The second problem was that the support staff, who were all centrally located in Charlotte, North Carolina, had absolutely no automated system for monitoring and testing the remotely located VRUs. All we could do was try to stay ahead of any system failures by randomly calling units and see if we encountered any problems. More often than not, when problems did occur Perry's group heard about them from the besieged call centers, whose volume of calls would spike if the VRUs failed to do their jobs. We have a very high standard for uptime for our VRUs. In our business, minutes cost money.
Downtime translates to delayed transactions, higher operational costs, and sometimes lost business.
We won't tolerate even two minutes of downtime. What Perry found was the Hammer system from Empirix. It was, and still is, the only system like it on the market. Perry installed three Hammer systems, two for production and one for regression testing of new and modified VRU applications. Essentially the Hammers simulate a touch-tone phone, checking the telephone lines to the VRUs, the VRUs themselves, and the host connections.