Eze Castle Integration Expands Business Continuity Portfolio

Boston-based Eze Castle Integration (Booth 3612), which has more than 400 clients and over 50 firms with assets under management in excess of $1 billion, has announced the expansion of its vSite Disaster Recovery facilities. Executives at the company say that the expansion is needed because of strong demand by hedge funds and investment firms for its outsourced IT services including start-up and relocation, disaster recovery and voice over IP.

With the addition of new solutions, Eze Castle Integration hopes to encourage future growth, according to Chris Grandi, managing director, sales and marketing, Eze Castle Integration. "Our mission and focus right now is to maintain our market leadership in the hedge fund space while delivering other products and services," says Grandi. "This includes strengthening our disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, which we've been delivering to our clients for a number of years."

Grandi says the needs and requirements for disaster recovery have changed significantly because the SEC is becoming heavily involved with the audit of the funds, demanding to have a better understanding of exactly what disaster recovery plans entail and proof that plans will actually work. "The biggest priority around disaster recovery is that a lot of the institutional investors, as well as the funds of fund investors, are now demanding that they see the disaster recovery plan before they will approve the allocation of funds," says Grandi.

The cost of disaster recovery testing could become an extremely expensive process, according to Bob Guilbert, vice president of marketing and channels for Eze Castle Integration. In an effort to ease this burden, Guilbert says his company is announcing the expansion of its Business Continuity Portfolio, designed to offer a range of managed IT and consulting services, combined with the company's best-of-breed availability/disaster recovery solutions.

The expansion of the Business Continuity Portfolio will be introduced in phases, according to Guilbert. Disaster Recovery Services, for example, exists within the Business Continuity Portfolio Expansion and is available in silver, gold and platinum levels. Each level contains different sets of capabilities to fit different needs. A voice continuity service will launch later this summer and is designed to keep voice capabilities up and running during an outage. Strategic Consulting Services also will be introduced during this time that enable the design and implementation of business continuity plans that clients can share with potential investors, according to Guilbert.

Strategic Consulting Services is an expanding area of interest for Eze Castle Integration, according to Grandi, because as hedge funds bring on more assets they expand into other strategies or partner with other financial firms. "We're building this side of our business out to a much greater extent to make sure that as we bring on more funds we have adequate human resources," says Grandi. "The value we bring to hedge funds has not changed. We still work with hedge funds at the onset so that when they do start up we architect their entire IT infrastructure, build it and manage it on an ongoing basis."