AtHoc IWSAlerts Helps to Fulfill the Navy’s Anti-terrorism Force Protection (ATFP) Needs to Rapidly Alert Personnel about Emergencies and Provide Critical Instructions
BURLINGAME, Ca. -[EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION NEWS]-- Sept. 12, 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, AtHoc IWSAlerts 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.
“For a complex organization such as the Navy, effective emergency alerting isn’t just about distributing information. It’s also about pre-planning and managing the emergency notification 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’ management 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.
U.S. Navy Awards AtHoc with Contract to Provide Network-centric Emergency Notification Systems Reaching up to 400,000 Personnel in Four Navy Regions
