Better late then never, or maybe not!

"Virgin Blue pursues $20 million in compensation for business loses in check-in crash."

Virgin Blue will seek to recover $20 million lost when it's reservation system crashed last month.

The carrier is expected to demand compensation from Navitaire the company which supplies the NewSkies system which failed on September 26 2010.

Apparently another carrier Ryan air had experienced similar problems in the preceding weeks so Navitaire should have been especially alert to possibility of systems issues with Virgin Blue.

Virgin in this situation are probably in a bind that smaller organisations don't have to face. That is they are locked into a proprietary IT solution because of their need to collaborate with other industry players. This mean that Virgin probably cannot change IT suppliers even if they wanted to.

To an outsider the performance of Navitaire in this situation has been outstanding. When most businesses expect an up-time of 99.99% which means a downtime of around one hour a year and some businesses demanding up-time of 99.999 or about six minuets a year, it is hard to understand how an Navitaire could let their customer suffer an outage of days.

Virgin Blue do not see this situation as causing long term damage to their company. How would your business be perceived if you suffered a similar outage. The concept of disaster recover somehow does not seem to have permeated the people at Virgin Blue or Navitaire and they both should share some responsibility for this. If organisations don't ensure that their IT providers have sufficient disaster recovery for them, the they must share some of the responsibility when disasters happens.