OnSolve announces brand relaunch
While 2020 proved to be challenging year for most businesses, for some the pandemic year presented an opportunity to demonstrate the value of their solutions to the market. Such was the case for critical event management (CEM) software provider OnSolve, which added 450 new enterprise and government customers to its rolls last year.
The company, which was formed following the merger of Emergency Communications Networks and Send Word Now in 2017, also acquired Stabilitas, provider of a machine learning-driven situational awareness platform, last fall as part of an effort to diversify its portfolio. In the months following the acquisition, OnSolve CEO Mark Herrington says the company has placed a large emphasizes on bringing all these brands together under the OnSolve umbrella and investing in the organization as a single platform.
“We’ve got tremendous experience and expertise from the heritage of the companies that were bought and merged together, but I think the market needed to hear a more consolidated story from us and understand what we’re leaning into here is a single platform on all of the most modern tech stacks using a public cloud and obviously leveraging AI and machine learning across everything we do,” Herrington explains. “It is hard to manage a bunch of sub-brands and we felt like OnSolve was really the go-forward, lean into us (brand).”
According to Herrington, the company was heavily invested during 2019 and 2020 with consolidating their platforms into a single solution and that the acquisition of Stabilitas helped them build out their CEM product beyond mass notification, which they plan to continue to expand on over the next several years.
“We have a very ambitious roadmap heading into 2021 and 2022 on the product side to continue to bring capabilities to leverage our core capabilities around speed, relevance and usability. The evolution was intentional, and it just was obvious what we needed to do,” he says. “We were branding our capability as situational awareness with Stabilitas but since then we’ve done some research and risk intelligence is where we landed. Stabilitas equals risk intelligence for us and we were able to achieve substantial growth in 2020 without really much investment in the way of sales and marketing. We were putting the majority of our investment in the product roadmap, the infrastructure and all of that so going into 2021, what you will see us doing is aggressively investing in the sales and marketing side now that we have the platform ready to roll out and deliver.”
In fact, Herrington says they hired approximately 70 additional people last year and that they plan to hire another 90 employees this year to help keep pace with growth.
Aligning Products with Brand Identity
In conjunction with the announcement of the brand relaunch, OnSolve also announced version 10 of their mass communications software featuring the integration of Stabilitas’ risk intelligence and incident management platform as well as the upcoming rollout of their “Control Center” solution that will provide organizations with the ability to manage spontaneous incidents, such as weather-related disasters.
“There is all of the workflow that goes on with a team that is trying to manage through that – from being able to manage response plans from an incident perspective and all of the communications,” Herrington adds. “If you think about it holistically, our driving motivation here really does hinge on those three pillars that I mentioned (speed, relevance and usability). If you think about managing a crisis, it’s obvious that seconds and minutes count, so it is how quickly we can surface the information number one and second, make sure it is relevant and actionable and doesn’t take a lot of sifting through from human analysts, which is what our machine learning AI platform provides. Third is usability and when we talk about usability it is both (user interface) and user experience, but also the number of steps and keystrokes that it takes to activate and respond to and continuously update during a crisis.”
Though the pandemic did not have that much of an impact on OnSolve as a company, Herrington says it did emphasize the importance and critical nature of their technology.
“What we saw in March and April was the use of our platform essentially by every customer we had simultaneously. We saw volumes that the company had never seen in its history and the platform was incredibly resilient,” he adds. “That was very reassuring. There was no stress test we could have ever tried to perform artificially that we ended up with in reality.”
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
