Sydney and London call centres take calls for Veritas
Published: 12 Sep 2001 12:01 BST
The Sydney support center of storage software company Veritas opened for business at 0130 this morning (AEST) to take a flood of calls for America's devastated east coast.
The 80-strong Australian team took customer calls directed at the company's support centres in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Maryland, Philadelphia and Virginia, according to an internal company memo from the company's chief executive obtained by ZDNet Australia.
In the aftermath of what has been described as the worst terrorist attack in history -- in which both towers of New York's World Trade Center were razed by hijacked commercial planes -- chief executive Gary Bloom said all the company's east coast support centres had been closed down for security purposes and that the company had advised all employees at its California support centre to stay at home.
Veritas says its software was used to store most of the data contained within the World Trade Center buildings in 1993, when a terrorist bomb exploded.
Currently, the company could not confirm how much, if any, of the data stored in the WTC buildings was housed by Veritas storage software.
The company's local marketing manager said its Sydney support centre was used to handling calls from overseas customers; around 85 percent of the Sydney center's phone traffic came from overseas.
"This tragedy will naturally have an impact on some of our customers and partners," Bloom's memo read.
"The support organisation is prepared to move calls to our overseas support centres to further our capacity as needed and to help handle the potential increase of loads due to the various office closures around the country."
The company's Sydney support centre was later joined by its London office to take customer calls.
See ZDNet UK's Enterprise Channel for full coverage.
Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the ZDNet news forum.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read other letters.
Did you find this article useful?
33 out of 68 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
