Case study: David Archer, Cofathec Heatsave

Sometimes, being innovative is not about the technology you buy; it is about how it is installed and run with the minimum amount of pain.

When Cofathec Heatsave, part of the $1.4bn (£760m) Cofathec Group, wanted to roll out a new disaster recovery service, IT director David Archer knew it would not be easy.

‘For a long time, there was just nothing on the market that met our needs,’ he says. ‘We wanted something that would synchronise all our data in real time without the need to ferry tapes back and forth.’

As internet technologies developed, real-time online backup became a possibility – but Cofathec lacked the internal skills and resources to take advantage of such services.

So Archer negotiated with supplier Sunbelt to create a new disaster recovery site on the company’s behalf, which mirrors 20 servers in real-time using VMware technology. Only when the site is up and running will Cofathec take over management of it.

‘I like to think we have a bit of a bargain,’ says Archer. ‘They get to make all the mistakes and go through the learning curve, and then we will take it in-house.’

As it turns out, this has been a good approach: ‘It is fair to say that quite a lot of things have gone wrong,’ says Archer. Cofathec did not drive the project hard enough, with the result that deadlines were missed.

Also, the team focused on setting up the new recovery site without planning how it would be invoked in the event of an actual disaster. In addition, Sunbelt needed to reconfigure the software halfway through the project when it became apparent that replication was not being completed.

With the recovery site now up and running, Archer has turned his attention to other technology initiatives. The biggest project is a new SAP implementation, which was started in January 2005.

But Archer is also working on several smaller, more innovative projects. ‘We are rolling out a piece of technology to automate purchase orders, which will radically improve our billing processes,’ he says.

The company is also investigating technology to improve information access for its field-based engineers, who need regular access to email and customer databases.

‘We are in the fortunate position of being part of a large organisation that allows us to explore these options,’ says Archer. ‘If it is going to bring a business benefit, I’m able to be as innovative as the technology will allow me to be.’

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