Business Continuity Marketplace Trends and Virtual Workforce Continuity Services. Welcome to Showcase on Services, an IBM podcast.

Transcription

1 IBM Global Technology Services IBM Podcast Business Continuity Marketplace Trends and Virtual Workforce Continuity Services Welcome to Showcase on Services, an IBM podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Gluck, and my guest today is Russ Lindburg. Russ is Global Offering Executive for Business Continuity and Resiliency Services in IBM Global Technology Services. Today we're talking about a new service product called Virtual Workplace Continuity. Now, Russ, I think most people have a pretty good idea of what business continuity or resiliency means, but I'm not sure I really understand what this new service product's all about. So explain Virtual Workplace Continuity. Well, first of all, Jeff, thanks for inviting me today to the podcast. So when we look at clients, most companies have a fantastic plan when it comes to protecting and recovering their data center, but when it comes to looking at their workforce, most companies -- and there's actually some research to back this up; Forrester Research actually just did a study... And what they found in this study is that 95 percent of respondents felt it was either important or very important to have a strategy in place that looked at the workforce and how they can ensure continuity of that workforce in the face of a disruption. 1

2 Additionally, enterprises are ultimately spending up to 30 percent of their business continuity budgets on workforce continuity. So when they were asked the question from Forrester, that's what they came back with. So what we're announcing here today from IBM is a new Virtual Workplace Continuity Service that helps clients with this very issue. It really focuses on the human side of business continuity planning to ensure that their critical employees can still remain productive when they cannot get to their workplace. So don't think of this as, a service that's going to be in place... It could support this, but don't think of it as a service that's going to be in place to handle a major disaster where the data center is taken out, the workplace was taken out. This is really for more non-traditional disasters, things like pandemic, things like a labor disruption, a transit strike, some kind of an event that takes place where people just cannot physically get from their remote location into their workplace and operate as they normally would. So the service we're developing we're doing this in conjunction with one of our alliance partners, Citrix Systems. And Citrix is also announcing with us in a joint release that this new technology which they've code-named Project Kent will be the cornerstone for the service that we're building. And what Project Kent does is it provides integration of communications, collaboration and access to data and applications as the three core features. And our services on 2

3 top of that really go in and look at a number of things within a client to ensure that they have a comprehensive workforce continuity strategy. So the first place we'll start with the service is to look at their current business continuity plans, understand to what degree if any they've even looked at workforce continuity, and then begin to develop a strategy for them as to how they'll address workforce continuity within their company. It sounds to me like there's a trend here that really started with the 9/11 tragedy, where most companies were pretty well prepared by having a backup to their data but they weren't well prepared for what happened then from a people pointof-view. And so certainly 9/11 was a pivotal event. I think it forced many, many companies to rethink how they handle disaster recovery. And it also led to a whole new thinking about how important it is, and how impactful an outage can be in terms of the bottom line for the corporation. And it means real economic, real economic loss. So other significant drivers that we've seen, though, are things like pandemic. You've probably heard this, but a major push all around the world about the potential of something like an Avian flu coming with a pandemic. IBM actually launched some services back in June, we launched what we call our Contingency Planning Assessment as a pandemic planning service that helps clients 3

4 look at how vulnerable they are today if a pandemic were to strike and to put some risk mitigation plans in place to be able to address those pandemic concerns. Now, when you look at Virtual Workplace Continuity, what we're offering here today, this is a logical follow on to pandemic, it actually fits very, very well in the sense that one of the key things and one of the key recommendations out of anyone trying to plan for a pandemic is to look at a way for allowing your people to collaborate remotely, to stay in their remote location and to continue to operate not only with the mother ship, with the corporation, but also to be able to work with partners, with suppliers, and with other peoples that they...other people that they do business with on a day-to-day basis. IBM is pretty well prepared in this way [I think we've] got some experience, and just about every employee I know can work from almost anywhere in the world. That's an excellent question. So as a matter of fact, IBM is one of the few companies probably with a population of the workforce that's as high as it is. I'm not sure if this is right, but I think it's around 20 percent, who actually work remotely, they have laptops, they have VPN clients. We'll look at this as part of our consulting as another potential strategy for how clients can work with a total workforce continuity program. Citrix will play a central role but we'll also look at other technologies as well like the whole notion of a work at home strategy full time. 4

5 And in doing so I think when you look at the service specifically and the target that we're aiming at here, it's really more around campus environment companies who have many, many of their employees centralized in a campus location or in multiple satellites. I was going to ask you a question about client benefits, but it seems that at least to start, it's pretty obvious that this isn't just a little bit of an incremental change, this is, having a plan like this is the difference between being in business and being out of business. And I think sometimes when people think about business continuity and resiliency services they oftentimes think of it as really an IT problem, an IT play. But at the end of the day, business continuity is really a business issue. It's a business problem. And when we look at the things we cover, I mean, and the targets that we go and talk to and clients, yes, this certainly includes the CIO, it certainly includes the DR manager or the IT director for things like Disaster Recovery and how I'm taking care of my data center. But when you get into these issues around the workforce and around people, or workplaces in general, it's very much a business issue. 5

6 Now, IBM's in this business already not just from a virtual perspective with these services we're announcing today; we actually have a leading position across the globe for this notion of physical workplace recovery. We have front office and back office positions for financial institutions with traders where we can provide an alternate work location for them to go to, and we also have mobile trailers that we can deploy so if there was a disaster we could bring a mobile trailer in and have people go and work in those locations. So when you look at this notion of bringing out a Virtual Workplace Continuity solution, this really is just a perfect fit in terms of providing our customers with additional choice and flexibility in the kinds of workplace services they need to buy. We're talking with a lot of customers right now to develop the services, it's a continuous process. IBM and Citrix and both out talking to our respective customer base. We are actually going to be at the Citrix iforum event which is where this will be launched next, on Monday, October 23rd. And we are presenting our portfolio of services including our consulting there that we'll talk about, not specifically for workforce but sort of the bigger picture as well, as to how we can put an entire business continuity program in place for a client. The first step is to get some pilots going. 6

7 Actually, yes. As I said earlier, we are speaking with customers both on our side as well as Citrix is speaking with their customer base. And we are looking for customers who are going to be interested in being a pilot going forward. As I mentioned previously too, Citrix is announcing this on the 23rd as a project, so I mean, they're still in development, we've seen a strong preview, they'll be previewing the technology and demo-ing the technology at their iforum event, which is the annual event they hold for all of their partners and customers. And we'll be entertaining pilots in So the two-part question. We've formed up with Citrix, why Citrix, and then what's the competition doing and how are we doing. First of all, we've had a long-standing relationship with Citrix, we've worked with them for a long time. They are a great alliance partner for us. And from the various technologies we've looked at for workforce continuity, Citrix is really the only vendor who's been able to sort of tie together the three key areas I mentioned earlier, which are communications, collaboration and access to data and applications. And really, when you look at Citrix, they are a market leader particularly in this space around access. So we're very excited from that perspective, and we think it can really provide the value we need in the services engagement. 7

8 IBM has a really long history here we ve been in this business of business continuity and resiliency for a long time.. a lot of experience. We've actually, in some way, shape or form we've been doing business continuity for almost 40 years, so I mean, all the way back to the, you know, very early stages of computing. So we have been around a long time, we are a market leader. We listen to our customers. We're excited about this relationship, and we're frankly very excited about the services. Russ, to find out more we have a Web site with everything you d want to know. As a matter of fact, we do. It's ibm.com/services/spotlight. I want to thank you for your time, and wish you luck. Well, thank you very much, Jeff. I appreciate the time. Thank you to my guest, Russ Lindburg, Global Offering Executive for Business Continuity and Resiliency Services for IBM Global Technology Services. I'm Jeff Gluck. Thanks for listening. [END OF SEGMENT] 8