customers in the World Trade Center and at 10 a.m. on Sept. 11, half of Epoch's staff was scheduled to roll out a document management solution for the law division of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, located at the World Trade Center. But Port Authority officials canceled the meeting minutes before Epoch closed on Sept. 10.

"The world grieves, but business also keeps moving," Cangero said. "SMBs are spending money because those businesses are in need of solutions. Leases are running out, and equipment needs to be refreshed. So businesses are looking for new solutions."

While more customers are talking about implementing disaster-recovery and business-continuity solutions, most are adding only a component at a time, mainly for network redundancy, according to John Burke, CEO of both Bulldog Information Services and J.B. Technologies. Burke,the former CEO of Big Apple Technologies, which offered many customers free services after the attacks,said customers appreciate the extra help he gave them last year, and he expects that they'll give him more business once the economy improves.

"Our relationships really strengthened after Sept. 11 and allowed me to retain customers when I opened my new businesses," Burke said. Both his former company and his startup are based in Lower Manhattan.

New York solution providers also said they've seen increased interest in IP telephony solutions. After the towers collapsed, they noted, many people working in Lower Manhattan lacked reliable standard and cellular phone service for weeks, while the destruction barely affected Internet service, enabling people to communicate via e-mail and wireless devices like IP phones and handhelds. Some customers now want IP telephony solutions written into proposals, said Andy Kass, director at Array Technologies, a solution provider based on West 25th Street.

"That's a consideration that has to come up in the planning stage of developing solutions," Kass said. "The products and prices are coming down to a level that makes it feasible for companies in my market."

Corporate customers nationwide also have boosted their use of collaboration technologies such as Web, audio and videoconferencing, said Marc Beattie, an analyst at Wainhouse Research. Increased usage, however, doesn't always translate into business for solution providers, he said, adding that in many cases businesses are making better use of the conferencing equipment they already have.

Bob Kipke, vice president of sales and marketing at CritiCom, a Washington-based videoconferencing and telecommunications solution provider, agreed that customers are doing more questioning than buying.

"There has not been the huge spike in sales that people thought there would be after Sept. 11," he said. "But everyone is talking about it."

Although customers might not be spending much, they're at least considering new technology and making contact with solution providers, said Grady Crunk, executive vice president at Central Data, Titusville, Fla. The solution provider, which has a strong disaster-recovery and business-continuity practice because of Florida's history of hurricanes, has found that customers are taking such solutions more seriously these days. "Customers now look at those plans proactively instead of reactively," Crunk said.

Companies and institutions that can't afford a full disaster-recovery solution also are partnering with others by sharing backup sites and leveraging clustering technology,

Crunk added. "As the attacks brought the country closer together, a lot of universities and businesses began utilizing each other's data centers as backup," he said. "It's a barter system, and I don't think we've ever seen that same spirit as we do now."

And solution providers aren't forgetting what engendered that spirit. At the Ground Zero site, Digitask's Brill stood on the observation walkway off Liberty Street, an area that hugs the southwest side of what once was the World Trade Center. Today, the site is little more than a giant hole, a 16-acre concrete basement that stands as a sad reminder of what once was a monument to the U.S. economy and the people who fueled it. Brill couldn't bring herself to take a direct look.

"I don't know how to explain how I feel," she said amid the cacophony of jackhammers, trucks and heavy machinery working in and around the site. "When you see the hole, you feel the hole. Sometimes I wonder how people can work down here. There's no way to get away from the pain of it all."