Event management and notification specialist AlarmPoint Systems Inc. today announced the availability of AlarmPoint 3.1, featuring expanded support for companies using voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology, as well as new partnerships with Avaya and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.
The AlarmPoint system monitors IT-based events within a company and automatically notifies a predetermined set of employees when exceptions occur, including application failures, network disturbances, and other system malfunctions. The system supports a wide range of contact methods, from traditional phone calls to text messages, e-mails, pagers, and VoIP phones.
As factories across the industrial spectrum have come to depend more and more on the continuity of IT systems, the need to streamline the process of event resolution has gained importance. And in today's mobile business world, the employees who can address a given problem are seldom within earshot at the pivotal time. By automating the process of finding those staffers, AlarmPoint aims to eliminate the time involved in manually tracking down the right person to address a system event.
"It's not rocket science," AlarmPoint CEO Troy McAlpin said of the technology that allows the system to read events and contact the appropriate personnel for resolution. "It's more process design than anything else," he told Managing Automation. Pinpointing who should be contacted if a factory floor execution system fails, for instance, and defining the process of escalation if that person is not immediately available or not able to resolve the situation require thorough planning. "That's the process that takes a little bit of thinking," he said.
Through a process that McAlpin calls "catch and match" — catch the event and match it to the right person — the system feeds contextualized information to the appropriate individuals on a company's staff. "At that moment in time that we find you, on any communication device, you can take automation action," he explained. By cell phone, for instance, a user with the proper permissions could tell the affected system to reboot, and AlarmPoint would relay that command for execution and report on its result, all via the cell phone.
In the 3.1 version of the product, AlarmPoint has leveraged a partnership with Avaya to support greater functionality for companies using IP-based telephony, or VoIP. Employing session initiation protocol (SIP) allows the system to send event notification to anyone in the enterprise who uses VoIP communications channels, a feature that can save companies the cost of installing additional dedicated hardware.
Asked what percentage of AlarmPoint's customers use VoIP technology, McAlpin said it was more than he would have expected. Texas Instruments, an AlarmPoint client, was using the technology three or four years ago, he said. "It's moving over fairly quickly," he said of the shift from landlines to Internet-based telephony.
Because AlarmPoint notifications must travel all of a company's various communications paths unfettered, the provider has established numerous partnerships worldwide. McAlpin said the company has designed more than 40 preset integrations and offers customers approximately 120 others through partners. In Europe, for instance, telecommunications companies operate on different standards from country to country, and AlarmPoint must ensure that an employee of a British company who is based in Italy is able to receive system messages on a cell phone without interference.
AlarmPoint also worked with Research in Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry brand of mobile devices, to allow AlarmPoint notifications to be routed directly through a user company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, keeping those users in the notification loop.
Also new to version 3.1 is support for Web services integration. For companies that rely on custom-developed applications, AlarmPoint now features an application programming interface that facilitates integration with those programs via Web services.
Of the company's 750 customers, more than 50 are manufacturers, most of which use AlarmPoint to monitor equipment, plant floor systems, IT services, and business continuity. The AlarmPoint product has gained traction in automotive, heavy manufacturing, medical device equipment, and high-tech industries.
AlarmPoint's competitors in the manufacturing realm include companies such as Wonderware, while competition in the IT services arena comes from the likes of Computer Associates and niche vendors such as CalAmp and MIR3.