Everbridge announced the release of a major new version of its Communication Engine that delivers a 300% performance increase.

The new release also introduces the ability to create “Incident Zones,” which provide instant alerts to people who enter an area located near a currently occurring critical event.

Everbridge’s Communication Engine takes advantage of a new, innovative back-end architecture which enhances the efficiency of initiating and broadcasting a message. The new engine also continues the company’s focus on making its applications more dynamically location aware.

Traditionally, mass notification systems have sent messages at a given time based on a specified, static location – typically, a person’s home or work address. Incident Zones make this process much more dynamic: notifications can be broadcast continuously for a specified duration of time to the mobile phones of people who come within a prescribed distance of a critical event. For example, if a beach area was experiencing dangerous rip tides, alerts could be sent to people who come to that beach for the next several days. Alternatively, if there was a hazardous discharge, instructions could be sent directly to people who come near it until the situation was fully resolved.

Everbridge’s Safety Connection enhances the concept of dynamic locations even further. The solution enables organizations to locate and share two-way communications and instructions with traveling or remote workers, with workers located in a campus office environment, and with first responders. This feature helps to ensure people’s safety and the business continuity of organizations during severe weather, workplace violence, terrorism, disrupted local conditions or other critical events.

Everbridge’s continued investment in the core technology powering its Critical Event Management platform has resulted in several improvements to its Communication Engine, including:

- 300% Performance Increase – enables organizations to deliver critical messages faster through an enhanced architecture that increases both speed of delivery and throughput.

- Incident Zones – makes it possible to dynamically send alerts and information based on a specified geographical region around a critical event, notifying people who enter the area.

- Improved Scalability, Redundancy and Capacity – increases the elasticity of the Communication Engine and the rapidity and ease with which new deployments can be scaled up. This helps assure that the solution can expand globally as demand requires and as volume surges during wide-scale critical events.

- Redundant Global SMS Providers – leverages Everbridge’s ongoing commitment to utilize redundant, multiple SMS aggregators to deliver notifications around the globe, enabling the company to move traffic for improved performance and to failover to additional aggregators when one provider has an outage. The uptime performance and reliability of using multiple providers far exceeds that of reliance on a single option.

“Speed and reliability are essential for managing critical events – and we are continually enhancing our platform to be out in front of the performance and scalability our enterprise customers require,” said Claudia Dent, SVP of Product Management, Everbridge. “At the same time, we continue to innovate in making our system more dynamic in locating people and sending notifications to match the needs of an increasingly mobile world.”