[EVBG – Everbridge] The ERP of Enterprise Safety

You don’t recognize the value of an Everbridge system until things go bad – bad like a class 5 hurricane is closing in on your warehouse, or a tsunami descending upon your town, or an active shooter roaming the streets outside one of your coffee stores.  The headlines scuttling past you on the TV don’t reveal which employees or how many residents are in the direct path of danger, or how to notify them, or how to trigger remedial action to preserve human lives and limit downtime.  That’s what Everbridge does.  Enterprises, cities, counties, and even whole countries use Everbridge’s software to manage the fallout of left tail events as efficiently as possible. 

The company was founded in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, launching with an application, Mass Notification, that government entities and enterprises used to notify residents or employees – via text, call, or email – of danger.  For instance, through Everbridge: the Emergency Operations Center of Fairfax County alerted residents of an escaped federal inmate who was on the loose; Jefferson County texted 70k residents about an unforeseen tornado less than a minute after it was detected by the National Weather Service and then contacted members of various emergency aid organizations; Rackspace warned employees in London of terrorist attacks and received replies confirming their safety. 

With lives on the line, it’s obviously important to deliver the right notifications with enough lead time for those in the danger zone to escape or prepare.  Paradise, California had a low-cost alert system, CodeRed, in place when devastating fires descended on the town last November, killing 86 residents.  According to the LA Times, city officials did not have ready access to the list of residents who had subscribed for alerts and 40% of the initial calls failed to go through.  Several zones either received warnings when they should have received mandatory evacuation orders or didn’t get any warnings at all.  Paradise officials fired up antiquated sirens, knowing the CodeRed messages couldn’t reach residents in less than 30 minutes.  Meanwhile, just one town over, Everbridge’s system notified a population 2x larger in less than 3 minutes, safely evacuating all residents (of course, it may not be fair to lay the blame entirely on CodeRed, as several other confounding factors, including geographic constraints, impeded speedy evacuation, but nevertheless, rapid notifications are a prerequisite to a safe escape). 

When the impoverished Indian state of Odisha¹ was hit by a violent cyclone in April, Everbridge’s system, along with other measures that the local government had in place, played an important role in minimizing casualties.  As The New York Times reported earlier this month in an article titled How Do You Save a Million People From a Cyclone? Ask a Poor State in India:

“To warn people of what was coming, they deployed everything they had: 2.6 million text messages, 43,000 volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers, television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers, and public address systems blaring the same message on a loop, in local language, in very clear terms: ‘A cyclone is coming. Get to the shelters.’…Experts say this is a remarkable achievement, especially in a poor state in a developing country, the product of a meticulous evacuation plan in which the authorities, sobered by past tragedies, moved a million people to safety, really fast”.

Favorable press and peer adoption – Everbridge claims 9 of the 10 largest US cities and all 25 of the largest US airports as customers – are important in shaping perception for risk-averse government buyers, who when considering a crisis management solution, are inclined to select the acknowledged leader, the player who has demonstrated reliability at scale during critical moments.  At the same time an alert management system triggers the workflow to manage an earthquake in California, it must also be able to notify 20mn residents about a cyclone (as it did in Odisha) and send a terrorist alert to millions of people in Norway (or New York or wherever) and convert that message into a dozen different languages across 100 different modalities.  Everbridge, a multi-tenant SaaS built on Amazon’s cloud, is apparently one of the few players that can do this.  For what it’s worth, a data analyst friend of mine who works at an Everbridge competitor validates this claim.  He believes the company is cleaning up in large enterprise and that the major telcos don’t have the software DNA to create a competitive product.

The foundation of any crisis management apparatus is Mass Notification and its variants – like Incident Management (an automated, rules-driven version of Mass Notification) and Population Alerting (mass notification used by government entities in Europe) [from here on out, when I refer to “mass notification”, I am including IM and PA].  Mass Notification may be Everbridge’s most mature market – the Fortune 500 and nearly all large cities have some kind of solution in place – but it’s one that management claims will grow by ~20%/year in the 5 years from 2015 to 2020, from $2.5bn to $6.4bn (I don’t know how management derives those figures…their IR didn’t know either), which I am guessing is largely due to growth prospects overseas², where 2/3 of engagements are still greenfield.