Notification system software enables preplanned responses to events

Catastrophes like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were the impetus for a new solutions category that goes by varying names, including emergency notification systems and business continuity software. Dialogics, Red Alert, Send Word Now, and NotiFind are vendors in this growing space.

“Responses [formed] in the heat of the moment often don't turn out as they should,” says Roberta Witty, a senior VP of research with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. “With emergency notification software, you develop scenarios ahead of time and then populate the messages, target groups, and time frames for response so that when an event or disaster occurs, you're 'locked-and-loaded' and ready to go.”

Emergency situations include disaster response, IT/business continuity response, crisis management, and product recalls, among others, adds Witty.

MIR3, a leading vendor in the space, recently announced a significant upgrade to its flagship Intelligent Notification solution, calling it the first truly global emergency notification system for government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.

“Solutions like these allow an organization to very quickly put out notification alerts to a large number of people across multiple channels, including phone, email, and PDA,” says Kate McCurdy, government technology analyst for Datamonitor, a London-based analyst firm. “In one form or another, the technology has been around for awhile, but it has become very robust with multi-channel notification and capabilities for confirming that the message has been received.”

In addition to multilanguage features, MIR3's Intelligent Notification now has event management capabilities, a rules-driven alternative channel for targeted personnel options, and recipient self-subscription. It also can be linked to manufacturing equipment in a petrochemical refinery or a nuclear power facility, for example, where performance or safety degradation can trigger an alert to be sent anywhere, and the recipient can activate an emergency response from the receiving cell phone or PDA.

“It delivers notifications globally, making local calls in the local language,” says Frank Mahdavi, MIR3 chief strategy officer. “You can even have a machine 'talk' to someone, delivering a message anywhere in the world. It can communicate to any device—or by any modality that people want to use—and it is tremendously scalable.”

Intelligent Notification also manages events by receiving actionable responses and keeping track of who has—or has not—received a message.

“It can solicit certain responses, manage the processing of those responses, and generate other notifications,” concludes Mahdavi.