Salamander Technologies Plays Active Role in Spring Ahead Exercise

This week Salamander Technologies, as a private sector stakeholder, will join the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Office of National Capital Region Coordination, as well as Federal, State, local, public and private sector stakeholders to participate in Spring Ahead, a Federal and Mutual Aid multi-jurisdictional electronic validation demonstration leveraging Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201-compliant and FIPS 201-interoperable credentials.

Traverse City, MI (PRWEB) May 22, 2009 -- This week Salamander Technologies, as a private sector stakeholder, will join the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Office of National Capital Region Coordination (NCRC), as well as Federal, State, local, public and private sector stakeholders to participate in Spring Ahead, a Federal and Mutual Aid multi-jurisdictional electronic validation demonstration leveraging Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201-compliant and FIPS 201-interoperable credentials. Spring Ahead will be held at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and at various other locations around the county.

Spring Ahead is comprised of eight scenarios, with Salamander Technologies assisting with two of these scenarios: Federal and mutual aid out-of-area ingress for disaster response, and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 201 migration technology.

More than 30 organizations, in 20 locations across the United States from the National Capital Region (NCR) to Hawaii, will simultaneously participate in Spring Ahead. Salamander Technologies, its partners RockWest Technology and Identisys, Inc., and customer partners Alan Colon, Emergency Manager of City of Commerce City, CO and Dennis Glavin of CGN and Associates (as representative of the State of Illinois Information Technology Team) are working together to cover support to three locations: Washington DC, Colorado, and Illinois. This effort will provide state-wide capability with local support feeding information to the national level.

"Salamander Technologies' interTRAX Suite for Personal Identification Verification is a unique offering to stakeholders as it not only provides FIPS 201 support," says Mike Whelan, Vice President, "but it merges the requirements of Homeland Security Presidential Directive-5 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive -12 to offer National Incident Management System and FIPS 201 capabilities in one solution."
"This one-of-a-kind, off-the-shelf commercial offering takes credential reading validation to a whole new level moving identity into an incident management environment under NIMS. This allows assignments and accountability to be maintained based upon qualifications and attributes," says Joseph Robinson, Vice President.

"Then this combined data will be communicated and stored in an enterprise class, high-connectivity network infrastructure in tandem with the federal model for both purposes of credential validation at the federal level and accountability at the state and local level," continues Robinson.

About Salamander Technologies, Inc.
Salamander Technologies, Inc., www.salamandertechnologies.com, is the nation's leading provider of personnel accountability solutions. Combining manual accountability with an electronic incident command solution, Salamander Technologies offers a simple, scalable, NIMS supporting (and now FIPS 201 supporting) solution for incident management. Salamander Technologies is the first organization to provide both HSPD-5 (NIMS) and HSPD-12 (FIPS 201) smartcard validation into an incident command context for the purpose of automated tracking for life safety and security. The founders of Salamander Technologies, Inc., President Russ Miller and Vice President Mike Whelan, are also known for their landmark work: Resource Accountability Guide for First Responders.

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