Intelligent Telephony Increasingly Important To Business Continuity

By Greg McNevin

October 6th, 2006: Lightning storms, fires, floods and earthquakes aren’t the only threats to business continuity. If an influenza pandemic hits, the fact that the data centre and office is humming along as usual is little comfort if your employees can’t leave their homes.

Quarantine concerns such as these are leading to increased demands on intelligent telephony and other technologies that enable staff to work remotely says communication specialist TeleWare.

The company has announced a sharp increase in enquiries in its APAC offices concerning an influenza pandemic.

“Business continuity for telephony is often seen as protection against natural disasters such as fire, earthquake and floods,” says comments Mike Blanchard, Managing Director of TeleWare A/ NZ. “Increasingly, health issues are becoming a factor for many organisations.

“Over the last few months, our regional headquarters for the Asia Pacific region, based in New Zealand, has received a number of requests that have sighted Bird Flu and Pandemic Influenza as the prompts for considering telephony solutions that provide workers the same level of contactability they would receive in an office environment while working at home.”

Wide-scale threat from infectious nasties such as Avian Flu is still relatively small, however, media saturation has not been without effect as according to Blanchard, TeleWare has started six new projects across the region within the last few months where Avian Flu has been a considerable concern. 

“These customers were looking to deploy an intelligent telephony solution that would allow them to quickly redirect calls, seamlessly to workers who could not work from a traditional centralised office,” says Blanchard.

While customers may be worried, Blanchard is quick to add that something simple is far more likely to impact on business than a viral outbreak. That said though, alternatives to centralised communications should still be high on the list when dealing with business continuity.

“In the scheme of things, Avian Flu and Pandemic Influenza are extremely unlikely compared to more common disruptive events such as fires, power failure or even a burst water main – but the level of media coverage around the issue has led to increased awareness for companies that are entirely dependent on telephone communication from a centralised location.”

In response to these growing concerns, TeleWare has issued an advisory ‘Business Continuity in the Context of Planning for Pandemic Influenza’ as well as providing a free white paper “Business Continuity” which looks at the wider issue of business continuity and telephony.

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