Mass Notification Alerting Proliferates

Unified intelligence, actionable intelligence and situational awareness are critical processes within the United States Military 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The success of a mission or exercise is totally reliant on an effective chain of command and its deployment capability of effective communications.

The United States Military has always been a leader in its embrace, support and utilization of information technology for the warfighter machine and that trend continues. The military is now utilizing innovative communications systems that less than 10 years ago were totally unimaginable.

Enterprise implementations of ip-based alerting platforms at many military sites worldwide have sprung up and enabled command leadership to instantly notify all personnel equipped with computer workstations, mobile laptops, pagers, Blackberry's, RF devices, loud speaker systems and telephones with intelligently routed unified information.

With the advent of notification platforms operating on ip-based networks within minutes thousands or even millions of nodes on the network can receive intelligently routed unified information. Unified communications have taken center stage within corporate and industrial organizations too who seek to bolster general communications and mitigate emergency scenarios. The good news is that some of these systems are available for costs comparable to the cost of a few in office copy machines.

Rather than manage and administer to the dissemination of critical, secret or top secret information across multiple publication channels with separate interface inputs, web-based administration consoles now corral and manage all notifications within a single interface.

The Desktop Alert 4.0 interface solution works for the U.S. Army in both small and large scale deployments based on requirements. For example, an administrator at The United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA), New York can alert all personnel on base with emergency or non-emergency situational data. In a recent past performance analysis conducted by USMA the Desktop Alert 4.0 system attained an E grade (Excellent) based on tests, exercises and actual installation emergencies during 2008. The USMA is protecting tomorrow’s leaders today.

The United States Army Garrison HQ At Heidelberg Germany has now in-placed Desktop Alert 4.0 with a capability to notify over 40,000 personnel using the system in Europe.
Peterson Air Force base Command, Colorado has utilized Desktop Alert for over two years for sending alerts across the entire network to all personnel with resounding success and most recently the Multi-National Force-Iraq at COB Speicher procured Desktop Alert for usage in battle zones for emergency alerting, personnel recall and personnel accountability.

The implementation of ip-based notification technology has also reduced communication costs dramatically. None more so evident in that of the reduction of costs associated with premised based auto-dialer solutions. In the old days the best way to communicate was with a phone call. Making 10,000 phone calls instantly equated to spending a fortune on telephones, lines, clunky and prohibitively priced auto-dialer servers and substantial money allocations for recurring maintenance support for these legacy systems. Whereas the costs to make such calls instantly could costs millions of dollars, the cost can now be reduced to a fraction of the original and less effective cost by utilizing ip-based notification technology.

Ex:
A desktop alert can be published to 10,000 desktops instantly with one mouse click or automatically. The Desktop Alert 4.0 accountability report indicates that only 8500 of the messages were actually seen or "engaged" by the end-user. The resulting 1500 user’s information is then rolled up into a report and sent to the premised based auto-dialer which then has the task of making 1500 calls as opposed to 10,000 calls it would have had to make if the desktop alert capability was non-existent.

Thus there is clear and unambiguous proof that unified communications are not only bolstered but the more communication requirements demanded the lesser the resulting cost. This is a departure from notification platforms that while reliable, restricted maximum capability due to staggering costs.

IP-Based technology is also a doorway to new and undiscovered technologies. Ip-based desktop alerting is now available utilizing a newly released GIS capability where an administrator or operator of the Desktop Alert Platform can use Microsoft Virtual Earth to select a named area of interest (NAI) with polylines to a map and quickly send an alert.

The resulting synopsis is that ip-based notification technology is bolstering communications while bringing the cost to do so down as well as opening new doorways to new and exciting technological capabilities.

Desktop Alert
ip-based mass notification