Desktop Alert
Industry Disruptive Mass Notification Technology

While hundreds of lives gasped for air in the twin towers of America on September 11, 2001, the existing IT computational infrastructure could have been used to raise alarms and provide emergency instructions to the victims. Amidst true life-threatening emergencies like active shooters, lockdowns, evacuations, severe weather, and more, there is very little time to react to the event and mitigate the impact of the event. However, an emergency situation in a workplace can go beyond these life-threatening events, wherein occurrences like email and system outages can and have had a cascading negative effect and high realized costs as a repercussion. In the wake of the same, Howard Ryan originally pioneered Desktop Alert Inc. to send emergency alerts directly to desktops as un-blockable pop-ups as well as emails leveraging the IP-based infrastructure in place. “Our goal is to provide organizations with rapid and secure communication to their personnel through a federated and unified alerting platform,” asserts John Monville, CEO, Desktop Alert.

Desktop Alert provides a comprehensive suite of alerting solutions through a single web-based browser platform. It is an intuitive and easy-to-use mass alerting software platform which can be hosted both on-premise and in the cloud. Depending on the client’s requirements, Desktop Alert notifies company personnel through computer pop-ups, emails, text messages, phone calls, social media, and mobile application, along with offering virtual and GPS-enabled physical panic buttons. Physical GPS enabled key fob style panic buttons activate a real-time alert with a location map and two-way voice communication. Further, Desktop Alert Inc. acquired Metis Secure Solutions to leverage the Metis Secure emergency communication platform that offers notification beacons and help stations tailored for both indoor and outdoor emergencies.

From a privacy and security standpoint, the system tracks when a specific message was sent, to whom it was sent to, did it get delivered, did it get acknowledged, was there a response and many other unique reporting metrics, all in real time. The firm employs a novel approach to tackling the daily business interruptions, such as, IT system issues and email outages, by enabling organizations to assign privileges at all levers to send alerts and notifications guiding personnel on what should be done during the outage, interruption, event or emergency.

Our goal is to provide organizations with rapid and secure communication to their personnel through a federated and unified alerting platform

In a nutshell, regardless of the size or specific alerting need, Desktop Alert assists in sending and receiving alert messages via a standards-based, scalable, configurable, and unified alerting platform. The platform is easy to install, typically within two hours, and easy-to-use.

Apart from the best-of-breed alerting solutions, customer centricity is a significant differentiator for Desktop Alert. “We literally shrink-wrap the system around the customers’ requirements,” says Monville. Furthermore, Desktop Alert is the only Department of Defense (DoD) certified mass alerting software that is also accredited to operate on NATO networks.

In one instance, the company received a call from a client, a County in CA, informing about the results of an alert activated via Desktop Alert internal alerting system. The robust internal alerting system helped to evacuate 500 people within minutes of activating the alert, and within 10 minutes they accounted for all personnel. In another event, when large corporate client suffered a major email crash, and the email system was down for several days, the Desktop Alert system was used to maintain corporate communication within the organization and across the enterprise.

Scripting similar success stories, Desktop Alert is enhancing their phone and texting capabilities, emphasizing expanded international texting and phone calling. The company is also set to introduce their Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) module early next year. “Credentialed by IPAWS, we are expanding from enterprise organizational alerting to community alerting by leveraging the same software platform,” concludes Monville.