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 What various winners of the recent business continuity awards have to say for themselves…
The following press releases have been issued this week by the winners of CIR Magazine's Business Continuity Awards. (Published verbatim):
Shadow-Planner Named Best Business Continuity Planning Tool
Office-Shadow Ltd, the business continuity software company, has won the coveted CIR Magazine award for Best Business Continuity Management Planning Software of the Year.
This internationally-recognised award, presented by CIR (Continuity, Insurance & Risk) Magazine in conjunction with the Business Continuity Institute, is one of the industry's highest accolades. Shadow-Planner was selected as the winner by an independent panel of judges comprising business continuity experts from the private and public sectors. The award recognises the benefits that business continuity software delivers in making business continuity management (BCM) more effective.
Commenting on the award, Office-Shadow CEO Richard Green said, "Since our inception, we have been guided by the principle that to be effective, a BCM tool must not only offer advanced functionality, but must also be easy to deploy, manage and use. This means it will not only be embraced by BCM experts, but also by occasional users across the enterprise, whose buy-in is essential to maintaining effective and up-to-date plans.
"This industry recognition comes at an important time for Office-Shadow," continued Green. "We are experiencing a resurgence of interest in business continuity planning and the award will be of huge importance to our future expansion."
Office-Shadow's rapidly growing list of international clients contains many well known names from finance, commerce and government. Clients value Shadow-Planner's ability to successfully devolve ownership and maintenance of local BCM plans, yet maintain central management and control, through an intuitive user interface. These factors have led to Shadow-Planner becoming the industry's first choice specialist software tool.
With successful operations already up and running in France and Australia, Office-Shadow is also about to set up in the USA in September 2006.
www.office-shadow.com
SunGard Sweeps The Board At Business Continuity Awards
SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of information availability and business continuity services, won three prestigious awards at the Business Continuity Awards 2006, recognising outstanding achievement in the face of one of the most demanding years in business continuity on record. For the fifth time in the awards’ eight-year history, SunGard was named ‘Business Continuity Service Provider of the Year’, as well as receiving the following accolades:
* Richard Jones, managing consultant, SunGard Availability Services, won the award for Business Continuity Consultant of the Year;
* SunGard National Network (SNN), SunGard’s nationwide data backup, recovery and availability environment, won Most Innovative Product of the Year;
* Assisted Northgate Information Solutions in its recovery from the Buncefield fuel depot blasts, which was awarded Recovery of the Year.
Business Continuity Provider of the Year
Business Continuity Managers chose SunGard as Business Continuity Service Provider of 2006 based on its record of availability, flexibility and consistency over the last 12 months, a period which has thrown up some of the most severe business continuity challenges the UK has ever faced. The judging of the “Business Continuity Service Provider of the Year” award is decided by business continuity managers across all industry sectors in the UK. Under this all-industry selection process SunGard has now won the award five times, having been a finalist on seven occasions and nominated eight.
Commenting at the awards, Keith Tilley, managing director UK & SVP Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said: “This is our most successful year at these respected industry awards and it is a credit to the passion, commitment, and integrity of SunGard’s staff, the innovation and reliability inherent in our products and the trust our customers place in us to keep them in business, no matter what they are faced with.”
Most Effective Recovery of the Year
Northgate Information Solutions was awarded the Most Effective Recovery of the Year award for its handling of the Buncefield blasts, which destroyed its offices in December 2005. SunGard and Northgate Information Solutions worked together to invoke a business continuity plan within hours in order to rebuild customers’ servers at SunGard’s London Technology Centre and restore full IT services to its customers. Chris Stone, chief executive, Northgate Information Solutions, said: “SunGard acted in an exemplary fashion in re-establishing connections to our customers. This award recognises SunGard’s expert support during the invocation of our business continuity plan, which safeguarded and protected the information, business operations, and employees of our customers.”
Consultant of the Year
Richard Jones, managing consultant, SunGard Availability Services, went home with the “Consultant of the Year” award based on the professionalism and innovation displayed in his role as principal consultant for the UK based Business Continuity Management (BCM) Practice of SunGard’s Professional Services. SunGard consultants have been finalists in this category on five other occasions. Mr. Jones’ current role includes leading strategic projects for customers in a variety of industry sectors including global logistics, financial services and mobile telecommunications, as well as supporting sales opportunities in the UK and EMEA, with additional responsibilities for the development of products and services and quality control within the practice. The judges selected Mr. Jones based on the high regard in which he is held within the industry, and his experience of working across a wide geographical spread. The overriding message in the testimonials received was that Mr. Jones had a proven solid performance and an ability to think quickly and respond effectively.
Most Innovative Product of the Year
SunGard’s newly launched National Network (SNN) was awarded the “Most Innovative Product of the Year Award” based on its ability to extend its infrastructure to customers’ own networks, helping enable data protection services and instantaneous response to disaster declarations. Offering nationwide real-time data management, backup, recovery and restoration, SNN is a 100Mb nationwide Ethernet network, which connects all of SunGard’s recovery facilities together, and links all the facilities to SunGard’s flagship London Technology Centre (LTC) and its pioneering high bandwidth optical metropolitan area network, ScaleNet. Keith Tilley said: “The award acknowledges SunGard as a leading light in recovery centre networking. Our aim is to provide our customers with the flexibility and resilience to tackle any interruption. The reliability of the SunGard network has been proven on numerous occasions, from the London bombings to Hurricane Katrina, which occurred within weeks of one another. In all of the invocations it has received, SunGard has never exceeded 35% of the available bandwidth on its 10/100Mb overlay network.”
This is the second time that SunGard has won the Most Innovative Product of the Year award and follows on from the success of MobileVault (2002) and the highly-commended Paragon (2005), as well as finalists Workplace Recovery (2003), Mobile Bank Recovery Centre (2001), iXguardian (2001) and e-continuity (2000), giving SunGard more success in this category than any other company.
www..sungard.co.uk
JR Consulting Partners Ltd’s INONI Commended as Continuity, Insurance & Risk Magazine’s Innovative Product of the Year
Last week’s UK and Europe Business Continuity Awards recognized JR Consulting Partners Ltd’s achievements in developing its highly innovative product INONI.
INONI is a powerful online measurement and diagnostic software tool, capable of identifying areas of strength and weakness in an organisation and uniquely delivering intelligent and immediate corrective guidance to its users. INONI received a high commendation from the judges and runner-up to Sungard’s National Network from a short-list of six finalists.
INONI was used during 2005 by the UK Tripartite Authorities (the FSA, HM Treasury and Bank of England) to benchmark the recovery capability and resilience of the UK’s top 62 financial sector firms and institutions, culminating in the Resilience Benchmarking Project Discussion Paper. The system faultlessly delivered over 1000 continuity-related questions to each participating firm; it analysed participants’ responses in real time and provided each with immediate individual feedback, improving the sector’s overall continuity capability. The project is planned to be repeated in 2007.
The awards were held at the prestigious Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s West End. John Robinson, JRCPL’s Managing Director said “We are delighted to have received this commendation and wish to thank the FSA and all participating firms for helping to make the project such an outstanding success.” Robinson explained that INONI is already being used by global organisations to benchmark operations internally and to carry out Business Impact and Risk Analysis (BIRA) across multiple distributed sites. He added that “We believe 2006 will see many more organisations using INONI to improve their BIRA activities, increasing consistency and efficiency by allowing experts to focus where the need is most acute”
For information, contact either John Robinson via email jr@jrcpl.com or visit www.jrcpl.com
Full list of awards winners at http://www.continuitycentral.com/news02554.htm
•Date: 19th May 2006• Region: UK • Type: Article •Topic: BC general
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