St. Louis (October 2007)—Convergence Communications, the creator of E•SPONDER and E•SPONDER Express, announced a new addition to the E•SPONDER family, E•SPONDER Alerts powered by Send Word Now.  This unique tool allows organizations to instantly communicate with teams and large numbers of people.   Response organizations can use this tool to notify teams of critical information, to report or request a response, mobilize response, community and volunteer organizations, or advise team members of when an E•SPONDER or E•SPONDER Express event site is created.  E•SPONDER Alerts tracks outgoing messages and incoming responses, increasing situational awareness for all E•SPONDER and E•SPONDER Express users.

“Two-way on-demand alerting and response, as well as swift communication and coordination is necessary when time is of the essence” according to Robert Wolf, President and CEO of Convergence Communications.  “E•SPONDER Alerts integrates directly with and enriches other E•SPONDER products, adding the ability for organizations to send a critical message to thousands of people in minutes via the E•SPONDER platform.  E•SPONDER Alerts is designed to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

E•SPONDER Alerts is extremely easy to use.  While logged into E•SPONDER or E•SPONDER Express, a message is simply typed into the Alerts screen, recipients and groups are selected, and what ways the message is to be sent. Once activated, the alert is delivered to the selected contacts and groups within seconds.  Messages can be sent via multiple voice, text, SMS, pager or email listings per contact.  Additionally, recipients of the message can respond to the message, or immediately join a conference call, allowing for efficient and reliable collaboration.

E•SPONDER Alerts provides a complete audit trail of the messages for reporting. With this capability, organizations can send critical and virtually unlimited email and text messages to simultaneously call 1,500 contacts at a time and instantly receive a response, allowing for better situational awareness and decision-making.

“E•SPONDER Alerts not only allows organizations to quickly, securely and reliably distribute critical information in real-time, it frees up your key personnel,” said Wolf. “Since messages can instantly be sent and tracking of the responses is automated, it allows personnel to focus on critical tasks instead of on communications logistics.”

E•SPONDER Suite of Products

The E•SPONDER product family provides a range of capabilities for the response management community, from the individual agency to the complexity of multi-agency, multi-regional response planning and collaboration.  At the agency level, E•SPONDER Express simplifies and automates the incident management process, mapping to the NIMS/ICS (Incident Command Structure) process being adopted in many locations around the world.  It allows the pre-staging and creation of Incident Action Plans, resource tracking, and electronic versions of ICS Series forms.  E•SPONDER is a highly customizable software solution that enables diverse governmental or corporate entities to exchange information necessary for daily activities, to plan events, to coordinate command and control during events and incidents, and to review and evaluate performance afterwards.  E•SPONDER Alerts provides a notification and alerting capability to either product that enables 2 way communication to up to thousands of people that can be triggered automatically in workflow or on demand as the situation dictates.

About Convergence

Convergence, the creator of the E•SPONDER family of products, provides government and commercial enterprises with highly customizable communications and collaboration solutions as well as providing the commercial market with a wide variety of information technology solutions.  A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner (NASDAQ: MSFT), Convergence is an industry leader in mission-specific software for the homeland security and disaster preparedness community with E•SPONDER and the new E•SPONDER Express suite of solutions.  Winner of the 2005 and finalist for the 2007 Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year Award, E•SPONDER has been used by a variety of customers and events including Super Bowl XXXIX, the 2004 St. Louis Presidential Debates, and the St. Louis-based games of the 2004 and 2006 MLB World Series.