P45 looms for IT managers with 'flaky' websites

IT managers fear losing their jobs if the company website goes down more than four times in six months.

According to a survey commissioned by web content management company Vertical Sky and carried out by IDC, 73 per cent of companies with more than $200m in ecommerce revenue have had a site outage in the past six months. An outage experienced by eBay in 1999 wiped $3m off the company's second quarter revenues that year. Although loss of revenue and the cost of IT repairs were cited by IT managers as important business impacts of outages, the one they most fear is bad publicity. Loss of reputation, they felt, is most likely to result in the loss of a job. Randall Howard, CEO of Vertical Sky, said: "The lasting lesson of the outages at eBay and the London Stock Exchange is that this is not an IT problem. This is a problem that goes to the very heart of the existence and success of a brand in the online world." Over half of the companies surveyed by IDC blamed outages on software bugs, and 45 per cent blamed software upgrades. The report warns: "Few upgrades or changes to the code are going to be 100 per cent correct the first time they are deployed." One IT manager told silicon.com: "The resources devoted to developing code for internet applications are not on a par with other software projects. The code doesn't go through the same strict procedures that other applications go through."