I’m always interested in technology solutions catering to emergency situations and rescue services.

Recently Everbridge, a NASDAQ listed company that offers communications and safety software specifically for emergency situations, acquired  two companies; Swedish company Svensk Krisledning, the creator of Crisis Commander and IDV Solutions. Crisis Commander is a SaaS mobile crisis management solution that covers the collaboration, task assignment and response management aspects of emergency response. For its part, IDV Solutions offers threat assessment and command center software. Its Visual Command Center software is a visualization platform for situation intelligence and response used in organizational functions such as business continuity, security, supply chain, and operations to mitigate or eliminate the impact of risk.

These are a couple of pretty interesting acquisitions. As an emergency responder for close to 20 years, I’ve seen some major changes in terms of how organizations plan and respond to crises. The fact of that matter is that even today when so much happens in a digital world, this is one are which is still very much paper-based. Which is where Crisis Commander comes in – it is used to provide mobile access to all of those plans which would have formerly been stored on paper and in ring binders. Crisis Commander covers off that document storage aspect, but also the task-assignment and status updates aspects. The net result is that with Crisis Commander, plans are readily available within a mobile context, and those plans become dynamic tools ties into crisis communications. Crisis Commander is currently in use by over 100 customers including Volvo Group, Nestle S.A., Siemens Sweden, Nissan Motor Company, The Absolut Group and Tui Group. IDV’s part is to wrap a presentation layer around all of that to provide enterprises and emergency services a visual depiction of situational risk and response.

So what, you might ask, is the tie-up between these companies and Everbridge? For those who haven’t come across Everbridge, the company delivers a unified critical communication suite. What that means in plain English is that they offer a variety of solutions that allow different industries and services to communicate quickly and effectively. In the context of emergency services, my pet love, that means things like mass notification, incident management, and staff communications.

As I remarked when writing about Everbridge previously, the problem they’re trying to solve is, much like the problem space Crisis Commander and IDV are in, typified by paper-based systems and manual approached:

While traditional emergency response has been by way of personal pages, advances in mapping, communications and cloud technology means that there is a lot of intelligence that can be added to the underlying systems that power these messaging devices. The latest release of Everbridge’s product shows some good examples of this. The latest solution adds some interesting mobile and mapping functions that will prove to be really useful to emergency services. They’re also applicable to some broader use cases – energy, healthcare and transportation among them.

Put these two tools together with Everbridge and rapidly you can apply two-way communications and automated workflows into crisis response.  On top of that, you have a single pane of glass through which to assess risk and planning actions.The acquisitions bring technology that will enhance Everbridge’s core mobility platform and extend the capabilities of its employee safety and security solutions.

MyPOV

Everbridge is in an interesting space. While emergency services (fire, ambulance, police, USAR) get lots of attention and excitement, there is an even larger opportunity to offer services for commercial organizations’ crisis response needs. Everbridge seems to be doing a good job of servicing both markets simultaneously. These acquisitions will, in my view, allow them to offer an even more attractive service that enterprises will be keen to take a look at.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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