3Com’s European headquarters shares a boundary fence with a fuel depot in Hemel Hempstead. On Sunday, 11 December 2005 at 6am, one of the fuel tanks exploded. It was the UK’s biggest peacetime blaze.
‘The office was, for practical purposes, destroyed,’ says Andy Gillham, international human resources director for 3Com. The office was 3Com’s largest site outside the US. It was the European hub and, from a technical point of view, the IT hub.
Shortly after the explosion, a team of senior 3Com managers convened. ‘There was a well documented corporate plan for occasions like this, which we all studied assiduously,’ says Gillham. ‘But it is interesting that in reality you can’t slavishly follow a document that’s been written in the quiet of a conference room. It acted as a guide, not an instructor.’
The team decided that getting email up and running was a priority. ‘We had already established a web interface via our corporate email systems so staff at least had web access,’ says Gillham.
‘We were quickly able to build mailboxes on a US-based server available via the web. This was our main method of communication.’
The 300 employees were informed of what was going on and were instructed to sit tight and wait for messages from the management team.
‘We were then faced with how to accommodate 300 people,’ says Gillham. ‘The power of relationships was vital. Office space was organised in Milton Keynes, Watford and High Wycombe within four or five hours. If it had been 14 or 15 hours, we wouldn’t have got it because there were a lot of other companies in the same situation. The speed of response was absolutely crucial.’
As for business continuity, 3Com’s network configuration was such that as soon as the Hemel Hempstead site was destroyed, all 17 European field offices were automatically redirected to the firm’s Santa Clara data centre. ‘It allowed us to focus on the UK impact and without having to spread our resources thinly across multiple locations,’ says Karl Lovelock, international IT director.
3Com managed to sell, ship, bill, and collect cash, more or less uninterrupted. ‘Externally, the business was hardly interrupted,’ says Gillham. ‘Internally it represented a massive challenge of management and human endeavour just to keep the thing afloat.
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