Emergency Notification Systems Provider AtHoc Awarded with Contract by US Navy to Provide Network-centric Alerting System Reaching up to 400,000 Personnel in Four Regions
AtHoc IWSAlerts Emergency Notification System Helps to Fulfill the Navy’s Anti-terrorism Force Protection (ATFP) Alerting System Needs to Rapidly Signal Personnel about Emergencies and Provide Critical Instructions
Burlingame, Ca. (PRWEB) September 18, 2006 -- AtHoc, Inc. today announced the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego has selected and procured AtHoc IWSAlerts™ to serve as the networked alerting system for four of the Navy’s sixteen regions around the world. The Navy purchased twelve enterprise edition server licenses of AtHoc IWSAlerts as well as the add-on Weather Alerts Module. Using the Navy’s existing IP network, the AtHoc IWSAlerts alerting system will be used to alert up to 100,000 personnel at each of the four regions within minutes of an emergency event occurring.
The AtHoc alerting system, named the Computer Desktop Notification System (CDNS) by the Navy, will be used primarily by the Regional Operations Center (ROC) within each of the four regions. ROCs operate 24/7 and have the primary responsibilities for all Navy installations and personnel within a defined geographical region. Their efforts are supported by Emergency Operations Centers (EOC) located on individual bases within the region, which will also be able to activate the system. CDNS will work in conjunction with installations’ outdoor PA and telephony alerting systems to deliver, within minutes, alerts to over a hundred thousand networked devices in each region, including desktops, laptops, PDAs and even cell phones.
AtHoc IWSAlerts is a network-centric, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) emergency notification system offering that uses the existing IP network to quickly distribute alerts to installation personnel. The alerts, in the form of pop-up windows on a desktop or other mobile device, accompanied by an audio alarm, describe the potential threat, categorize the threat level and include instructions for action. Personnel receive alerts regardless of which application they are using as long as they are connected to the network. Once the alerts are distributed, the AtHoc system tracks which users acknowledged receipt of the alert and provides operators with detailed, real-time reports of alert responses.
AtHoc IWSAlerts emergency notification system also includes a robust, Web-based management system to manage emergency notifications. The management system enables operators to pre-define alerting scenarios that can be activated instantly during emergencies. It includes a library of more than one hundred pre-defined scenarios complying with signals and messaging specifications appropriate to watches, warnings, evacuation routes, battle staff directives and other federal, Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Navy-specific emergency notifications.
“For a complex organization such as the Navy, effective an emergency alerting system isn’t just about distributing information. It’s also about pre-planning and managing the emergency notification system process,” said Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft Federal. “Using AtHoc IWSAlerts, built on Microsoft Windows and SQL Server technologies, the Navy can do exactly that.”
AtHoc IWSAlerts’ emergency notification system can determine who needs to be alerted to deal with a situation, figure out what types of information and instructions should be sent, decide who has the authority to alert whom and with what information, and also measure the overall effectiveness of the alerting process. It also includes organizational management tools that allow the ROCs and EOCs to assign varying levels of permissions to different operators. One operator may be authorized to send alerts to all personnel in a region while another would be limited to base personnel only, or even to personnel who are members of a specific tenant agency inside a base. This provides great value to the Navy, which manages multiple bases and tenant organizations within each region.
“We’ve continued to evolve AtHoc IWSAlerts to stay in line with the ever-growing and expanding needs of the U.S. Military. It’s an honor to be selected for this deployment with the Navy,” said Guy Miasnik, president and CEO of AtHoc. “The Navy has stringent requirements for protecting personnel. By using our network alerting system, the Navy will be even better prepared in times of emergency. We’re excited about the role we’ll play in protecting our men and women in uniform.”
AtHoc IWSAlerts alerting system is running on a Microsoft server and SQL database platform. It has been certified for use within the DoD network.
About AtHoc, Inc.
AtHoc provides enterprise-class network-centric alerting systems for emergency notifications, force protection readiness, anti-terror warnings and critical communications. AtHoc offers a broad set of alerting solutions for the government/defense agencies and commercial enterprises, including IWSAlerts™ for Network-centric Emergency Mass Notifications; C2Alerts™ for Targeted User Alerts in Command & Control / C4I Operations Center; KMAlerts™ for Knowledge and Intelligence Dissemination; and EmployeeAlerts™ for critical Corporate Communications. AtHoc has partnered with business leaders including Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Unisys and IBM to bring these notifications solutions to the enterprise market. The U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Air Force, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Boeing, Raytheon, eBay and Juniper Networks are some of the world-class organizations that have selected and deployed AtHoc for their critical enterprise notifications needs.
For more information on AtHoc, please visit http://www.athoc.com.
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