SAN MATEO, Calif., 18 Feb. 2009. Officials at the U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, located in Vicenza, Italy, required an effective mass and network-centric notification system. They found their solution at AtHoc Inc., a provider of network-centric emergency notification systems in San Mateo, Calif.
The U.S. Army has deployed AtHoc IWSAlerts to meet its emergency mass notification needs. The deployment will provide alerting to Vicenza personnel, as well as personnel located at Camp Darby, the Army garrison near Livorno, Italy.
The Vicenza deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts further expands the Department of Defense's (DoD's) extensive use of AtHoc's solution in the United States and throughout the globe.
The Vicenza Garrison conducts base support and deployment operations in support of the Southern European Task Force, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team and other tenant units. The garrison also conducts law enforcement and force protection operations in conjunction with its host nation, Italy. To support its mission and protect personnel, the garrison evaluated IP-based notification offerings and selected the AtHoc solution to protect its population of roughly 5,000 people.
AtHoc IWSAlerts increases the garrison's ability to contact personnel indoors and off site when an event occurs. Alerts are rapidly delivered through the IP network to all computer workstations using pop-up visual alerts, and the computer speakers broadcast the message. The system also delivers alerts to telephones, sends SMS text messages to cell phones, and can send e-mails to computers and mobile devices (including Blackberry devices).
The AtHoc solution unifies many alerting channels for the garrison so they can be triggered simultaneously through a single Web interface, and it expands the number of alerting channels.
The deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts provides an added benefit to Vicenza by bringing its mass notification capabilities into compliance with the Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) from the DoD. The UFC recommends incorporation of a network-centric alerting system (NCAS) as part of the facility's mass notification system and includes a list of system features that DoD installations should acquire as part of their mass notification strategy. Topping the list of features is the ability to unify alerting forms using the IP network in order to simplify alert distribution and extend the reach of notification systems. AtHoc IWSAlerts complies with the recommendations outlined by the UFC.
"The AtHoc deployment at Vicenza is truly an enterprise solution. A single deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts protects the garrison as a whole, each of the multiple tenant organizations, as well as Camp Darby, a completely separate facility," says Colonel David W. Brown (Ret.), director of U.S. Army operations for AtHoc. "The system can be used to alert all personnel at Vicenza, and each tenant organization at the garrison can use the system to alert their own people. The ability to use a single system for multiple groups at a single installation -- or better yet at multiple installations -- cuts down on initial costs for the Army as well as long-term maintenance costs."
The AtHoc software is hosted behind the garrison's NIPRNet firewall and runs on Microsoft-based servers and database.
