Swan Island Networks Unveils TIES for Microsoft CityNext Agile Situational Intelligence Services to Enhance Emergency and Disaster Response

Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) July 15, 2014

Today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., Swan Island Networks, a leading developer of cloud-based situational intelligence software and services, unveiled a new Disaster Response Edition of its TIES® for Microsoft CityNext product to help government organizations and NGO’s around the world better prepare for and respond to disasters and emergencies. Swan Island Networks also announced that TIES for Microsoft CityNext is now available to public officials and NGO’s for 90 days at no cost after major emergencies as part of Microsoft’s Disaster Response Alliance Program, which enhances collaborations among Microsoft Disaster Response and other technology organizations to address global response challenges by delivering holistic solutions together.

“The new Disaster Response Edition of TIES for Microsoft CityNext provides agile situational intelligence capabilities which can give governments and NGO’s more complete, real-time pictures of breaking events as they respond to disasters and major emergencies,” said Tony Surma, Senior director and chief technology officer of Microsoft Disaster Response. “And because the solution operates on the Microsoft Azure cloud, data remains highly accessible even when traffic volumes are higher than usual, as they tend to be during disasters.”

The TIES for Microsoft CityNext - Disaster Response Edition is available as part of a Rapid Deployment Program, which can get government agencies and NGO's up-and-running on the service within hours after an event. It can also be used as part of an organization’s everyday preparedness and response mitigation initiatives. The new product builds on previous editions of TIES for Microsoft CityNext - including a Leaders Edition, a Safe Schools Edition and a Special Events Edition - which help government and public sector leaders monitor and glean real-time insights around critical events and services.

The new Disaster Response Edition gives government emergency response and NGO aid teams important new emergency intelligence and response services, when they need them most. Key capabilities include:

•     Agile, synthesized situational intelligence pictures, available during emergencies, and accessible through highly resilient cloud services. Government leaders and response organizations get real-time pictures of breaking events, local conditions and internal disaster response resources.
•     Easy-to-use dashboards and alert notification services that integrate the latest information about local and regional events and conditions from hundreds of sources, available in a single set of dashboards and alerting services.
•     Social media monitoring and management services, providing crowdsourced intelligence so that leaders and their teams can follow and respond to local citizens’ needs and concerns during an emergency.
•     Asset tracking services, using available GPS-enabled phone sources, and other technologies, to provide the exact location of personnel, vehicles and other assets in a crisis.
•     Live, real-time networked video monitoring capabilities using available video sources.
•     A variety of advanced, all-hazards situational intelligence features.

Swan Island Network’s TIES service has been hosted in the highly secure and scalable Microsoft Azure cloud for nearly three years, delivering advanced situational intelligence services supporting over 250 companies, including 20 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Its cloud-based delivery model greatly reduces the cost of such services, while also helping to support the sharing of real-time disaster information between schools and local police, between critical infrastructure providers and government in public-private partnerships, and among officials in neighboring jurisdictions.

“The TIES for Microsoft CityNext situational intelligence services provide us with new intelligence channels, smart alerting, and comprehensive common operating pictures that provide critical information to enhance our effectiveness,” said Carl Simpson, Executive Director of Denver 911. “TIES enables us to share information with other state and local agencies to enhance our combined ability to help keep the citizens of Denver safe.”

The TIES for Microsoft CityNext - Disaster Response Edition fully utilizes all of the new technical capabilities of the enhanced 2.0 version of the TIES service, based on Swan Island Networks’ TX360 platform, including:

•     Real-time information aggregation through the use of “Intelligence Channels”, featuring content from thousands of unique, real-time alerting sources.
•     Easy-to-use, customizable dashboards that ingest a multitude of Intelligence Channels to provide comprehensive visualization on maps and other displays.
•     Smart alerting—the ability to segment events to issue Notices, Alerts and Alarms…with Alarms being capable of waking city leaders in the middle of the night with phone calls or text messages, whenever a severe event matches the filtering settings they have selected.
•     Mobile incident reporting and alerting.

TIES for Microsoft CityNext continually evolves to meet new threats and incorporate new information sources to deliver comprehensive, reliable, and scalable services in emergencies of all kinds. It services are available over PCs, tablets and cell phones, and it makes hundreds of emergency- and security-related data sources of special value to cities instantly available.

“TIES for Microsoft CityNext provides government leaders and emergency responders secure and reliable technological tools to prepare their communities and protect their citizens during a variety of high-stakes emergency situations,” said Laura Ipsen, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector at WPC. “This state-of-the-art solution operating on the Microsoft Azure cloud connects new and existing public and private data sources, enables cross-departmental and cross-jurisdictional collaboration, and offers emergency responders the flexibility and agility they need to do new with less—from any device, anytime, anywhere.”

"Data sources of every type and description are now available to help cities become smarter, more efficient organizations and supply critical real-time information to inform, engage and protect their citizens,” said Charles Jennings, CEO of Swan Island Networks. "TIES for Microsoft CityNext gives cities the new agile services they need to aggregate information sources, filter data, and share intelligence from a myriad data sources to produce real-time pictures of what is happening in their environment—reliably and cost-effectively using the cloud”.

About Swan Island Networks
Swan Island Networks, Inc. is a cloud-based information services provider specializing in agile situational intelligence and risk management solutions. Its flagship technology, TIES®, (the Trusted Information Exchange Service), is a highly secure SaaS offering for capturing, displaying, filtering, and sharing data from thousands of sources, both open and proprietary. TIES was originally developed in a series of U.S. federal government R&D projects, and now supports 20% of the Fortune 100 and more than 250 enterprises. TIES for Microsoft CityNext is a new Swan Island Networks service designed to support local, state, regional and national governments’ situational intelligence needs, around the world. For more information, please contact Swan Island Networks at info(at)cityties(dot)net or 503-796-7926.

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