AlertSense
Reimagining Crisis Management with Collaboration

Witnessing a total solar eclipse first hand is a phenomenal experience, but when tens of thousands of citizens flocked to Idaho to catch a glimpse of the total eclipse, government officials faced significant communication and collaboration challenges. AlertSense, a firm whose state-of-the-art mass-alerting platform addresses these types of circumstances, came to the rescue and assisted in keeping the situation under control. Focusing on the criticality of such situations, as well as emergencies, natural disasters and crises, AlertSense offers collaboration and secure communication to citizens and between responders at these times. “The collaboration in the midst of a crisis, as opposed to one-way communication, is what we focus on,” asserts David Smith, President and COO, AlertSense.

Expediting crisis and emergency notification and response, the firm offers an array of best-of-breed crisis management solutions through a robust platform built on the thesis that communication during an emergency rests in the mobile community. AlertSense’s intuitive mobile solution, the firm’s flagship product, is comprised of a comprehensive suite of features and functions that enable mass alerting, IPAWS alerting incident reporting, victim polling, secure chatting, and streamlined crisis management during big and small disasters and incidents— both natural and manmade. One significant value of the AlertSense solution is the firm’s multi-lingual capabilities—its alerting app offers on-demand translation in over 60 languages and AlertSense was the first IPAWS vendor to demonstrate multi-lingual IPAWS alerting (IAEM 2017).

Alerting and Collaboration Spread to the Enterprise

In today’s world of ever increasing natural disasters and man-made emergencies, AlertSense has seen the need for its solution spread to the enterprise world.

Specifically, the ability for alerts to be initiated by individuals on scene is attractive to enterprises, which often have geographically dispersed locations and the ability for the managers of these locations to quickly and efficiently alert key individuals in the enterprise of an incident or crisis at their location is invaluable.

Mobile collaboration in the midst of a crisis, as opposed to one-way communication, is what we focus on

The built-in ability in the platform to then collaborate to resolve the crisis or incident takes the solution from alerting to helping organizations resolve real-life problems.

With regard to crisis management, quick polling is also an effective method of aggregating information about a critical situation. A large retail chain in the US, with store locations all around the world, recently faced interruptions in their business when hurricanes afflicted many of their stores. Leveraging AlertSense’s mobile solution, the firm was able to conduct a quick poll—is the store open? Are any employees injured?—to ensure the safety of their personnel. Store managers were also able to convey relevant information to headquarters through the secure chat feature.

The AlertSense platform allows for extensibility into an enterprise or government’s existing business continuity plans or emergency response plans—“the source of truth.” The platform, built on a cloud-first technology using a set of REST APIs, that can easily integrate into existing back-end business continuity plans of an organization.

AlertSense is all set to extend into the European subcontinent by 2019. Leveraging their multilingual functionality, the firm intends to serve the European citizens who speak diverse languages. AlertSense is also ready to venture into the IoT world, utilizing their platform to gather information from a multitude of electronic devices to make mass alerting more effective. “While we are just beginning to answer some use cases relevant to homeland security and IT cyber alerting, we have a platform that can extend alerting and collaboration management into many other use cases,” concludes Smith.