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[EVBG – Everbridge] the COVID stock that wasn’t

[EVBG – Everbridge] the COVID stock that wasn’t

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scuttleblurb
Jun 15, 2021
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[EVBG – Everbridge] the COVID stock that wasn’t
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Everbridge sells software that companies (63% of rev) and government agencies (26%) use to notify their constituents of unforeseen events and orchestrate a response.  Its mass notification solution will ingest all kinds of employee data – name, job title, home and office address, time zone, email, cell, work number, first language – from an enterprise’s HR system.  Those who work or live in proximity to a hurricane or wildfire or whatever can be circumscribed on a Visual Command Center (VCC) map and sent an alert message in their primary language. A user can design a workflow so that if an employee doesn’t respond to the SMS within X minutes, the alert is sent to their email, then to their desk phone, etc.  Messages can take the form of a poll where the recipient can click either “yes” or “no” to the prompt “are you okay?”; or delivered to specific individuals, divisions, and teams.  From the VCC dashboard, the user can see in ~real time how people are responding.

There is a more sophisticated variation of mass notification, incident communication, that provides even more tailored messaging features.  A user can populate outgoing messages with details selected from a dropdown menu; incorporate “IF-THEN” logic (IF a tornado hits Dallas, THEN automatically send this message to the Dallas field office); or blast different messages to different constituents (one message to employees telling them to evacuate, another to senior management saying employees have been notified).      

Everbridge’s primary communication medium is SMS, but through its recent acquisition of One2Many the company also supports cellular broadcasts.  If you’ve ever been near a wildfire, you may have seen these cellular alerts.  They appear as a prominent grey message accompanied by an obnoxious buzzing sound.  The main reason Everbridge acquired One2Many was to win over public sector customers in Europe.  With the EU mandating that all 31 countries in the European Economic Area adopt a nationwide emergency alert solution by 2022, some countries were wrestling with whether to adopt cell broadcasting or SMS.  Everbridge is hedging itself by offering both.

The upside of a cell broadcast is that it isn’t stymied by congestion and can override silent settings on a cell phone.  The downside is that, unlike location-based SMS, it doesn’t allow for 2-way communication, tailored messaging to different audiences, alerts in multiple languages, phone number-based targeting, and follow-up messages to those who have left the danger zone.  Cellular is blunt but fast; SMS is a bit slower1 but targeted.

So the point is Everbridge’s mass notification lets you customize alerts and send those alerts out across 20 different channels in a very reliable, targeted way. Even so, it’s a somewhat commodity solution with low switching costs.  It’s not that hard to replace a mass notification system that imports HR contact info and stores message templates.  But it gets harder when that solution connects to more enterprise apps and data. Everbridge’s Critical Event Management (CEM) suite sucks in events from 22k risk feeds, including external data from media outlets, government agencies, and social media.  It overlaps those events against a company’s warehouses, logistics, employee travel schedules, and other data pulled from 220+ other pre-packaged integrations to determine when and where a company should source from other suppliers and how to re-route deliveries and whatnot (i.e. “this warehouse in Miami is in the path of a Class 5 hurricane that will make landfall within 36 hours”).  Based on the intersection of critical events and critical assets, Everbridge can prioritize alerts and provide a global view of an enterprise’s vulnerabilities.

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