Learn more about InformaCast® CallAware™ by listening to this interview with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development with Singlewire Software.
Transcript from Interview
We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Singlewire. Welcome Ken.
Thank you, Good to be here.
Hoping you can talk a little bit about CallAware a new — something that’s new to InformaCast. Do you want to just explain what that is.
Yeah we’ve had a lot of requests from customers in the past about having the ability to monitor some type of out bound call, most commonly it’s 911 but in other countries it might be a different dial-string and do something with it. Frequently people even don’t know that 911 is being dialed in their organization until maybe the next month when the police or fire gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.
So what Call Alert does is it sits passively and watches the CallManager system to see 911 or whatever phone number you want to watch is dialed and when that happens it can send a message out to whatever group of devices that you want. Any device on the network that is a CISCO phone, IP speaker, desktop, analog paging system can receive this notification in text and audio just like you would any other InformaCast broadcast.
Can you put that to an example if your in a large building and lets say something happens on a floor and someone dials 911 what would what could be a typical scenario for that playing out then?
Actually a good example is we have a we are working with an organization in Europe that has eight thousand phones deployed on a very large campus, hundreds of buildings separate locations they have no idea if someone’s dialing an emergency number or not. With this is a very scalable product so they can have CallAware we can watch all eight thousand phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system and when that happens the security office elsewhere on campus is notified this phone, this user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.
So much more efficient they don’t have to wait see what happened maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call and since InformaCast can trigger other systems it they now have the ability as does everybody now to trigger other systems and be notified when 911 is called.
So today someone would dial 911 and that’s going to the police or fire the dispatch is bringing trucks to the building and the security staff internally might not know that anythings going on at all.
Yeah I worked with another customer who said that the only way they know 911 is called is every month they get a report from the city saying here are the number erroneous 911 calls you’ve made here’s you fine so they had people accidentally dialing 911 police come help they never even know what happens because it’s a large organization spread across majority of the state. So they don’t even know that’s happening until they have to pay the fine. So they look at this as not only an improved communication but actually saves them money very directly.
Do you want to talk about the impact to the network and is this a solution that will scale across large organizations you mentioned this one organization is that typical?
Yes in fact we waited until there is a good method to build this so that we can scale to very large organizations. We do have customers that have tens and thousands of phones and we didn’t want to introduce something that could only be used on five hundred phones lets say. So it is very scalable we do it in such a way that we don’t have to actually watch each phone and that allows us to scale very very well.
I see do you want to talk a about when this will be available and how people can get this if they are interested or learn more?
It’s available in February 2010 and you can just contact your local sales rep if you’re interested in using this or you can always send an email to http://www.singlewire.com/talkwithus
OK easy enough.
