Text Box: Page 5 ò Return to Page 1 Text Box: STC LINES—January 2006 Text Box: Business Continuity Planning and the STC Consultant (From Page 3)

and interested taxpayers are

well-advised to spend time determining precisely how much excise tax has been paid over the relevant period and making a request for refund based on precise amounts.

       These four points represent only some of the issues involved in the FET refund process. For more information, please feel free to call me, at 716-652-4413.

BlackBerry Settlement

       In early December, patent owner NTP reached a settlement with Research in Motion (RIM) about BlackBerry devices which were alleged to have infringed upon patents owned by NTP.  While the parties had initially reached a settlement in the neighborhood of a $450 million payment, a judge in Virginia disallowed the settlement, forcing both parties back to the table.  Ultimately, NTP will receive a percentage of the RIM’s earnings.

However, before the dust could settle, later in the week, NTP licensed a technology to one of RIM’s competitors, Visto who, licenses in hand, turned around and sued Microsoft for patent infringement.

All of these activities put additional pressure on RIM to reach some final settlement with NTP. Absent some sort of settlement, RIM could be forced to shut down its product (and healthy revenue stream) in U.S. markets.

       Finally, please be advised that the Federal Universal Service Contribution Factor for the First Quarter of 2006 (the amount which carriers are allowed to assess against interstate and international usage) is 10.2%.

Legal & Regulatory Update

(From Page 4)

In the case of design/build pro-jects, the question becomes a matter of design objectives.

According to several survey comments, where design/build or green field projects are involved, BCP protections are, and have always been, a consistent area of emphasis for STC consultants.

Different Levels of  BCP Terms

Table 1 summarizes principal terms relating to business continuity planning, which, at different levels, address the organization-wide challenge of maintaining service and support to customers.

“Disaster Recovery” is a sequence of specifically defined events designed to restore business processes.  A “disaster recovery plan” is just one element of the concept of business continuity.

 “Fault Tolerance” is the ability of a system to respond to failure, often using designs that mirror operations over duplicate systems. The point here is that fault tolerance, or hot failover, capabilities are an even more specific element of a business continuity plan.

When BCP Becomes Irrelevant

“High Availability” addresses a different level of business continuity planning, one that relates more specifically to design objectives.

Rather than constituting a response element, high availability describes an operating characteristic of a system, namely an ability to function without reference to business process recovery models.

Business process management, or BPM, has come to represent an enterprise-wide effort to evaluate internal work processes in terms of particular strategic emphases.

Strategic decisions relating to planning for extraordinary circumstances, when addressed comprehensively, will extend beyond communications networks, to encompass the business process of the entire organization.

When this occurs, our roles as facilitators for network continuity become magnified in relation to a more grand project objective, one that involves the role of the network in a complete set of business processes.

Table 1:  Uses of BCP Terms

¨ Business Continuity  The ability to ensure service and support to customers after an unplanned event.

¨ Disaster Recovery  Activities and processes to return an organization to an acceptable service level after an unplanned event. An element of business continuity planning.

¨ Fault Tolerance  Having a backup system to activate during a primary system failure. An element of disaster recovery planning.

¨ High Availability  Full system functionality under virtually any conditions. High Availability design paradigms incorporate principles that produce extremely robust, survivable systems. As a result, the concepts of disaster planning and recovery planning become irrelevant with respect to communications networks.