Despite Blackouts, It’s Business As Usual

When the power shuts off, no one cares why--they just want the lights back on. So while blackout-ridden California's politicians, regulators and engineers are busy pointing their fingers, businesses are left in the dark to find their own solutions to immediate problems.

But for Don Ursem, vice president of network operations at San Francisco-based VocalPoint Technologies, thorough planning and a solid partnership helped his business survive a blackout unscathed.

VocalPoint provides middleware, infrastructure and the services needed to voice-enable HTML and XML content, allowing a company to create access to any of its Internet and intranet applications and data over a phone.

To offer the ASP product, last August VocalPoint contracted Intira, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based netsourcing provider, to foster a strategic relationship. Both sides knew that voice-based applications have little or no tolerance for downtime. Even the slightest disruptions could cause a much larger crash of the entire system.

Sure enough, in late January, Intira was hit with a blackout as part of California's rolling outages. The backup storage, redundancy and data-mirroring put into place from the beginning kept the systems up and running long enough for Intira's generators to kick in, according to John Steenson, Intira's CIO. The generators were able to support the entire data center and, in turn, support all of Intira's clients, including VocalPoint's Veriscape voice portal, until the outages were serviced and power was restored.

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