UCLA Selects AtHoc to Expand and Enhance its Campus Emergency Notification System
UCLA Deploys Network-based Emergency Alerting System to 45,000 Students, Faculty and Support Personnel
Burlingame, Ca. (Issues Wire / PRWEB) February 22, 2008 -- AtHoc, Inc., the pioneer and leader in network-centric emergency notification systems, today announced that University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has selected and deployed AtHoc IWSAlerts(TM) to expand its capabilities for a campus-wide, mass emergency notification system.
The deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts will dramatically increase the scale and speed of alerts and enable UCLA to rapidly reach 45,000 individuals from a single console. Up to 15,000 online users will be notified via desktop alerts, and up to 45,000 users will be notified via SMS text messages.
When UCLA faces an emergency, whether an earthquake or traffic accident, it is now able to act quickly and put the right information in the hands of the people impacted regardless of where they are.
"Sometimes it's a specific portion of the campus that needs to be notified, and at other times, we need to alert the entire campus," said Jack Powazek, assistant vice chancellor, General Services for UCLA. "UCLA issued a request for proposals (RFP) and a number of vendors submitted proposals. AtHoc was selected based on pre-established criteria."
AtHoc IWSAlerts provides the university with a significant cost-saving benefit by leveraging the university's existing on-site communications infrastructure. AtHoc IWSAlerts uses UCLA's internal IP network to communicate with desktops and mobile devices. In the near future, UCLA will also integrate AtHoc IWSAlerts with the existing speaker systems located throughout the campus as well as with the university radio station. Once the integration is completed, an emergency notification can be sent out through all channels simultaneously with a consistent message.
University personnel with alerting authority trigger alerts from any network-connected PC with a Web browser. Depending on the situation, they can select from predefined alerts or create a custom alert. Alert messages will be sent using multiple communication channels, including desktop pop-up notifications, SMS text messaging, email and telephony. By combining broadcast alerting with opt-in alerting using text messaging and phones, the university can achieve a very high rate of student and personnel notification.
"Emergency alerting for universities is surprisingly complicated - especially a school with such a large student body," said Simon Berman, vice president of product marketing for AtHoc. "AtHoc's experience with very large organizations - including those with populations in the hundreds of thousands - has resulted in a product that's able to handle the enormous complexity involved in managing user contact data and ensuring fast and reliable emergency notifications through a whole host of communication devices."
In addition to providing powerful notification capabilities, AtHoc IWSAlerts also addresses one of the biggest challenges of deploying an emergency notification system -the management and accuracy of user contact data. To meet this challenge, AtHoc IWSAlerts integrates with multiple organizational user repositories to import and synchronize organizational structures, user data, attributes, contact details and distribution lists. This allows the university to automatically import contact data from other systems, helping ensure the information is accurate and up to date.
About AtHoc
AtHoc is a recognized leader in providing enterprise-class, network-centric emergency notification systems to military, government, and commercial organizations for physical security, force protection , and personnel accountability. Millions of end users worldwide, in organizations such as the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Hawaii State Civil Defense, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Boeing, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and eBay rely on AtHoc's unified management systems for their emergency alerting and critical communication needs. AtHoc has partnered with market leaders including Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Siemens, Avaya, Unisys, and others to bring these notification solutions to the public and commercial markets.
For more information on AtHoc, please visit http://www.athoc.com.
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