Northgate Information Systems - Strategic Repositioning And Reason To Buy

Nice to some common sense prevailing heres a few points from my own and personal perspective on the recent events to add to the discussion.To be open and honest, as an ex employee and current shareholder yes I would dearly love this share to continue rising

1) NIS is BS7799 acredited therefore has a Business continuity plan reviewed and tested else they would not have got it.

2) Some of their DR is backed off to sungard (formerly guardian) do a traceroute on www.labour.org which is supported and hosted by northgate for example and see where that takes you mine takes me via a sungard gateway. These sites are up and running

3) Whilst NIS host systems on behalf of the customers, the level of DR offered as part of the package is as a costed option. Whilst customers maybe dissapointed by the delay in recovery perhaps the reason they are not shouting from the roof tops is the fact that they realise that they should have bought into a more comprehensive DR plan.

4) Business continuity is a different kettle of fish to IT service continuity some systems may not be deemed to be business critical eg EMAIL in the early stages of recovery. Phones faxes and snail mail still are available hence the percieved delay (low priority) for restoration of internal email.

5)The Customers themselves are jointly responsible for BCM and the time to recover services of which IT is a compenent part . However there should be processes in place to manage benefits claims and payments in the councils to cater for catastrophic IT failures such as this. What would have happened if their offices not NIS's had suffered the same.

5) Thankfully no one was hurt in the incident - had it been a normal working day the greatest asset the company has i.e. its staff would have been decimated. These guys have been working their socks of to restore the customers and recover the IT. Tin and software can be replaced, knowledge expertise and flesh and bones cant

I for one am confident that NIS will survive with minimal impact. In fact the loss of the Hemel building may well turn out to be a blessing in disguise as it potentially solves one of Chris Stones problems i.e. Too much real estate !!!!