Q&A: Everbridge on the Big Channel Opportunity in Critical Event Management

Can you tell us a bit about Everbridge and its evolution over the years?

Everbridge is a mission-driven company and our mission is to help organizations keep their people safe and operations running, faster. We help business, healthcare and government organizations around the globe mitigate critical events of all kinds, including the pandemic, severe weather, IT outages, cyber-attacks, and more. Essentially, if what organizations care about is affected by events they worry about, the Everbridge system jumps in and launches protocols that can reduce or eliminate the impact of the event.

Over the years we have evolved to support our customers’ management of the full lifecycle of a critical event. That means Everbridge’s CEM solution helps organizations such as Goldman Sachs, Tiffany & Co., and Nokia identify and assess the severity of events; determine their relevance to an organization’s people, assets, suppliers, and supply chains; automate taking action to mitigate threats and track progress; and analyze performance to improve future response.

Everbridge is the global leader in “critical event management.” For those who might be less familiar with the industry, what does that mean?

At Everbridge, we define a critical event as anything that threatens an organization’s people, operations, supply chains, or assets. Critical events include the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, fires, floods, cyber-attacks, IT outages and more. This year, the world has seen numerous simultaneous critical events, which highlight the need organizations have for Everbridge’s critical event management solutions.

How are you supporting business, healthcare and government organizations mitigate the impact of COVID-19, and more safely return people back to work and other public spaces?

A growing number of organizations across industry verticals, such as education, retail, manufacturing, state & local government, and more, selected the Everbridge COVID-19 Shield™: Contact Tracing software solution to enable the re-opening of campuses, stores, and operations during the coronavirus pandemic, all while safeguarding privacy. Everbridge offers the broadest, purpose-built contact tracing solution for organizations to understand their COVID-19 risk posture, protect individuals from virus exposure, and mitigate operational risk while automating an end-to-end recovery process.

Many organizations, such as universities across the United States, leverage Everbridge’s unique multi-pronged software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach to contact tracing. Everbridge provides a fundamental paradigm shift for university, corporate, government and healthcare organizations to more safely return people to work and to campus with a faster, more accurate, less costly approach, that also safeguards individual privacy. We provide a first-of-its-kind mobile app that digitally automates opt-in-based mobile wellness checks and proximity tracing in one solution, while also maximizing privacy protection.

How does Everbridge help organizations restore revenue-generating activities during the pandemic and other crises?

A recent Forrester study commissioned by Everbridge reveals organizations that use Everbridge’s platform respond to, and contain, critical events – including the ongoing pandemic, cyberattacks, IT outages, severe weather, workplace violence, terrorism, or supply chain disruptions – more effectively than those that do not deploy our CEM solution. As a result, Everbridge customers benefit from safer workforces, reductions in property damage, decreases in IT downtime, and increased employee productivity, among other benefits.

The study noted that interviewed executives told Forrester that Everbridge helped them: “maintain business operations and revenue during critical events; react to unpredictable events more quickly and confidently; and put appropriate plans in place for events (such as a hurricane) that were more predictable. Because Everbridge uses an organization’s unique asset footprint to determine which incoming news and risk feeds to analyze, [an organization’s] security analysts do not waste time sorting through irrelevant alerts and can react more quickly to situations that pose a real threat to their assets.”

What should organizations do now to help protect their people and operations in anticipation of, or during, critical events?

It’s vitally important for organizations to deploy an end-to-end critical event management solution to prepare for and mitigate crises of all kinds. Over 5,400 global firms rely on Everbridge to keep their people safe and organizations running in anticipation of, or amid, critical events, whether natural, cyber, or manmade. The Everbridge CEM solution provides an integrated, end-to-end approach for helping organizations assess the severity of events.

The Everbridge CEM Platform leverages 225 out-of-the-box, pre-existing integrations and 22,000 risk data sources to digitally transform how organizations effectively keep employees safe and their operations, IT systems and supply chains running. So, we can get organizations up and running quickly.

Can you provide more details about your channel program, and exclusive partnership with Telarus?

We are very excited to partner with Telarus and help bring CEM to more organizations now when they need it most in the midst of so many world crises. We’re also excited to have expanded the scope of the partnership: originally focused on accelerating adoption of Everbridge’s CEM Platform in North America, and now also includes the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It’s been a win-win for our customers.

Any closing thoughts for the channel community about critical event management?

When it comes to critical events, we say it’s not a matter of if these will impact your business — it’s a matter of when. So, it’s essential for business, healthcare, and government organizations to implement critical event management now so they are ready to keep their people safe and their business running.