WPP Group go live with SmartNumbers Business Continuity

London, England. August 2005

SmartNumbers is pleased to announce that Mediaedge:cia, part of the WPP Group, has successfully gone live with the SmartNumbers Business Continuity solution. Mediaedge:cia are one of the largest communication planning and implementation businesses in the world, with 199 offices in 79 countries, 4,000 staff and more than $15bn in billings. With important clients such as Canon, Colgate, Daimler Chrysler, Yahoo! and others depending upon Mediaedge:cia for their corporate and brand communications, it is critical that they ensured communications would always endure, in all circumstances. To achieve this objective, and to save costs in the process, Mediaedge:cia have gone live with the SmartNumbers Business Continuity solution.

SmartNumbers Business Continuity is delivered as an On-Demand service from the public network, thereby eliminating a companies dependency on their own PBX or communications network. Calls can be delivered to a persons primary disposition, such as their desk, during times of normal operation and then instantly switch to second or third dispositions during times of emergency. In this way, staff can work for their home, temporary location or other offices, yet ensure that essential voice-services, such as voicemail, message-broadcast, hunt-groups and other services will endure. Other important features of this service include:

• Delivered On-Demand without requiring any new hardware, software or network infrastructure
• Ensures that all essential voice-services will endure during any emergency, in any location or for any duration
• Provides broadcast messaging to the entire company or to teams to ensure key messages can be distributed to employees, customers or suppliers
• Can be provisioned in a matter of days, and requires no capital expenditure

Luigi Galluzzo who runs the business continuity practices at Mediaedge:cia, said "Not only does SmartNumbers On-Demand remove our dependency on our PBX, but it saved us money too. Without On-Demand, we would have had to purchase secondary PBX's and all the housing and management costs associated with this. By using an On-Demand model instead, we've saved this cost and added true location-independence into our operations. In this way, if we're denied access to our buildings, or chose not to travel into our offices, our staff can work from any location yet all the company voice-services such as voicemail, fax-mail, hunt-groups and team-working will endure."

"In fact, the convenience of flexible working that the SmartNumbers service provides has been adopted by some of our users on a daily basis and not just for emergency situations", continued Luigi Galluzzo. "While this was an unexpected benefit of the service, it supports best practices since it means that in the event of any emergency the staff don't have to learn a new set of tools or processes."

"We are seeing very strong demand across all market sectors for better solutions to business continuity", explains Geoffrey Paterson, CEO of SmartNumbers. "Since business continuity is now a board-level issue, organisations are demanding more flexible, more resilient and less expensive options to solve this critical business problem. In the past, business continuity was addressed by duplicating essential resources or services, which not only tied up capital in these secondary systems, but also made it a challenge for the business to adapt it's working style to fit into new processes during times of outage. With SmartNumbers On-Demand, both the issues of capital costs and business impact have been eliminated. Since business continuity is built-in to the solution, organisations can adopt a business-as-usual footing in time of outage of denial of access to a building."

About Mediaedge:cia

Mediaedge:cia is a leading media communications specialist with 199 offices in 79 countries and is part of GroupM, the world's leading full-service media investment management company, a division of WPP Group plc. Mediaedge:cia develops communications solutions for brand and corporate growth, maximizing every connection point between advertisers and their consumers on a local, regional, and global basis. Key services include: ROI analysis, econometric modeling, consumer insight, communication channel planning and implementation, full service sponsorship, entertainment marketing, one-to-one media and digital consultancies. For further information, visit www.mecglobal.com.