U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza in Italy Deploys AtHoc IWSAlerts for Emergency Mass Notification

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - February 17, 2009) - AtHoc, Inc., the pioneer and leader in network-centric emergency notification systems, today announced that the U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, located in Vicenza, Italy, has deployed AtHoc IWSAlerts™ to meet its emergency mass notification needs. The deployment will provide alerting to Vicenza personnel as well as personnel located at Camp Darby, the Army garrison near Livorno, Italy. The Vicenza deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts further expands the Department of Defense's (DoD) extensive use of AtHoc's solution in the United States and throughout the globe.

The Vicenza Garrison conducts base support and deployment operations in support of the Southern European Task Force, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team and other tenant units. The garrison also conducts law enforcement and force protection operations in conjunction with its host nation, Italy. To support its mission and protect personnel, the garrison evaluated IP-based notification offerings and selected the AtHoc solution to protect its population of roughly five thousand people.

AtHoc IWSAlerts complements Vicenza's previous investment in an outdoor giant voice system and significantly increases the garrison's ability to contact personnel indoors and off site when an event occurs. Alerts are rapidly delivered through the IP network to all computer workstations using pop-up visual alerts, and the computer speakers broadcast the message. The system also delivers alerts to telephones, sends SMS text messages to cell phones and can send emails to computers and mobile devices (including Blackberry devices).

Prior to deploying AtHoc IWSAlerts, Vicenza was able to alert people through emails, a calling tree and giant voice. Though these capabilities were important to the garrison, it took time to trigger the separate systems during an emergency, and Vicenza wasn't able to reach all its personnel. The AtHoc solution unifies the many alerting channels for the garrison so they can be triggered simultaneously through a single Web interface, and it expands the number of alerting channels.

The deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts provides an added benefit to Vicenza by bringing its mass notification capabilities into compliance with the most recently released Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) from the DoD. The April 2008 UFC recommends incorporation of a network-centric alerting system (NCAS) as part of the facility's mass notification system and includes a list of system features that DoD installations should acquire as part of their mass notification strategy. Topping the list of features is the ability to unify alerting forms using the IP network in order to simplify alert distribution and extend the reach of notification systems. AtHoc IWSAlerts complies with the recommendations outlined by the UFC.

"The AtHoc deployment at Vicenza is truly an enterprise solution. A single deployment of AtHoc IWSAlerts protects the garrison as a whole, each of the multiple tenant organizations, as well as Camp Darby, a completely separate facility," said Colonel David W. Brown (Ret.), director of U.S. Army operations for AtHoc. "The system can be used to alert all personnel at Vicenza, and each tenant organization at the garrison can use the system to alert their own people. The ability to use a single system for multiple groups at a single installation -- or better yet at multiple installations -- cuts down on initial costs for the Army as well as long-term maintenance costs."

The AtHoc software is hosted behind the garrison's NIPRNet firewall and runs on Microsoft-based servers and database.

About AtHoc

AtHoc is the pioneer and recognized leader in providing enterprise-class, network-centric emergency notification systems to military, government and commercial organizations for physical security, force protection and personnel accountability. Millions of end users worldwide, in organizations such as the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, NASA, Microsoft, Boeing and PricewaterhouseCoopers rely on AtHoc's unified management systems for their emergency alerting and critical communication needs. AtHoc has partnered with market leaders including Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Harris, Siemens, Avaya, Lockheed Martin and others to bring these notification solutions to the public and commercial markets.

For more information on AtHoc, please visit http://www.athoc.com.

Contact Information: Contact: Ivy Eckerman Spire Communications (540) 373-2963