The boards of both AIIA and AEEMA met separately but concurrently last week to discuss the proposed amalgamation of the two associations.

An InfoWorld survey carried out in 2004 revealed that 46 per cent of CIOs believed that the number one priority they faced was ensuring data availability and recovery.

As a result, availability services have become a strategic and competitive imperative, especially since new corporate governance regimes demand organisations reduce risk by ensuring their information systems are resilient to outages.

Interactive is a 100 per cent Australian-owned services provider entirely focussed on systems availability. Established in 1988, Interactive now has 130 staff throughout Australia and has been selected for critical systems maintenance and disaster recovery services by more than 850 corporations and government departments.

Providing system maintenance services for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance and Intel-based (Dell, IBM, HP) servers and printers, Interactive engineers are vendor-trained to deliver maintenance services for critical systems from mainframes to PCs. In addition, they frequently help customers maximise capital investments by extending the service life of equipment well beyond vendor stated ‘end of life’.

A key differentiator for Interactive is its processes for minimising system downtime and therefore business risk. Each customer is allocated one or more dedicated team engineers, guaranteed to respond within 10 minutes of a call, and be on-site within a maximum of two hours. Industry-best spares policies ensure parts are kept in the same capital city as the equipment under maintenance.

This combination of rapid response by engineers familiar with the customer’s environment, and Interactive’s stringent spares-holding methodologies, adds up to an unparalleled ‘first call fix rate’ greater than 95 per cent.

Since entering the disaster recovery market in 1990, Interactive has built on its reputation for maximising system availability by providing purpose-built, world-class business recovery centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Strict subscription ratio policies limit the number of customers subscribed to any one system or business recovery centre on the basis of geographical location, power grid and telecommunications connectivity. This reduces the likelihood of conflicts in the event of multiple disasters, and lowers risk of lengthy system downtimes.

Managing Director Christopher Ride is especially proud of Interactive’s technical expertise. “Our reputation is founded on, and continues to be enhanced by, the dedication and quality of our people. Their determination to optimise our customers’ systems availability has enabled us to achieve double-digit growth every year since 1988.”

Christopher is enthusiastic about joining the AIIA. “As a true-blue Aussie member of the ICT community, we wanted to throw our support behind the industry’s leading exponent. We are looking forward to the benefits of membership, especially the exchange of ideas with other members and access to specialised training and services. After all, the greater objective here is the protection of critical Australian IT systems and the businesses that rely on their uninterrupted operations.”