At first blush it may seem like no big deal: clocks will move ahead by an hour three weeks earlier than usual this year. But for today’s networked businesses, the simple change could mean complex problems if IT shops aren’t prepared, industry experts say.

The trouble goes beyond missed meetings and messed-up schedules to errors within time-reliant applications that are critical to a company’s business — processes such as operating room scheduling, billing and contract deadlines and ensuring record compliance, for example, could be at risk. Any applications dependent on timestamps will run into trouble after March 11, the new day for the daylight-saving time change, if actions aren’t taken.

For more than two decades, daylight-saving time has begun on the first Sunday of April and reverted to standard time on the last Sunday in October. But beginning this year, due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the daylight-saving schedule will be extended by a month, with the period beginning on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. Legislators backing the change say it will save some 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

But the change also could throw a wrench in IT systems set up to automatically handle the old daylight-saving schedule. As a result, IT professionals need to take a close look at their systems and applications to determine which could be off when the change occurs and then take the necessary steps to correct them.

“My fear is that a lot of people aren’t going to realize this is a big issue until months down the road when they say, 'Oops, why aren’t these dates lining up,’” says Scott Metzger, CTO at consumer credit management firm TrueCredit in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Mike Sly, a senior IT consultant at IT integrator Evolving Solutions, agrees. Like a lot of vendors and service providers, Evolving Solutions has sent alerts to customers, many of whom haven’t been aware of the change.

“It’s really more pervasive than [Y2K] ever was,” Sly says. “It will impact anything that has to do with dates and times and scheduling — transportation, hotels, airlines, sales. It’s just everywhere. … It blows me away that not many people seem to be all that aware of it.”

Vendors have been focused on the issue and want to help customers make the transition. Most major IT vendors, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and Sun, have Web pages dedicated to the daylight-saving change that outline what fixes are necessary for their products. Smaller vendors, too, are making sure their products are updated.

PeopleCube, for example, began shipping updated releases of its resource scheduling and calendaring software that comply with the new daylight-saving dates late last year. On a larger scale, Microsoft addressed the issue by embedding the updated daylight-saving rules into Vista and it has patches available for Windows XP SP 2 and Windows 2000. Organizations running Windows XP SP 1 or Windows NT, however, will have to use a workaround that can be found on the Microsoft Web site.

In its daylight-saving directives, Cisco notes that the repercussions of the change extend beyond scheduling and into areas such as security and monitoring.

“This change can have a major impact on event correlation activities that are performed as part of normal operations troubleshooting and monitoring,” the Web site says. “For security-related devices, where logs are captured, correlated, and stored for future reference, this time change could render them incorrect for situations where they need to be recalled to rebuild a sequence of events. The incorrect timestamps might not be an issue for events that get immediate action. However, in the future, these events would reference incorrect times.”

TrueCredit’s Metzger says he and his team have been working since October to make sure their systems move smoothly into the new time. Metzger says the “lion’s share” of work they need to do centers around updating Java virtual machines, a task that can be tricky and time consuming because of the variety of Java Runtime Environments out there.

The good news for Metzger is that TrueCredit has consolidated its physical environment by running Azul’s multicore Compute Appliances, which offload Java workloads to reduce the strain on traditional application servers.

“We just have to do a patch update to four physical machines, which are centrally managed through one console,” Metzger says. “Prior [to Azul] we had multiple disparate systems, but consolidating everything onto a fewer number of physical units and having those machines centrally managed has made this particular issue easier to handle.”

Rich Debrino, CIO for Everett, Wash.-based Advances in Technology, which handles IT for a variety of healthcare organizations including parent company Compass Health, notes that systems tied to external network time servers should have few problems.

“Most proactive IT execs who run a big shop are going to use some kind of network time protocol tied either internally or externally,” he says. “Make sure you’ve got your [time] servers updated, then everybody else, when they log on to the network, should automatically update,” he says.

Industry experts caution, though, that while time servers will help synchronize time on networked devices, they won't solve the daylight-saving problem.

"Although it might appear that the use of Network Time Protocol (NTP) will avert any issues related to these time changes, NTP and Daylight Saving Time are mutually exclusive and one does not help or hinder the other. The Network Time Protocol is a utility used to synchronize clocks on different devices. Typically, NTP takes a reference clock from a source that is based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which does not change regardless of DST," Cisco says on its Web site. "For example, the Eastern Standard Time (EST) in the United States is five hours behind the UTC time when Daylight Saving Time is not active. EST is four hours behind when Daylight Saving Time is active. DST configuration is very specific to the time zone in which the device is deployed, and the NTP UTC is used as a reference when DST is calculated on each individual device."