Desktop Alert: Industry Disruptive Mass Notification Technology

While hundreds of lives gasped for air in the twin towers of America on September 11, 2001, the existing IT computational infrastructure could have been used to raise alarms and provide emergency instructions to the victims. Amidst true life-threatening emergencies like active shooters, lockdowns, evacuations, severe weather, and more, there is very little time to react to the event and mitigate the impact of the event. However, an emergency situation in a workplace can go beyond these life-threatening events, wherein occurrences like email and system outages can and have had a cascading negative effect and high realized costs as a repercussion. In the wake of the same, Howard Ryan originally pioneered Desktop Alert Inc. to send emergency alerts directly to desktops as un-blockable pop-ups as well as emails leveraging the IP-based infrastructure in place. “Our goal is to provide organizations with rapid and secure communication to their personnel through a federated and unified alerting platform,” asserts John Monville, CEO, Desktop Alert.

Desktop Alert provides a comprehensive suite of alerting solutions through a single web-based browser platform. It is an intuitive and easy-to-use mass alerting software platform which can be hosted both on-premise and in the cloud. Depending on the client’s requirements, Desktop Alert notifies company personnel through computer pop-ups, emails, text messages, phone calls, social media, and mobile application, along with offering virtual and GPS-enabled physical panic buttons. Physical GPS enabled key fob style panic buttons activate a real-time alert with a location map and two-way voice communication. Further, Desktop Alert Inc. acquired Metis Secure Solutions to leverage the Metis Secure emergency communication platform that offers notification beacons and help stations tailored for both indoor and outdoor emergencies.

From a privacy and security standpoint, the system tracks when a specific message was sent, to whom it was sent to, did it get delivered, did it get acknowledged, was there a response and many other unique reporting metrics, all in real time. The firm employs a novel approach to tackling the daily business interruptions, such as, IT system issues and email outages, by enabling organizations to assign privileges at all levers to send alerts and notifications guiding personnel on what should be done during the outage, interruption, event or emergency.