E-commerce - vital to growth

AST Enterprise Systems Management, a division of the AST Group, has released a survey by UK`s Trend Consulting Company that focuses on European attitudes to the financial impact of downtime. The report, "Mission Critical Market Trends among Enterprise customers in Europe", was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and BMC Software, distributed in South Africa by AST ESM.

"This report should be a warning to the South African market place," says Martyn Healy, MD of AST ESM. "It reports that Europe is slowly catching on that e-commerce is vital to future growth, but most enterprises have little idea how to bring mission-critical applications into a 24 hour, seven day per week environment."

"It was found that 81% of respondents had no way of accurately measuring such costs even though as little as 0.1% deviation in enterprise systems up time can cost a 50 000 employee company 50 man years of effort," adds Healy. "No explanation could be offered as to why Europe should be in such a unstable situation."

"The survey looked at 399 enterprises across six European countries, and found 33% of respondents plan to put mission-critical applications onto the Internet/Intranet in the next 12 months, and half of these will be related to e-commerce. However, 60% said they had no way of measuring the cost of downtime of an e-commerce application, a further 21% saying their methods of measuring were inadequate."

Over 60% of respondents claimed security was a main factor in holding them back from e-commerce, as well as factors such as key escrow, regulation and legislation. In addition, the report found that Unix is the mission-critical operating system of choice for 63% of large enterprises, with NT at just 26% due to Windows` scalability problems. Most respondents believe NT will take another three to five years before maturing into an enterprise-level OS.