Forewarned is forearmed

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Doug Mohney

Driven by a number of high-profile incidents, the business of providing emergency alert services across a college campus, large city or region is booming. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are stepping up to the plate with stand-alone solutions to meet the demands of their current customer base, while a few dedicated providers large enough to handle the needs of major metropolitan areas are setting up shop in places like New York City and San Diego. Though these alerts may be delivered by something as simple as a phone call, many customers are demanding support for everything from SMS text messaging to faxes and e-mail.

Universities and municipalities are buying emergency alert services at a rapid clip, but schools have slightly different criteria for the end result compared with municipal customers.

“Universities want to notify their whole population, both faculty and staff, for emergency situations,” said Ray Bonneau, product line manager for NEC Unified Solutions. “They want to contact their student population mostly through SMS, and usually by voice to faculty or to emergency response teams. Municipalities want the functionality to notify a geographic area, so if there's a water main break they can notify by ZIP code.”

However, both universities and municipalities want to allow their respective populations to be able to opt in to alerts, edit their contact information and let people select the notifications they receive.

“There's a lot more of that on the government side,” Bonneau said. “It can be any proactive … message that needs to go out.” Traffic alerts and school closings are popular, and NEC has several customers in the K-12 market that use the alert system to send absentee notifications to parents. “It puts more students in seats and results in more funding from the state, a couple hundred thousand extra per month,” Bonneau said, adding that the absentee notification alerts pay for the system.

NEC is leveraging its PBX presence in the higher education and health care markets to deliver its Emergency Campus Notification solution to existing customers. “We're still in the early adoption [phase],” Bonneau said. “The interest level went way up after the Virginia Tech incident.” (On April 16, 2007, a gunman killed at least 33 people at the university's Blacksburg, Va., campus.)

For some vendors, getting the opportunity to work in a collegiate environment often depends on the ability to work with what the school already has in place. For instance, Georgia Perimeter College, an institution with more than 22,000 students and 3000 faculty and staff on campuses throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area, recently deployed a Cistera Networks emergency alerts system designed to work within its IP telephony network. The system currently can deliver broadcast text and voice messages to more than 1900 phones across 36 buildings, with future functionality to support cell phones, e-mail alerts and IP-enabled loudspeakers in common areas.

“We could have bought an overhead paging system, an overlay,” said Chris Burge, the university's full-time IP telephony consultant, “but we wanted something that would integrate into the phone system.” Faculty wanted classroom IP phones to become a security device capable of receiving a silent page, text or broadcast message.

Georgia Perimeter's alert system can address all the phones in a hierarchy arrangement, sending alerts to groups of classrooms, a building or group of buildings, and entire campuses.

“We can use the system to send either a live page or use canned messages for school closings,” said Burge. “We can see where [alerting] is evolving. We need to go well beyond the classroom and have to cover hallways and gathering spaces.”

For Cistera, after a modest beginning, emergency alerting has grown to be an important revenue center.