Helping Hands Reach Out In The Wake Of Katrina

Just as the Sept. 11 attacks caused America to rally around its fallen, Katrina&s wake inspired an outpouring of public support unmatched in U.S. history for a local natural disaster. And it also caused many solution providers to ask: Could my own business—and my clients—withstand a similar catastrophe?

Standard and Poor&s estimated late last week that total damage from the hurricane could reach $50 billion, once damaged infrastructure such as roads and bridges is assessed. This would more than double the initial estimate by AIR Worldwide of $17 billion to $25 billion for insured losses, surpassing Hurricane Andrew&s $15.5 billion price tag.

Last week, local solution providers scrambled to get customers& networks up and running, distributors worked overtime to get new equipment shipped to those that needed it most, and vendors offered money and other support. Storm-seasoned Tech Data was among the distributors deploying emergency response teams to fulfill crisis needs of customers, said Ken Lamneck, president of the Americas at the Clearwater, Fla.-based distributor.

“We know what these companies are going through. We&re a Gulf-based company. We live with these [storms] as well. We had four hurricanes last year,” he said.

Support came from small businesses and enterprises, from West Coast to East Coast. A few dollars here, a few gigabytes there.

“I can sympathize as a fellow business owner. I can&t even imagine having to put padlocks on the doors, walking away and not knowing what you&ll find when you come back,” said Marie Scott-Eldred, managing partner at WonderKids Computer, an Egg Harbor Township, N.J.-based solution provider. WonderKids offered Web space and e-mail service to fellow ASCII Group members that may have been displaced.

Closer to the Gulf Coast, solution providers went a step farther. Cherbonnier, Mayer and Associates (CMA), a Baton Rouge, La.-based solution provider, took in about half a dozen of his end-user clients, giving them office space and equipment to try to resume their business.

“We&re doing everything we can to stop [businesses from closing or leaving permanently]. New Orleans needs money to flow. Business has got to go on to keep that city alive,” said Mitch Gautreaux, CMA&s manager of network technical sales.

Several of CMA&s customers evacuated with backup tapes on the solution provider&s advice, which has allowed CMA to quickly get them up and running. “We have a blade center, and we&re carving up the blades for each customer as needed. Everybody is asking for Exchange, Notes. They want their e-mail up and running,” Gautreaux said.

That in itself is a challenge. Much of Baton Rouge, about 50 miles from New Orleans, remained without power last Thursday, he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have evacuated New Orleans and other nearby cities and towns. They have to go somewhere. Baton Rouge, normally a city of about 227,000 people, is coping with an influx of refugees seeking food, shelter and the ability to communicate with loved ones. This is straining an already precarious situation, Gautreaux said.

“The phone lines are jammed. We are not able to get out. People can call us, and we&re asking folks to call us on an hourly basis. We&re using text messaging, anything we can to communicate,” he said. “Fifty miles is about as close as you can get [to New Orleans]. Folks are trying to find permanent shelter and places for their employees to stay. There&s no power [there]. There&s standing water in most of the city. This isn&t for a weekend.” Joe Vaught, executive vice president and COO of Houston-based solution provider PCPC, is preparing to fly his private plane to New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast as soon as he gets the call. Vaught, a member of an organization that flies low-income patients from the area into the MD Anderson cancer hospital in Houston free-of-charge, is a Homeland Security First Responder Angel pilot.

“I&m sitting here with my pack ready to go. I can carry about 500 pounds. I expect to be called at any moment,” Vaught said last Thursday.

PCPC also hired a refugee from New Orleans who happened to know one of the VAR&s engineers. “We put him to work,” Vaught said. “He&s real upbeat. Said he and his wife had been thinking about moving to Houston anyway, and now there&s no reason not to.”

Outside the region, Katrina&s destruction has caused solution providers across the country to reexamine their own disaster-recovery plans.

“We do have policies in place to assure not only our business continuity, but those of our clients who rely on us from a managed services perspective as well. But I can&t say if a Category 4 hurricane hit Long Island that we&re prepared to meet that kind of calamity,” said Brian Okun, director of strategic partnerships at Chips Computer Consulting, Lake Success, N.Y. “Not only our customers, but the entire business community has lots of work to do. It is an expensive proposition,” he said.

Chuck Vincent, president and CEO of Global Data Systems, a $49 million Lafayette, La.-based solution provider about two hours north of New Orleans, flew over the flooded city last Tuesday to assess damage. Several of his largest customers are located there. “It&s as to be expected. It was pretty bad. It was a very big hit,” Vincent told CRN last Tuesday afternoon via telephone.

The fact that Vincent could call is noteworthy. Phone calls to more than a dozen other solution providers in the Gulf could not be completed, as the region struggled to recover from rampant flooding and power outages. As of last Thursday, several solution providers& Web sites still were not working, although all the solution providers reached by CRN said their employees and families were safe.

Global Data Systems was one of the few area solution providers to emerge with its headquarters fully operational, so it offered up its services to the Louisiana state government and the City of New Orleans, Vincent said. The solution provider has an office in New Orleans, but Vincent is unsure how much damage has been done there.

“We do significant business in New Orleans. That has come to a screeching halt. We have a major bank as a customer based in New Orleans. They had to move their entire banking operations out of New Orleans,” he said.

Will it be safe in that new location? Weather experts predict additional tropical storms will reach the United States this year, perhaps as far north as New England. But whether it&s a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or other natural disaster, the lesson is simple: Solution providers should make sure they can provide their customers with a continuity solution.

“Most customers are probably still thinking, ‘This is not going to happen to me. I don&t live close to a hurricane area,& ” said Greg Starr, president of SEE-Comm, a solution provider in New Boston, Texas. “But we&ve had storms knock power out for a week. Phones lines are down. What are you doing to prepare for that?”

SEE-Comm is still fine-tuning its own disaster plan. “Our guys can work remotely. We do that day in and day out. But we&re in the middle of setting up some offsite implementations over the next couple of months,” Starr said. Companies that had disaster-recovery programs in place before the hurricane have the best chance at a timely recovery, said Ron Roberts, president of BluPointe DRS, an Atlanta-based solution provider specializing in disaster recovery.

Roberts cited the New Orleans office of Fisher and Phillips, a large Atlanta-based law firm specializing in labor law, that has been backing up data to a remote site for the past two years. The firm&s lawyers firm left New Orleans Monday morning to move to other offices and by Monday afternoon had access to their data.

Several solution providers from New Orleans as well as Mississippi and Alabama had planned to attend Ingram Micro&s VentureTech Network Fall Invitational in Austin, Texas, this week. They will not be there, but fellow members of VentureTech&s Lone Star chapter plan to meet to discuss what else they can do, Starr said.

“We are having discussions to send extra technicians out at cost to help those guys,” he said. “This is not about making money, it&s a way to help out. Nobody wants to be in it for the money, but they&ll be in a bad way for a while.”

JOSEPH F. KOVAR contributed to this story.