OnSolve looks to set itself apart in the security event management market

With that the various ways people consume information today, having a mass notification solution that can reach those multiple touchpoints is a critical element of any organizational security or business continuity program. However, unlike with video surveillance or access control where the options are numerous depending on the needs of the end-user, the mass notification market is characterized by a relatively small group of companies that specialize in providing  a technology which is used predominantly by commercial enterprises, critical infrastructure operators and government agencies.

Based in the metro Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Ga., OnSolve is one such company that serves the critical communications market. The company, which was created as the result of a merger between Emergency Communications Network and Send Word Now in 2017, recently acquired Stabilitas, provider of a machine learning-driven situational awareness platform, to diversify its portfolio and bring a more varied offering to customers.

According to OnSolve CEO Mark Herrington, the acquisition of Stabilitas will enable the company to provide a broader platform to its customer base beyond critical event notification.

“When we did our research, it became obvious that situational awareness, sometimes known as threat intelligence, was by far the number one capability our clients were most interested in us providing to them,” Herrington explains. “After looking at a number of alternatives, we felt like Stabilitas had the most modern and effective technology platform available in the marketplace based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and it became clear really quickly that that was the best answer for us and we were fortunate to be able to get through the process and bring them in.”

Since the acquisition was first announced last month, Herrington says they are close to completely integrating them into the company and that they brought all of their employees over with the sale. Over time, he says the Stabilitas brand will eventually become “OnSolve Situational Awareness.”

“As a company, we have a number of sub-brands and there has been a lot of work going on this year that will continue throughout the year and we’ll have news around the beginning of the year as to the OnSolve branding strategy,” Herrington adds.

With the move, OnSolve also becomes one of only two companies in the entire industry that offers mass notification, situational awareness, and incident management solutions from a single source.

“I would say we have the most modern technology stack if you look at the technology that underpins our situational awareness and Groupdolists’ incident management,” he says. 

By combining Stabilitas’ situational awareness platform with their existing mass notification technology, Herrington says they are able to help provide end-users with actionable intelligence which is paramount in today’s security environment, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re able to provide proactive insights on cases and hot spots around the globe and overlay that where you might have facilities,” he explains. “If you’re a manufacturer and you have a supply chain with a number of manufacturing facilities and distribution capabilities, you are then able to be proactive with what some of the trends are from a COVID case perspective and then start to try to figure out a plan to move capacity from one location to another area that might not be as affected.”

OnSolve currently has 28,000 customers worldwide that use their technology for a wide variety of use cases.

“Some are very small (businesses) and they may have 200 employees, or they may have a population of a million or two million in the case of our state and local government-type customers,” Herrington says. “The notifications I think have become much more mainstream clearly with some of the things that have happened this year have made the need to get those notifications out to people reliably and quickly much more acute.

“Situational awareness has been around for some time, but there is a very small number of providers out there that actually have a platform that operates at any level of scale. It’s sort of a natural evolution that companies that have a lot of experience around leveraging notification capabilities start to talk to us about their resiliency plans and looking for ways they can be more proactive in their assessment of risk to their businesses as opposed to just waiting for something to happen and then sending notifications,” he continues. “They’re looking to have as much forewarning and advanced understanding as they can to be able to have more time to react.”  

Visit the GSX+ Marketplace during GSX+ this week to learn more about OnSolve and their suite of security event management offerings.