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Razorline, a Louisiana-based provider of hosted IP-PBX services, had always included business continuity in its sales pitch to small and mid-sized businesses in the New Orleans area.

Needless to say, that sales pitch is resonating much more today. Razorline offers a converged hosted voice and data service on a Tekelec softswitch that works with existing phones and is billed at one monthly fee. The company found, pre-Katrina, that most customers were more attracted by the price benefits or features such as auto attendant than the reliability, however.

“We started off knowing the benefits of this,” said Gene Dry, managing member and one of three cofounders of the company. “There are no features that we have now that we didn’t have then.”

The difference is that potential customers now understand that the ability to pick up your phone and take it with you, to set up service again with any broadband connection, can be important.

“As in any city, nobody really expects to not have an office to go back to, whether it’s a hail storm, tornado or terrorist attack,” Dry said. “What happens more often is fiber cuts where a T-1 goes down or Houston rain storms--when they hit, people couldn’t get to work for a whole day. Our employees are able to reroute calls to employees’ homes or send calls to another office.”

Razorline has “a pretty good sales effort in New Orleans before Katrina,” Dry said. “But most people dismissed the idea of disaster recovery. Now they are listening.”

In the days immediately after Katrina, all of the New Orleans-based customers for Razorline’s hosted PBX service had the option of taking their phones with them as they left – and many did, Dry said. One customer, a computer-related business called DCC Services, temporarily moved its operation to Austin, TX, then decided to permanently relocate there.

Razorline was able to continue functioning from its 10^th floor office in a building two blocks from a BellSouth tandem switch location in downtown New Orleans. Its CLEC service provider Xfone USA, has multiple links to BellSouth’s network was able to route outbound calls through a BellSouth tandem switch in Jackson, Miss., when the downtown tandem went down, athough inbound calls were lost when BellSouth’s service went out.

“The lights on the 10^th floor were still on,” Dry said, as generators continued to power the facility for 10 days after Katrina hit. Because the service is network-based, it was able to continue functioning.

In the post-Katrina environment, disaster recovery has become a big part of Razorline’s pitch. One local school district just purchased the service and now it’s part of the disaster plan for teachers and administrators to take their phones with them in case of an evacuation to make it easier to get in touch.