Coast Guard can send notices to 50,000 people with AtHoc's notification system

AtHoc's IWSAlerts

The U.S. Coast Guard last December awarded a contract to AtHoc, Inc., a provider of net-centric mass notification systems, that will enable the Coast Guard to send immediate alerts via telephone, instant messaging, e-mail and fax to as many as 50,000 of its active and auxiliary personnel, reservists and contractors.

The alerts could be sent to the entire group, or individual subsets, depending on the Coast Guard region or district involved, and the nature of the warning.

The award last December represents an expansion of the licensing deal AtHoc struck with the Coast Guard in July 2009, when an initial deployment covered 25,000 individuals. Since that time, AdHoc teams have trained Coast Guard personnel across the country, and the Coast Guard has felt comfortable enough with its new warning system to deactivate its earlier 'homegrown' system, explained Dubhe Beinhorn's the company's vice president of alliances and channels.

'I expect that the size of the license will increase over time,' said Beinhorn. 'In the next 12 months, I expect they'll be over 100,000.'

The Coast Guard can use this multi-faceted warning system, which it calls its Alert and Warning System 2.0, in a variety of expected and unexpected ways. For example, it could send out a mass notification calling reservists back to duty, it could issue warnings about upcoming storms, and it could issue notifications of immediate crises, such as biohazards or oil spills.

In addition, the 'personnel accountability' function of the AWS 2.0 system enables recipients of mass notification messages to respond in specific ways to the Coast Guard office that issued the original alert. Thus, if a Coast Guard district sent a weather warning to 1,000 personnel, and asked each recipient to respond with their current status, the AWS 2.0 system would keep track in real-time of each and every response, and provide summary data to commanders back at the issuing office.

AtHoc has not released any pricing information about its Coast Guard contracts, or about individual components or its entire mass notification system, which the company calls the IWSAlerts system.

AtHoc has done a lot of business with the Defense Department in the past, but this new Coast Guard award represents a major step forward for the company on the civilian side of the U.S. Government, said Beinhorn. 'This is really our largest homeland security deployment,' she added. 'We'll be getting vetted pretty hard in the marketplace.'