I was recently working with a customer and was a bit astonished by their pain-point, especially because it was still hurting them in 2009. They were spending $20/month on a pager subscription for each of their 25,000 staff.  Ah, well that’s only $20 right?  Not when you consider that $20 x 25,000 employees is $500,000 per month.  That’s $6,000,000 a year. 

I repeat, $6,000,000 a year.  So what were the pagers for, you ask?  Personnel relied on them for IT event information.  Whenever an IT event occurred, the company would send out a mass page with some quick info and a directive for users to get back to their computers to resolve the problem. People got paged, sprinted back to their desks if they could or ignored the page if they were unable to leave whatever they were doing. The system was slow and inefficient, but, worse yet, it was costing millions to maintain.

While this is obviously a very large company, supporting an army of pagers was making a serious dent in their budget.  Adding to the growing frustration was that in addition to their pagers, employees already maintained far superior communication devices in the form of iPhones and BlackBerries and other Smartphones.  These phones are able to do far more than pagers and yet were completely underutilized for IT purposes. Our suggestion was to use them to their full potential.

Pagers are reliable, yes, and traditionally used in IT. But that's where the positives end. There’s no reason to employ a one-way technology that’s exclusively used to tell you to get back to your computer. Smartphone users already have a computer in their hands or on their belts. Taking pagers out of the equation and switching directly to Smartphones cuts out the middleman, and all the valuable time the middleman used to eat up.

Our solution for the company was to implement AlarmPoint’s Alert Management platform coupled with our Mobile Gateway so the user could acknowledge events and view help desk application on their Smartphone.  Our customer saved $6,000,000 in operating expenses in their first 12 months with AlarmPoint. And more importantly, IT users suddenly had the freedom to stray from their consoles, deal with issues rapidly and not spend time on non-value-added tasks.  That’s like going from 1987 to 2009 in one upgrade.  No DeLorean necessary. Marty McFly would be proud.

Guest Post by Doug Peete
Director of Technical Presales at AlarmPoint

Automatically assigning events to a specific person then escalating to different communication devices and/or users is great and all, but sometimes there’s no time for even that. Sometimes you just need everyone on a conference call RIGHT NOW.

When a critical application goes down, like the servers that run ATMs at a global financial institution or online shopping at a major retailer, a company starts bleeding money. When a problem starts impacting areas outside IT and threatening Service Level Agreements with customers, a fast meeting where all the affected parties can speak to share important details and status information can be critical. Delaying that meeting while everyone checks their email or enters the wrong code for the conference call can cost millions.

A little known feature of AlarmPoint is our capacity to automate conference bridging. Using the contact and scheduling information in the self-service portal created for effective Alert Management, AlarmPoint can automatically call everyone you need and connect them instantly into the conference. No frantic emailing, no scribbling down phone numbers and passwords. Instead of taking half an hour to hurry, hurry, gather your staff then sit and wait while everyone slowly joins the call, AlarmPoint can automate the notification process so you start the meeting a couple minutes after you send an invite.

Watch this new three minute video to see exactly how this service can accelerate this critical part of your workday or emergency processes: