Everbridge is a global software company that provides enterprise software applications
that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical
events in order to keep people safe and businesses running. During public safety
threats such as active shooter situations, terrorist attacks or severe weather
conditions, as well as critical business events such as IT outages, cyber-attacks
or other incidents such as product recalls or supply-chain interruptions, our
SaaS-based platform enables our customers to quickly and reliably aggregate
and assess threat data, locate people at risk and responders able to assist,
automate the execution of pre-defined communications processes and track progress
on executing response plans. Our customers use our platform to identify and
assess hundreds of different types of threats to their organizations, people,
assets or brand. Our solutions enable organizations to deliver intelligent,
contextual messages to, and receive verification of delivery from, hundreds
or millions of recipients, across multiple communications modalities such as
voice, SMS and e-mail. Our applications enable the delivery of messages in near
real-time to more than 100 different communication devices, in over 200 countries
and territories, in 15 languages and dialects – all simultaneously. We
delivered 2.0 billion communications in 2017. We automate the process of sending
contextual notifications to multiple constituencies and receiving return information
on a person’s or operation’s status so that organizations can act
quickly and precisely. Our Critical Event Management platform is comprised of
a comprehensive set of software applications that address the full spectrum
of tasks an organization has to perform to manage a critical event, including
Mass Notification, Incident Management, Safety Connection, IT Alerting, Visual
Command Center, Crisis Commander, Community Engagement and Secure Messaging.
We believe that our broad suite of integrated, enterprise applications delivered
via a single global platform is a significant competitive advantage in the market
for Critical Event Management solutions, which we refer to generally as CEM.
In critical situations, the speed at which threats are assessed and information
is transmitted and accessed is essential. For example, United States Department
of Homeland Security research indicates that the average duration of an active
shooter event at a school is approximately 12.5 minutes, while the average police
response time to such events is 18 minutes. Accordingly, organizations must
be able to aggregate multiple types of threat and incident data and determine
whether their people, assets, or suppliers could be impacted, rapidly deliver
messages that are tailored to multiple, specific audiences, in precise locations
and be assured of delivery. Further, the proliferation of mobile and digital
communications has resulted in individuals spending less time in a fixed office
location, with International Data Corporation estimating that by 2020 mobile
workers will account for 72% of the total United States workforce, and this
trend has simultaneously increased the number of pathways through which people
receive information. These developments have made it imperative that organizations
be able to locate travelling or remote workers to determine who might be impacted
by a critical event, and that critical communications be delivered via voice,
SMS, and email, as well as to social media, outdoor signage and personal computers.
Moreover, organizations require the ability to leverage all of these pathways,
individually or in sequence, to reach people in situations where a certain means
of communication may be inoperative or individuals are not responsive to a single
pathway. During public safety threats and critical business events, the ability
to gather, organize and analyze data in real time, and to enable secure, scalable,
reliable and automated communications to people can be essential to saving lives,
protecting assets and maintaining businesses. Further, the ability to rapidly
organize a response by locating available responders and reducing the time required
to manage them via automated communications can also result in significant economic
savings, as each minute of unplanned downtime costs organizations an average
of approximately $8,900, according to the Ponemon Institute.
The severity, complexity and frequency of these critical events, their implications
for business performance and personal safety, and regulatory and compliance
challenges are increasing. The need for active shooter preparedness and public
safety protection from terrorist attacks, as well managing the response to IT
outages, cyber incidents, severe weather conditions, product recalls, supply-chain
interruptions, hazardous material discharges and other urgent events, drive
the need for a secure, scalable and reliable CEM system that can be operated
quickly and easily. In addition, there has been a rapid proliferation of connected
devices and networked physical objects – the Internet of Things, or IoT
– that have the capability to communicate information about status and
environment and generate data that enables individuals and enterprises to take
appropriate action. These dynamics have led to a growing need for solutions
that can deliver comprehensive yet targeted and contextually relevant content
that facilitates the desired outcomes in critical situations and overcomes the
information overload that individuals face.
Since inception, our SaaS-based critical communications engine was architected
on a single code base to deliver multi-tenant capability and the speed, scale
and resilience necessary to communicate globally when a serious event occurs.
This engine is designed to address both the emergency and operational components
of a critical communications program, and is capable of providing two-way communications
and verified delivery in accordance with our customers’ escalation policies.
Our critical communications engine has multi-modal communications reach, including
redundant global SMS and voice delivery capabilities, and is designed to comply
with local, technical and regulatory requirements, which we believe has provided
us with a competitive advantage. For example, we believe that our early deployment
of local SMS codes intended to comply with rules established by the Telecom
Regulatory Authority of India allowed us to increase our SMS delivery success
rates in India. Our CEM platform builds on the strengths of this critical communications
engine, adding capabilities for integrated threat assessment, visualization,
incident management and analytics.
Additional core technical attributes of our platform include:
Monitors more than 100 types of threat data for situation assessment.
Multi-tenant architecture that supports multiple layers of redundancy to maximize
uptime and delivery of critical content, regardless of volume or throughput
requirements.
Dynamic spatial/geographic information system capability to geo-target communications
by zip code, street address or a specific radius from a location.
Support for two-way communications and alerting on over 100 different devices
and endpoints, including landline and wireless phones, hand-held communication
and other voice-capable devices, satellite, SMS, two-way radios, outdoor digital
signage, sirens and internet enabled devices.
Designed to meet rigorous security and compliance requirements for financial
services firms, healthcare institutions, the U.S. federal government and other
regulated industries, including facilitating compliance with health care requirements
such as HIPAA privacy and security standards.
Extensive set of APIs and configuration capabilities to allow customers and
partners to easily integrate our platform with other systems. Our APIs’
two-way invocation capabilities enable third-party systems to flexibly and easily
integrate with our platform.
Multi-channel visualization capabilities support integrated views of threats,
incidents and status of response to improve management visibility and control.
Supports easy-to-use native mobile applications, including multiple secure
mobile applications for message initiation, management and reporting.
Supports push notifications and two-way conversations that enable mobile users
to send and receive secure messages such as text, pictures, videos and the users’
current geographic locations.
Through our CEM platform, we deliver reliable enterprise-ready applications
that provide organizations with the ability to assess threats, locate people,
automate actions, monitor incident response, and deliver contextual communications
in any volume, in near-real time. We have designed our applications’ user
interface to be easy to use. We understand that since some of our applications
will be utilized to manage complex situations or to send large volumes of messages
to key stakeholders during stressful situations, streamlining the user interface
to reduce user errors and anxiety is essential. We conduct extensive usability
testing and design reviews with our stakeholders, and have applied in our designs
the lessons learned over more than a decade of working with critical communications
users and professionals.
Our applications enable:
Communications to key stakeholders during emergency situations.
Corporate communications with customers and employees.
Automated outreach to on-call personnel.
Integrated threat assessment and visualization.
Integration of physical security data with location awareness data gathered
from travel, network and access systems to rapidly find and communicate with
employees during disruptive events.
Securely designed and efficiently implemented communications among healthcare
providers and patients.
Community engagement and collaboration with citizens and businesses.
Critical IoT communications between machines and from machines to people
Mobile response plan deployment and management of incidence response.
Our applications include:
Mass Notification. Our secure, scalable and reliable Mass Notification application
is our most established application and enables enterprises and governmental
entities to send contextually aware notifications to individuals or groups to
keep them informed before, during and after natural or man-made disasters and
other emergencies. We provide robust analytics, map-based targeting, flexible
group management, distributed contact data, language localization, multiple
options for contact data management and a globally-optimized approach to voice
and SMS routing. We also support community engagement functionality, which provides
a direct link between residents and emergency management departments with the
goal of fostering public safety.
Safety Connection. Our Safety Connection application enables organizations
to send notifications based on dynamic last known location of an individual,
including the airport, street, building floor or conference room at which the
individual was most recently present, while actively incorporating threat and
other data to allow for targeted and relevant communications. When fully deployed,
the application can also aggregate near real-time data from multiple sources,
including building access control systems, wired and wireless network access
points, travel management systems and mobile application check-ins. We believe
that Safety Connection represents a significant advance in helping organizations
use critical communications to keep their constituents safe, as many current
solutions use only static office and residential locations that are not sufficiently
location-aware relative to an increasingly mobile workforce.
Incident Management. Our Incident Management application enables organizations
to automate workflows and make their communications contextually relevant using
drag and drop business rules to determine who should be contacted, how they
should be contacted and what information is required. We believe that this application
decreases costly human errors and reduces downtime, while simultaneously capturing
required compliance information. We also support cross-account collaboration
and situational intelligence sharing during crises for corporations and communities.
IT Alerting. Our IT Alerting application enables IT professionals to alert
and communicate with key members of their teams during an IT incident or outage,
including during a cyber security breach. The application integrates with IT
service management platforms, including ServiceNow, and uses automatic escalation
of alerts, on-call scheduling and mobile alerting to automate manual tasks and
keep IT teams collaborating during an incident. We also provide real-time shift
calendars with integrated on-call notifications to help users better manage
employee resources and get the right message to the right person, at the right
time through automated staffing. Taken together, our IT Alerting application
has the potential to provide meaningful savings to organizations by reducing
mean-time-to-repair. Each minute of unplanned downtime costs organizations an
average of approximately $8,900 according to Ponemon Institute, while 59% of
Fortune 500 companies experience 1.6 hours of downtime per week, according to
Dunn & Bradstreet. IHS, Inc. estimates information and communication technology
downtime costs North American organizations $700 billion per year.
Visual Command Center. Our Visual Command Center application enables customers
to monitor and integrate more than 100 types of threat data, as well as information
on internal incidents, to generate and visualize an alert when potential risks
occur within proximity of an organization’s physical locations, suppliers,
assets or people. The solution improves the ability to more quickly understand
and assess the impact of threats, execute the correct response, and monitor
on-going resolution in order to mitigate risk to personnel safety, business
continuity, assets and supply chain operations.
Community Engagement. Our Community Engagement application integrates emergency
management and community outreach by providing local governments with a unified
solution to connect residents to their public safety department, public information
resources, and neighbors via social media and mobile applications. This creates
a stronger and more engaged community improving the communication reach for
emergency personnel, while providing residents with real-time emergency and
community information, and allows residents to anonymously opt-in and provide
tips. For example, the City of Philadelphia experienced a 70% increase in opt-ins
in 2015 with our Community Engagement application.
Crisis Commander. Our Crisis Commander application provides mobile access to
crisis, recovery and brand protection plans, as well as the capability to manage
a crisis or event through role-based assignments and status updates. Organizations
can enhance their overall crisis management efforts by making plans readily
available to responders on the most popular mobile platforms regardless of their
location. The application also simplifies updating plans for changes to personnel
or processes, and enhances visibility into response progress during a critical
event.
Secure Messaging. Our Secure Messaging application meets the compliance and
security requirements of organizations that need to provide an alternative way
for their employees to communicate and share nonpublic information. A tailored
version of our Secure Messaging application, CareConverge, is designed for medical
professionals and facilitates HIPAA-compliant communications without the need
for pagers and other single use devices, supporting the development of a “connected”
hospital. CareConverge also facilitates telemedicine by allowing medical professionals
to hold video conferences with patients and other medical professionals as well
as share medical imaging, lab results and other critical information. Our Secure
Messaging application also enables financial services organizations’ employees
and customers to securely communicate via text, voice, and video, while remaining
FINRA compliant.