IBM Oz buys Classic Blue

IBM has furthered its push into the small-to-medium business market in Australia with the acquisition of disaster recovery company Classic Blue, reports ZDNet. The privately-owned business operates data centres in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and claims nearly 300 small-to-medium business clients.

The acquisition would particularly help IBM in the South Australian and Queensland markets, according to David Burns, GM, IBM Global Services. IBM presently operates seven data centres around the country, but none in those two states.

Classic Blue had been vendor-agnostic, he said, also being a business partner of Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. IBM did not disclose the value of the deal.

Continuity Software, business continuity software solutions provider, and the sponsor of TheBCForum.org forum for business continuity professionals, has announced its upcoming webinar titled "Trends in Business Continuity for 2006", scheduled for 17 January, according to a company statement.

TheBCForum.org is an exclusive, invitation-only roundtable for enterprise business continuity professionals and IT architects, who are mandated with the mission of supervising the business continuity activities in their enterprises.

The forum serves as a place to share knowledge, establish relationships with industry peers, and share lessons learned and best practices in the business continuity arena.

December`s report on the Resilience Benchmarking Project from the UK`s Tripartite Authorities (The Bank of England, FSA and HM Treasury) asked both UK firms and business continuity providers to be more transparent about business recovery provisions, reports Continuity Central. This will enable more effective management of concentration risks.

The report found that, although IT arrangements for firms operating in the financial sector are very resilient, there is a heavy geographical concentration of primary and recovery sites in and around London. Follow up work by the tripartite authorities will explore this issue.

In an appendix to the Resilience Benchmarking Project report, the Tripartite Authorities published a sample voluntary risk declaration form which business continuity suppliers can use to provide information about syndication levels at their various recovery facilities. ICM has stated that it will issue a voluntary risk statement based on the voluntary risk declaration form to its clients in January.