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CALL ME IF THERE'S TROUBLE

The recent power emergency in California has given several notification companies a timely chance to showcase two-way alerting. All have variations on an application that lets the State of California ISO (Independent System Operator), the State's main power grid manager, warn California building managers of Stage One or Two alerts and request immediate cutbacks on electrical consumption to avoid blackouts; these require positive, trackable responses. An automated system can do the job in 30 minutes - something that five people on five phone lines can't. And the application is discrete enough to become the logical province of a service bureau/ASP.

Westlake Software (Calabasas, CA - 818-631-9120, www.westlakesoftware.com) is one such such ASP, having come up with a solution that notifies selected groups on two-way pagers and gives senders a real-time view of responses as they come in. They developed this application at the request of AS Coalition, an aggregator of large power consumers, among them many California water treatment plants. Participants receive discounts on their utility bills in exchange for their compliance.

Westlake's browser-based GUI (try it at www.respondnow.net) lets administrators compile lists of those to be notified, request whether confirmation must be retrieved, and set deadlines for the confirmation. The group then can be selected, a text message entered and sent in one click.

Westlake is merely a web aggregation point, a Unix box that routes the messages to the email addresses of pagers, PDAs, and cell phones; actual message delivery is still the responsibility of the wireless carriers and their mail servers. Alan Gould, CEO of Westlake, posits the service as a great way for carriers to upsell their customers from one-way to two-way paging, and to offer the service to all sorts of enterprises that must send alerts.

Through automatic refresh of the list on the website, notifiers get real-time visual confirmation of message receipt. In the California power application, participating companies receive the messages and signal back compliance by typing back "OK." As they do, the check boxes on their displayed lines turn from red to green. "No" replies float to the top of the list, with phone numbers for human follow-up by voice.

Gould reports that on July 3, a particularly hot day, a Stage Two alert went out and was prevented from escalating to a Stage Three, largely through the notification efforts of Westlake.

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