Response to Press Comment

7 Mar 2007 15:40

Eckoh PLC07 March 2007 7 March 2007 Eckoh plc (Eckoh or "the Company") Eckoh Response to Inaccuracies In Press Comment Today Eckoh notes the inaccuracies in the Press today about the stability andintegrity of its call handling technology. Eckoh's call platform is sited in two secure hosting facilities and is designedto be fully resilient. This means in the event that there is a major hardwareproblem there are suitable systems in place to ensure that this does not affectthe ongoing successful operation of the services. Eckoh monitors its computers with sophisticated monitoring systems, and a mannedsupport team in the office 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and any issues aretherefore identified and addressed immediately. Eckoh vigorously denies the suggestion that it has any serious technical issuesand furthermore has not suffered any complete systems failure of any duration.With regards to the ITV shows Eckoh confirms that there have been no significanttechnical problems which have affected the successful operation of these shows. For large ITV voting shows such as "I'm a Celebrity" Eckoh utilises the BT masscall handling facility known as RIDE so in these instances no calls are terminated on Eckoh's equipment and the Company understand there have been no technicalissues on the BT platform either. Eckoh's call processing platform is extremely large and can handle over 500,000calls per hour. The platform terminates millions of calls every month. The callplatform uses around three hundred separate computers and because of the very large numbers of calls there are inevitably crashes of individual computers fromtime to time as happens with any computer based system. However, the vast majority of votes that Eckoh operate and certainly for all major shows are measured using BT network call records. In these circumstances any isolated computer crash would have no impact to the registration of votes as these would still be counted. Given that Eckoh has a wide range of clients covering sectors such as financialservices, utilities, government, retail and leisure as well as the media, the resilience of the platform is at all times under intense scrutiny. If there were any major technical shortcomings these would have been identified and raisedthrough either client or caller complaints. The Company is not aware of any suchproblems. Nik Philpot, CEO of Eckoh said: "Today's article in The Sun newspaper containsincorrect information and we vigorously deny the suggestion that we have had anyserious technical issues during the running of any of the ITV shows in which weare involved or that the public have been misled in any way. As previously stated, we welcome the Deloitte review which is being carried out on behalf of ITV and we are confident that it will clear us of any suggestion of wrong doing and show our premium rate services as being robust and trustworthy and fully compliant with all applicable regulations." Enquiries: Eckoh plcNik Philpot 08701 100 700Adam MoloneyJim Hennigan Corporate Synergy Plc David Seal/Jerry Keen +44 20 7448 4400 Corfin CommunicationsHarry Chathli +44 20 7929 8989 This information is provided by RNS The company news service from the London Stock Exchange