“Keep calm and notify”

This being my first blog, it will be a little different to the format of others. It reflects that I have been through a lot of change, moving from my previous employer, starting my own company and starting to work with my first client, Everbridge.  We thought it might be fun to write this blog to let you know what I am up to. So here goes…

I’m here at 6:18am writing my first blog entry. I have so much to say, so much to cover but I need to remain concise.  So I will try to keep it brief. Nick Hawkins the EMEA Managing Director and Denise Clinker the EMEA Marketing Marketing have asked me to take on a role as a subject matter expert. My scope is to help with everything and anything that helps Everbridge in EMEA, from pre-sales consulting, webinars top R&D in Mass Notification. I’m not going to go in to the details today, that will be for another week, but I will talk about why I am here and why I have been given this opportunity.

Around six years ago I was asked by my CISO at Cargill why he got an SMS/Text from his daughter’s school informing him of a snow day yet he struggled to get to work only to find the offices closed. That was the start of my critical communication journey. I was subsequently asked to spec and start to find a vendor that could reach out and message over 140,000 people in the event of an emergency. After a long RFP process my journey with Everbridge began. Over the past six years I deployed Everbridge Aware to 65,000 people. Then migrated from Aware to MN and upgraded to over 140,000 contacts. Implemented Single Sign On (SSO), ContactBridge and numerous APIs. Managed works councils to ensure privacy laws and concerns are properly controlled, and of course used Everbridge in many crisis situations. All of this while still executing my main role as a Business Continuity Consultant and Resiliency program manager.  So it is fair to say I do fill the role of subject matter expert when it comes to Everbridge!

During my years of working with Everbridge at Cargill I built a solid working relationship. One so solid that when I took redundancy to start my own consultancy agency, Everbridge asked me to work with them. My brief was to help them and bring my expertise, insight and knowledge to you, their existing and new customers. To that end I have been asked to run a number of webinars dealing with the many main area’s I have covered, including pain points, data privacy, planning or just parts that you may find interesting.  I’ll be helping with user groups, at the BCI with Everbridge and most excitingly (for me personally) doing some tool deployment and pushing MNIV to its limits. All of which will be laid bare on this blog.

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be detailing what I get up to in my blogs. Not all blog entries will be this long, some may be detailed, some may be me simply showing a screen shot of something cool. What I hope to do, is give you a glimpse in to what I am helping build for Everbridge.