Dive Brief:
- Bogen Communications has partnered with Alertus Technologies to help facilities managers make emergency communications more comprehensive and automated, the companies announced Monday.
- Bogen’s Nyquist IP-based paging platform will integrate with Alertus’ tools, allowing Alertus’ alert messages to spread through the Nyquist overhead speaker and paging systems, whether triggered via a human operator or through Nyquist automated routines.
- The combined capability supports applications in education, healthcare, transportation and other sectors requiring facility-wide alerting and coordinated response, the companies said. “Alertus brings a strong mass notification platform that complements our Nyquist system, enabling organizations to streamline alert delivery, automate responses, and use their existing infrastructure more effectively,” Randall Lee, Bogen vice president of marketing and product management, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Emergency response is top of mind for facilities operators following recent high-profile shootings, including those at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, 345 Park Ave. in Midtown Manhattan and the killing of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. As of Dec. 16, there have been at least 392 mass shootings and 13,993 shooting deaths nationwide this year, CNN reported based on data from the Gun Violence Archive.
During the most recent shooting at Brown, the university alerted those on campus via an emergency information website and BrownAlert notification system to lock doors, silence phones and run, hide or fight in response to an active shooter. In critical events, the BrownAlert system can be used to deliver advisories and instructions to students, faculty, staff and others via cell phones, land lines, wireless PDA, text pager, email and other communication devices, the university says on its website.
At 4:22 p.m., 17 minutes after 911 calls began to flood Providence Emergency Services, the university issued an alert, GoLocalProv reported.
One doctoral engineering student who was working at a campus lab told NBC that people hid under their desks as shots rang out. The university’s shelter-in-place order continued for more than 10 hours as police drew a perimeter around the area of the shooting and slowly cleared buildings within the perimeter.
Physical security is collaborating more with IT and bringing together video management, access controls and AI technologies, physical security firm Genetec said in its sixth annual State of Physical Security report. Automatically triggering events, filtering and classifying events, and automating emergency response dispatch were three of the top four goals organizations said they were trying to achieve this year by integrating AI technology into their security systems, Genetec says.
Amanda Sassano, Alertus’ vice president of business development, said in a statement that “by connecting the Alertus platform with the Nyquist paging system, organizations gain a reliable and flexible method for disseminating emergency messages across their facilities.”
Through API-level communication, Alertus can automatically trigger Nyquist platform routines, share alert information using custom messaging and zoning, and display system status directly within the Alertus console, the companies said. Alertus can also send multiple alert parameters for routine activation and define retry behavior in the event of communication failure, helping ensure message delivery during time-sensitive situations, the company said. Options include text-to-speech functionality.
“The partnership strengthens our ability to support customers seeking dependable, interoperable emergency communication,” Lee said.
