As an emergency services worker (coming up to two decades as a Firefighter and previously a paramedic), I’m particularly interested in crisis response and specifically how technology can be applied to crisis situations. I’ve written about emergency communications networks in the past and having been through a number of mass emergency situations (the Canterbury, New Zealand earthquakes several years ago, for example) I am all too aware of how communications break down in crisis situations.
Technology can, of course, be a counter to this and the recent acquisition of Send Word Now by Emergency Communications Network (ECN), is an example of this. ECON is a SaaS provider of critical event management and emergency notification systems, while Send Word Now is a worldwide software provider of critical communications solutions.
Put the two together and you have the rebranded OnSolve offering, a holistic software communications solution that is still focused on the emergency and mass notifications area. OnSolve is both a software-based communication platform and composable notification and alerting functionality that third parties can integrate directly into other critical business systems.
And this is by no means a niche opportunity, the Emergency Mass Notification Services (EMNS) market was $2.2 billion at the end of 2015 and expanding at a 17% compound annual growth rate to $4.9 billion by 2020, as estimated by Frost & Sullivan.
With this combination, customers get an enterprise-grade emergency notification system, which has been proven to effectively transmit tens of thousand of voice and text messages per minute with the existing ECN offering delivering real-time notification and response.
“Real-time emergency notification with confirmed delivery and specific response functionality can mean the difference between life and death, significantly reduce costs and damages, and improve revenue and efficiency for customers,” said Wain Kellum, OnSolve CEO. “The combined company serves the majority of the Fortune 500, including 72 of the top 100, and tens of thousands of smaller organizations. Our broad solution offering and experience makes us uniquely positioned to help enterprise, government, and small- and medium-sized business organizations meet evolving business challenges and threats through proven, robust, and innovative emergency and mass notification solutions. We have the resources to invest in our platform, bring together the best software features from each company and meet the evolving market demands.”
OnSolve is another string to the broader bow which includes other offerings such as MIR3, a solution available for large enterprises and federal agencies seeking to manage critical events or natural disasters effective through the transmission of critical information and instructions. As well as MIR3, the company offers the CodeRED solution which provides high-speed notification services capable of reaching millions of people in minutes and has applied its mission critical capabilities to government, commercial, healthcare and other end markets. In addition, the company offers solutions such as SmartNotice and TelAlert for other specific use cases or companies with less complex notification requirements.
MyPOV
The proliferation of different communication modalities has increased markedly the complexity that emergency service providers and organizations looking to communicate in crisis situations have to deal with. This acquisition, plus the rebranding and rebundling of the different offerings, gives OnSolve a big opportunity in the space. Of course, they’re not along and Everbridge, in particular, also has strong offerings in the crisis communications space – it will be interesting to see how OnSolve executes under its new corporate branding.
