BearingPoint is setting up operations centers that will be staffed round-the-clock to monitor the situation and help customers with problems during the DST switch-over and for several days after March 11, Courbe said.

Ethan Simmons, co-founder of Boston-based IT services provider NetTeks Technology Consultants Inc., said DST help requests have been coming in like gangbusters from clients lately.

"It's completely chaos," Simmons said. "Everyone's still sort of picking it up. We've been telling our customers about this for a while now, and it's only been about a week where they've been coming to us and saying, 'We want to get this done.' All of a sudden, they realized that they never kept their systems patched."

Simmons, who is attending a Cisco Systems Inc. technology conference in San Jose along with officials from about 25 other IT services firms, said cell phones have been ringing madly among the attendees, with many callers seeking help on the DST issue. He pinned most of the blame for the last-minute rush on hardware and software vendors, saying that many have only recently begun releasing DST patches.

"Everyone's been really late to the game and behind the eight ball on this one," Simmons said. "It should have been better planned. This was known over a year ago, and it's taken forever to get patches."