Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

The primary use case is for us to mobilize and engage our IT workforce in response to either major incidents or critical monitoring alerts that require immediate response. We run anywhere between 150 to 180 major incidents per month. We also use this for our critical ticket management, as well, which is roughly 200 more a month.

Before Everbridge, it would take us anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half to mobilize our IT resource teams.  This was a manual call tree process where you are picking up the phone and calling everybody one by one. Now, by leveraging Everbridge, with a few clicks of a mouse, we are able to go in and request as many teams as we require to respond to an incident and bring them together to collaborate much faster. That 45 minutes to 90 minutes is now a few minutes up to maybe 15 minutes, depending on responsiveness or if the escalations have to kick in. We have seen substantial savings in manpower and a significant reduction in our time to respond and recover.

The automated escalations are the most valuable feature. We program in our escalation chains for each individual IT group. Being able to go out and request a resource from that team, and if they don't respond, that automated escalation makes it very hands off. So, our major incident managers and our network operations center can focus more on the other work that they need to do rather than chasing down those resources. They can rest assured that somebody will be answering.

Another valuable feature is the ease of integration into our ServiceNow platform, where we are doing all of our work between two teams. They are able to make requests from within the tickets that we can manage rather than having to use another portal or logging into Everbridge directly.

Reliability is their biggest value.

The IT Alerting portion of the Everbridge platform is built on all the fundamentals set by their mass notification product. Some of the specific use cases for IT response could use a little attention, in terms of changing the default behavior of the application. That would be the number one for me, which I know that they're already looking to address.

The stability is excellent. In the three years that we've been using it, there has only been one major outage. Even during that outage, there was still limited functionality available. We have definitely seen that since that event, which was a little over a year ago now, they've made some massive improvements to their infrastructure and their highly available environment. There really hasn't been any disruptions since then.

They actually advertised that they improved it. They sent communications to their customer base. They advised them that this was an event that you never really plan for, but it did happen. They made significant investments to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. There has been a series of maintenance to their back-end systems and infrastructure to ensure that they remain more resilient. Since then, we haven't seen a major disruption in service. I would classify it as a very highly available system with minimal disruptions.

They just upgrade their platform continuously, so you're always on the most recent version.

We have a part-time administrator who is doing our day-to-day maintenance. Most of that is more about further enhancements and improvements than about maintenance. Maintenance is very low-key, in terms of an administrator. In IT Alerting, the most complex part is that we have in and around 52 calendars that are being managed for all of our individual IT teams, but we allow the managers of those groups to do the management of those calendars. It's fairly hands-off. There was some work upfront to create some documentation, and we had to train them. That is more of the administration that we have to do now: the upkeep. However, this is more done on a part-time basis.

In IT Alerting, we have around 400 users. In our Everbridge instance, we have everybody in the organization, which is close to 11,000.

When we initially started using the product, we were at around 4,500 users. We were able to more than double that with ease. I know other much larger organizations who are using the platform without issues. In the most recent user group that I attended, they were showing us a lot of improvements on their back-end and database queries, so they could continue to scale. They can pretty much handle any scale that has been presented to them, so far.

The technical support is excellent. They certainly have different layers of support based on what you need and what you require. We have dealt with all levels of support throughout our journey with them. Where some of it is just a simple call into their help desk, which is more about basic troubleshooting, basic issues, maybe some how-tos, or some functions that weren't working exactly. This is right through to very hands-on technical assistance to solve some of our more challenging use cases. Where the IT Alerting platform sometimes isn't designed for the specific use case, they have been able to assign us a technical resource to give us a workaround or maybe to champion an improvement in a future release that will give us that function. We have pretty much seen that ongoing throughout our relationship with Everbridge, where they are always looking to make those enhancements or improvements for the usability of all their customers.

Typical upgrade cycle: We make a recommendation for an enhancement or an improvement, because it's not there. It gets entered on the community, where other customers can vote on it, which will push it up the scale. Or, we also have our account reps who will speak on our behalf to their development teams if there's something that we really need. Then, if there is a sense of urgency, that is where those workarounds come in, where they'll work the system to give us a configuration or rules which will give us what we require.

We have used PagerDuty, xMatters, and one that's not quite IT alerting (Send Word Now). These are all products that we have experience with at Finastra.

The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a very good experience with our initial deployment. Most of this was due to customizations in our ServiceNow instance. When we were using Everbridge as a standalone tool, that implementation was relatively straightforward to get some immediate value. When we went to integrate with our ServiceNow instance, we ran into a lot of challenges. 

We didn't have to, but we made the decision to re-integrate at the end of this past year. That reintegration was very easy and seamless. There was a lot of upgraded functions put into the connector by Everbridge, which have been installed in ServiceNow.

The first time around, it took us a couple of months, a lot of headaches, and a lot of effort. Our second implementation was a matter of hours before we were up and running again. It was a massive improvement from our initial implementation. Half of the improvement was the connectivity capabilities and upgraded connector that Everbridge designed and had certified in the ServiceNow Store. The other half of it was the realization that a lot of our challenges the first time around were based on customizations that we had in our environment. What we did ahead of this implementation was return to the out-of-the-box configuration in our ServiceNow instance. This allowed all of that automated connectivity to just take over, so we didn't have to customize or script. It really was just plug and play. Remove the old connector and install the new one, then do a bit of configuration settings and we were good to go.

The first time, we used a third-party to do all the development. That posed a lot of challenges. It wasn't a great experience. It wasn't just because of the challenging environment. We definitely had some challenges in dealing with that third-party organization and the deployment overall.

Initially, the third-party integrator provided us two full-time resources for six weeks since they were doing a lot of scripting, customizations, and development work.

The second time around, based on the simplicity, we were able to secure a resource from Everbridge for about 45 minutes to meet up with our ServiceNow administration team. They were able to do it all on the call in that short period of time.

On the redeployment, since it took hours, we had maybe one person for two days. That would be at most what we probably committed.

The end result is that we have driven down our MTTR by an average of about 45 minutes across all major outages. That is very substantial considering the cost of every minute of outage can be thousands of dollars lost.

We are saving probably 100 plus hours of outage time within our customer-facing products per month, which is significant. You can easily put that into an ROI of hundreds of thousands per year.

For other use cases, there is at least another 50,000 to 100,000 dollars a year of savings or cost avoidance.

The annual cost is approximately $125,000 USD but is highly dependent on the number of licenses required.

They are one of the cheapest solutions on the market. We looked at all of the major competitors in the space. Everbridge was one of the most affordable for what they are offering.

We switched mostly because of our internal use cases. Everbridge was the most flexible, in terms of adding on additional use cases for just the base function.  Affordability was a big factor as well. When costing out the solution, they were the cheapest for the IT Alerting portion specifically. However, the biggest thing was the ability to add in those additional use cases.

For example, one of our customer support organizations was paying a third-party service to answer phone calls after hours. All they were doing was answering the call and taking some details, then they were engaging a support team who was probably sleeping at that time. Knowing what the capabilities were within IT Alerting, we said, "We could probably give you a better solution for that. We'll give you an email address that your customer can email directly. Then, you'll just maintain your calendar of support in Everbridge. Then, when your customer emails into that address, Everbridge will call you and tell you that you have an email from your customer that you need to respond to." They were able to eliminate that third-party calling service, which was fairly expensive. There was no additional cost because we were able to capture it within the licenses that we already purchase with the product.

We have about a half a dozen other use cases like that which we've been able to leverage the same platform and same licensing for with Everbridge and realize some savings, giving us better service to our internal and external customers.

It is about ensuring that you have the organizational buy-in from the top down. This product starts with the C-level suite when you're going to implement. We struggled through having to prove that the product was worthwhile before we were able to fully implement across the organization. We found some early adopters within those IT responder teams and showed them that this is a product which would help them as well as help our organization. 

We started out with three or four teams three years ago. Now, it is a standard. The organization realizes that there is value here, and that we are going to continue to use it. We have expanded it to more than 50 IT responder teams across the organization. Now, whenever we find a team who isn't using it, we onboard them pretty quickly, as it is part of the standard.

The product is pretty new for them. We were a pretty early adopter to the product. I don't know where we stand in terms of 10th or 50th (or whatever), but I know that the product itself is only about four years old, from what I understand.

We have already been able to drive a massive amount of value out of it in its current state. Anything else is what I would call finessing, or refinement. Some of that may be specific to my organization and how we use it. We already have a roadmap of how we will to continue to use it, which will be leveraging a lot more automation, but most of that is already ready on the Everbridge side. It's more our ServiceNow instance that we need to prepare for that level of automation.

All of the core function that we are looking for is already there in Everbridge. They have the connectivity into our ServiceNow instance, which is pivotal, so that we can affect workflows to automate our engagements. Today, it's our network operations center and major incident management team who are requesting resources. The intention is to have our ServiceNow instance automatically do that based on defined workflows, so we are taking the human element or delay out of it. Everbridge is already set to allow us to do this.

I would give the product a solid nine because of their support. It is how responsive that they have been between their account management, technical resources, and leadership. They knew that we had a very painful implementation the first time. Therefore, for our second implementation, they were very hands-on. We had a lot of conversations leading up to the implementation about the support that we needed and what our goals were. They were very responsive in providing us pretty much whatever we needed, just short of Professional Services and doing it for us. They were very clear that they could do all of this for us but there would be a fee. However, they are always there to help, which is the biggest thing for me. You almost consider them to be more like a partner than a vendor. If you treat them more like a partner, and they treat you as such as well, then you are likely to have a much more desirable outcome.

We have a ticketing system, Remedy OnDemand, a fairly large IT shop, several thousand servers, about 900 people or so working in IT, about one-third of them are doing support in one way or another or having to deal with incidents. So the use case for this tool was to notify teams or individuals that there was an incident in progress that they needed to attend to. Usually, it was for incidents that had the kind of priority that needed immediate attention.

Natively, Remedy will send out an email. But if you need to get somebody's attention because a server is on the brink of falling over, that doesn't cut it.

Our use case was essentially incident notification.

I was there to transition to the tool. I did all the use cases for it and then I handed off the reins of power to my successor.

For us, having a quick response to urgent events - events that were not necessarily critical but that could become critical if not dealt with urgently - was important for us.

Prior to having a notification system in place, we either had to have an operations person checking all the queues in Remedy or someone subscribing to emails from Remedy and then doing manual call-outs to people at 3 am because a server died.

We had a fairly sophisticated ticket flow. We had a monitoring system with an events co-relation and event management system that would then automatically create incident tickets. The incidents tickets, based on their level of urgency, would then be channeled out through the Everbridge IT alerting platform which would then trigger off escalations based on the urgency of the incident. For example, if there was a P1 incident where the data center was down, it would escalate much more quickly than if there was a P3 issue that you needed to look at quickly to avoid a P1.

If we were to compare no IT alerting to IT alerting of any kind, the latter makes a significant difference. In our case, we used to have real, live operators who would call people out. Now, the operations staff is there just to manage some escalations but it really removes the human from the equation, from the moment of detection to notification. 

Before, we'd have a human looking at a console of some kind and that person would then have to look up a contact list to find out who was the owner of the alert, find their number, call them and, if nothing happened, figure it out, and say, "Okay, I've got to escalate." They would then have to call the second person in line, and so on. It was not really a manageable situation. Having an alerting solution connected to our ticketing system made the flow much more effective and really did improve our overall response time and uptime.

There are quite a few valuable features. In terms of the general notifications, one of the things that was interesting and good is that you can configure the tool to escalate if no action is taken within a certain time period. That avoids sending off an alert that nobody deals with and where nobody knows that nobody has dealt with it. 

You can program in rotations, shifts, and scenarios of different kinds and it allows you to page multiple people, or people in sequence, or a group of people simultaneously.

Another good feature Everbridge has is deduplication. We had cases where everybody on a team had the same phone number. Maybe they were passing a cell phone around. When the tool sees that, it doesn't call the same phone number 15 times. It will call it one time, because it will see, as part of the list of devices and device hours, that it's a duplicate.

Once your users are defined, you can pop up a map and draw a circle on the map and notify everybody within that area. That geo feature is really useful if you have a particular incident where there is a protest on the street, a building on fire, a Hazmat spill. These are all scenarios that I've lived through.
It was crucial at that time to have a solution where one could say, "Let me draw a radius around the impacted building and have everybody in that radius contacted." That was a huge win.

The feature that xMatters has that Everbridge doesn't have, or has in a limited way, is a method of funneling some alerts, as an FYI, to other stakeholders who are not necessarily prime actors in an incident. For example, you have a support team that supports critical application X, and you have somebody who is actually the application owner. The application owner normally does not normally get called out in the middle of the night to let him know that his application is down, unless it's super-critical and it's going to stay down. But they would be receiving a copy of the notification that was sent out so they'd know that something happened overnight, or that something is happening right now.

It's been performing like a champ. We haven't had any outages. I had lunch with my buddies last week, and there has been nothing significantly wrong. It's been flowing like it should. 

The old 2012 solution was using somewhat dated technology and it was starting to choke on a regular basis. We really didn't want that with the volume of incidence tickets that we were generating.

We didn't have any scalability issues with it. I don't have a comparison point, but it easily handled everything we threw at it.

Everbridge's tech support was really excellent. They were on the ball, they had answers to our questions. They made things happen that they probably hadn't done beforehand. I found them really collaborative and very much a pleasure to work with.

I found Everbridge to be very responsive during the implementation phase, and post-implementation, whenever we had questions, we were able to reach out either via our managed service provider or directly to Everbridge. As a longtime tech guy - I've got over 30 years in the business - they were really a blast to work with. It's always great to work with people who are competent and who have some kind of empathy for your reality.

I'm not sure if I was dealing with US people, Toronto people, or overseas people. There were a lot of people from different places coming onto phone bridges. At a certain point it was hard to tell who was a managed service provider, who was Remedy, who was Everbridge. It was just quite the multinational effort.

It could have been a real horror story, and it turned out very well. We were starting to have doubts at one point, and then they called in the cavalry. We had a few extra resources. And things went off pretty much without a hitch.

Before, we were using xMatters, which is another notification tool, a very old version that was resold to us through a managed service provider. Our xMatters solution was hosted by them and it was at end-of-life. It was the last xMatters on-prem offering back in 2012 or 2013.

When we migrated we looked at different solutions but the Everbridge solution was the most cost-effective at the time. It didn't have, from my perspective, any other clear advantages over xMatters, over PagerDuty.

In our environment it made financial sense and, with the templates, it made operational sense. It worked just fine. It was surprisingly, blazingly fast. The throughput was pretty incredible. The time from when the incident system - the ticketing system - poked Everbridge to say that there was something going on, until Everbridge starting to notify, was very short.

I wasn't even aware that Everbridge was doing an IT alerting product up until last year. I had always known them to be a mass-notification type of company. It was actually a smart move on their part to leverage their mass-notification capability - which, by definition, means you're alerting a whole ton of people in a very short period of time - into an IT alerting product.

In the past, that's where we would run into issues with our on-prem xMatters installation. Sometimes, when there were too many alerts, a lot of queuing would happen. I didn't see any instances while I was there - and we did tests with a lot of events - of much queuing happening on the Everbridge side.

I don't really consider Everbridge to be a relatively new product. Everbridge had an alerting product beforehand. All they did was enhance their alerting product and add functionality required for it to become an IT alerting product. But they started off with a really good base. They managed the transition to an IT-alerting product fairly gracefully.

The setup was straightforward once you understood that it is a different paradigm. When you're used to things being a certain way - if you're used to Windows and you switch to Mac you have a little bit of an adjustment period and then things become intuitive. It was the same here. There's nothing inherently overly-complex about the tool itself. But if you're coming from another tool with a different underlying paradigm, you do have to wrap your head around some different concepts. It took a while to catch on to how to properly use the tool and to convey to Everbridge what exactly we were expecting as a result.

The deployment took about two months.

There were a lot of steps in there including a massive cleanup of the old notification system, so we wouldn't transport garbage into the future, a migration of over 1,000 users, which is quite a bit, all the technical onboarding that had to happen for people, so that they'd know how to use the new tool, exposure to the new functionalities. The training was done simultaneously with the integration of the tool. We had a Dev, a QA, and a Prod environment. We ran it through its paces in all three to make sure it worked out. 

The project took longer because the biggest problem was deciding on the tool. But once the tool was decided on, it was about a two-month effort to convert.

 The actual technical implementation strategy was really just making sure we were passing the right variables and tweaking templates until they were just so.

We used our managed service provider, and we had people from Everbridge and Remedy directly involved. But we did not have any third-party consultants.

Considering the knowledge of the people who were involved in the implementation from the Everbridge side, the transparency with which they worked with us, and the rapidity of the responses and corrections or modifications or tweaks, it was really a very pleasant experience.

It replaced something that was already doing a very similar job, so the ROI is hard to quantify. We already had something that notified people. Compared to having nothing, the ROI would have been substantial.

But let's look at it this way: If you have 1,000 users and you're paying $25 a head, you're paying $25,000 per month. If you have access to metrics on incident management and how much it costs a large organization to deal with a major incident, having a notification tool in place reduced our number of major incidents by about 20 percent, year over year.

It's helpful when you can notify and have solid proof of notification. Then you have accountability. What was particularly interesting was that the gains were seen because people were then able to be notified of things that were urgent but not a P1 yet, still at a pre-impact level. The classic example would be a disk that is filling up. You've got a critical app and if the disk fills up, you're toast. Monitoring picks it up, creates a ticket, dispatches it off to a team, the team gets notified. If nobody responds within 10 or 15 minutes, it gets escalated. So for sure, within half an hour, somebody would look at it. Just doing that greatly reduced the number of disk-space incidents we had.

In terms of additional costs, I was just the guy who was the pain in the back, telling them, "No, we need this functionality. You forgot this. These are the use cases that need to be represented." But apart from the integration costs and, obviously, using resources from Remedy and using resources from Everbridge, regarding licensing costs we just had that flat fee. Once we integrated it was just a standardized fee.

Our need was very unsophisticated in the sense that we wanted to notify a predefined set of people based on predefined criteria. Within Everbridge you could accomplish that using something called templates. It had an automated flow-through.

What xMatters has that Everbr201ge e doesn't have is something interesting called a subscription, where you can get an FYI notification of an event or incident based on matching keywords or other elements of the message.

We did a quick market scan and we saw PagerDuty out there, xMatters was out there. I don't remember if there Opsgenie was available at the time. But there were a bunch of them that all seemed to coalesce around the same price point and, for whatever reason, Everbridge came in as less expensive and they did integrations with Remedy OnDemand.

That was good for us because in a large shop with a good flow of incident tickets, for the people who are resolving these things it becomes cumbersome to take notifications, log in, go into the ticketing system and assign the ticket to themselves, and then work on the problem. With the Everbridge integration the person who acts on the alert becomes the owner of the ticket and the ticket changes status. That facilitated the visibility of how the incidents were being handled at the bank.

We also needed device discrimination based on severity of ticket, time discrimination based on the severity of ticket, and impact of ticket. You're not going to page out somebody for a low-level event.

My chief advice would be to know your use cases. A tool like Everbridge can do just about anything. All of these tools are very powerful tools. Start small, pick something that is attainable and that you can measure, and then build from there. Sometimes people try too hard to do everything at the same time, to implement every possible functionality on day one. It never works. 

Also, if you have a poorly defined use case you have a problem. The tool itself is good but, while Microsoft Word is a decent tool, it doesn't make me a writer. That's how I see Everbridge. It's a decent tool, but it doesn't mean that it makes you an alerting god if you don't know how you want to use it and how you plan to use it or what your expected results are. 

You really have to think through the process, the whole process. We're lucky that our incident management processes were defined. People knew what to expect. I had some very specific use cases. I needed shifts, I needed rotations, I needed device discrimination, depending on the type of alert. I needed targeted escalations. I needed escalations to our NOC for certain types of events. All of these things had to be figured out beforehand. If you discover them as you go along, it impacts the design. If you're designing for a fuzzy need you're going to have a bad time when it comes down to implementation.

In terms of improvement in remediation time, we had already seen that. Our use case was the same use case we had before. 

It was the primary means of notification for our ticketing system. In terms of incidents coming from automation, from monitoring, in any given month there would be 6,000 to 10,000 tickets, depending on the month and what happened.

Something to know about these systems is that once they're configured, they're pretty much set-and-forget. After that, it's just add a user, remove a user. It's very rare in our specific use case that we'd have to change a template.

In terms of IT alerting, I'd give Everbridge a solid eight out of ten. I'd give it a nine if the subscription functionality was a bit better. It's lightweight from an end-user perspective. It's not overly busy. It's straightforward in the way it communicates and it's heavily customizable.

The primary use is to engage, to notify, and engage IT team members when an outage is underway. We do use it for proactive notifications, but our primary use is to communicate with support-group team members when we need to get their attention and fix a problem.

Some of the features we were looking to achieve included proactive notifications, for a situation where we might have a database server that has 50 databases on it. That means if I shut down that database server for patching, all 50 of those databases are offline and multiple applications, anywhere from 50 or more, are also going to be taken offline. We use this Everbridge IT Alerting tool as a "polling" product to reach out to the stakeholders of those 50 databases and give them five options of day of week and time of day, and say, "We have to shut the server down. You get to have a voice in when we do so to minimize the impact on you as a business stakeholder." We've been leveraging the product to do some of those proactive outage notifications and polling capabilities as well.

We are also striving to integrate it with other parts of our IT operating ecosystem. We already use it to communicate when a monitoring alert triggers one of the reactive notifications, and we are seeking to implement more of a full loop between that event and an incident being opened in the service management system. We're not quite there yet, but we're walking in that direction.

What we were looking at was: "How do you shorten the time to restoration when a crisis is occurring?" That's really the key benefit of the out-of-the-box Everbridge IT Alerting functionality for us.

In terms of improvements to our organization, we're still on that journey. I've used the terminology with our friends at Everbridge a few times, where I associate this with the traditional "crawl, walk, and run" metaphor. One year ago when we launched, we were barely crawling. Then we started crawling fairly quickly. I would say we're now in the "toddling" stage where we walk, but we don't walk all that well yet. For us, it is a continual improvement journey. 

We are anticipating that over the next 12 to 36 months we're going to go from toddling to walking very upright and then into running.

Organizationally, we have gained some benefits already. Even in the first few months, we recognized or realized some of those benefits that I described above around shortening the time to resolution. 

What we envision getting as an additional organizational benefit is system consolidation. For example, we've got four different systems today that contain some of the data and capabilities that Everbridge can very naturally accommodate. We just haven't moved there yet. Over time, we'll see some reduced cost in infrastructure, reduced cost in application maintenance and complexity, some improved consistency across these procedures as a result of using one system versus many. This should contribute to further reducing the time to restore service. In the end, we get benefits adding up over time, where time to restore gets better and better, and our ability to leverage the platform in multiple ways gets better and better.

The engagement component is the most valuable, and what I mean by that is, if I were to send out an alert notification to a half-dozen people when a major IT crisis occurs, what I want to be able to do is remediate the issue as fast as I possibly can. For the sake of the business, I want to minimize downtime. What we were seeing in our prior systems, in our prior procedures and capabilities was that it would take quite a long time to get the right people to the table, making the right decisions to restore service.

One of the key drivers for us, and this is still one of the key benefits for us, is that Everbridge IT Alerting helps to pull those right people in very quickly through a collection of utilities where you can say, "I want to notify more than one person at a time. I want to escalate at my discretion and via rules within the system." It enables you to pull all the people into these bridge calls.

Let's say for example you have somebody in a group who is not online, but they are the on-call primary. The first iteration of a notification might go to them, but I can - depending on the nature of the issue - send a communication to the entire group under the anticipation that the primary on-call might not respond first. 

In recent weeks we've been talking to Everbridge about leveraging some new functionality that they're demploying right now around orchestration. Imagine a full, closed-loop event remediation: auto-remediation. A server throws an alert. We catch it in our monitoring tool. We page or SMS text, using Everbridge IT Alerting. A group member receives that text and responds to the text with "Option One." Option one can say, "I want to go ahead and execute an orchestration that will automatically stop and restart the services on that box or even reboot the box." That would, again, further reduce service restoration time, and significantly reducing the manual engagement of logging a ticket, logging onto the box, restarting the box or the servers or services manually. All of that can be done through automation. We're not there yet, but that's what we're talking about right now, as a part of our next wave of moving along the crawl, walk, run journey.

In terms of what could be improved, almost always, there is something that could be improved. I've been in this industry long enough to know that there is no perfect system. All the good ones still offer opportunities for getting better. I think if you were to look from their point of view, they would also see themselves in a crawl, walk, run journey. They may be further along in their walk, but they're probably not in the "Olympic sprint" or "Olympic marathon" stage yet. They've got lots of potential, room for feature enhancements, improvements.

A couple of key ones might include - and I think they are working towards these things - analytics. If I want to do sophisticated reporting and analysis of the data that's being captured in IT Alerting, at the moment, the reporting interface is immature. They're very helpful. They get it. They're listening to us, but it's weak. It's growing. It's getting better. Reporting and analytics would be one space. 

Their integration capabilities are still progressing, but not quite where we'd like to see them yet. They're moving there with that orchestration capability where they're seeing the potential of an API-first mentality. So instead of trying to build custom connections into everything, you open up APIs to allow other systems to talk to IT Alerting and allow IT Alerting to talk to other systems. There is room for improvement, but they get it. They're listening in that space, too.

Sure, there are things they can be doing better, but in partnership with them, us among other customers, I think we've got their ear, and they're being very proactive about listening.

We have encountered some issues with stability. The shorter answer is, "Yes, it's stable." 

The longer answer would be, we've had a couple of outages, and we had some very deep discussions with Everbridge on the fact that I can't alert people of an outage in my environment if I'm having an outage in their environment. That's bad, and they know it. They recognize it. They acknowledge that. 

We did have one problem within the first 30 to 60 days of going live where we had a day-and-a-half outage of the platform, and frankly, that's unacceptable. They heard that from us very directly. Since then, they've mitigated that by expanding their architecture and changing the method of their architecture to be more highly available and robust on their side. 

Since then, the stability has been top-drawer. We've had a few minor issues around things like messages not being delivered. Part of it is our expectation, that they deliver every message, 100 percent, 24/7, but I also absolutely recognize that we are literally all over the globe. We're everywhere in the world today as Cargill footprint. That means we're trying to deliver messages in near real-time, 20,000 miles away under infrastructure circumstances that could be very poor. It might be in a third-world nation. It might be in a place where there is no cellular signal or their cellular partnerships are not as well-built or professionally associated as in some other parts of the world. So sometimes, messages don't get delivered, but I would say that is a very rare challenge for us. Everbridge, along with any other service provider in their space, will have to face those once in a while, and I think they're very good at running interference with those "edge" connection points that are difficult to navigate. They're very good at it. Occasionally, we see a message dropped or a message not delivered, but it is rare, and I think they are doing everything they can to handshake with the providers around the world in a way that continues to minimize and, maybe someday, eliminate those one-offs.

I think scalability was part of that architectural review we did about a year ago where, when they encountered that outage. One of our challenges to them was, "If you're a cloud-first solution yourself, how do you not build your platform to be highly scalable?" Literally, spin up, spin down, any time you want or any time the demand suggests it.

Initially, the scalability was good but not great. Since then, I think it now borders on great. They've learned some lessons. They've restructured their platform a bit, and it is highly scalable. I've never seen a performance problem.

We have about 155,000 workers around the globe at Cargill, and there are maybe 5,000 who log in with some regularity to the platform to do message queuing or message sending or message response or self-service profile updates; I can log in and change my cell phone number, or specify that I want to use my cell phone as my primary and my work phone as my secondary. That capability has never been met with any comments from our community saying, "It doesn't perform well."

Their first-line tech support is good, but I think their method of providing support deserves some very real consideration. What I mean is, when I spend X dollars buying a product, our expectation for support is very high. I want you, as a vendor, to support your product 24/7 and give me appropriate response windows. If it's not urgent, I'm okay with you not being imminent, but if it is urgent, I want you on the phone right away.

They've pushed a Professional Services model where they're saying, for you to get this kind of attention or support for either "How do I" questions or "What could we do a little differently?" or those kinds of things, they're suggesting we buy a bucket of Professional Services hours. I've resisted that from day one, and I have not yet given into that request because my perspective is, I already paid you for that. I bought the licensing and I bought support as a percentage, if you will, of the licensing price. That's what maintenance is for.

To me, Professional Services is more an act of deeper consulting where I might say, "I want to actually go build an integration that's not leveraging your API strategy or methodology, so it's going to need some custom development work," or something like that. I get that. That's a pretty classic Professional Services engagement. But to hear, when I call you and ask a question like, "Well, how do I do this?" an answer like, "This is why you should buy a bucket of Professional Services hours," it feels a little "game-y" to me. I don't really like that. I'm working with Everbridge on that, too. I think that they're still wrestling with what their support model looks like internally and what their Professional Services business strategy is. I think they're trying to work their way through those growing pains themselves, but my gut reaction is, it's not a great start to say, "In order to support you, you have to pay me more."

Their technical skill on the support side is good. Their model is a little bit shaky.

I realized this, sadly, after the sale. I think it's partly because those same growing pains were part of what they were going through as a part of our normal sales cycle discussions. So they never put on the table that to get really top-level support, it will cost you more, until after everything was already deployed. We were probably well into our first quarter of deployment when the suggestion was, "I think you should buy a bucket of hours." It caught me, quite frankly, by surprise because I felt that we should have been talking about that during the sales cycle.

They're going to find us really reluctant to write another check for what we would consider standard practice for product support. We have a very good relationship with Everbridge, so I would not want to send the wrong signals. I think they'll be very open-minded to hearing that kind of feedback. I don't know if they'll back down completely from their business position on Professional Services and support, but it's certainly going to be a conversation I'll continue having with them.

We had an incumbent solution that had been in place for about seven years. The principal reason for switching was that the incumbent was losing momentum in the marketplace for traditional IT communications and engagement, to get people to the table and fix problems. The incumbent was slipping in the market. They were not putting money into R&D. They were not developing their platform at the same pace that some of the natural competitors were.

We did look at them as a part of our solution-selection activity. We absolutely kept the incumbent in the ring and had great conversations with them about what's missing and what they were going to do next. In fact, they were acquired by another company during those solution-selection discussions, and we were very uncertain about whether or not the acquiring company would invest or ingest. Would they swallow this thing up and sort of bury it under the rug, or would they invest in making it be a more competitive product? 

I think, in hindsight - it's been over a year since we made this selection and about a year since we deployed IT Alerting - I'd say that the casual observation would be that the incumbent did not gain any ground. If anything, they may have continued to lose some ground. For us, it was, "You don't have the feature functionality that we really want, and you're not really making progress towards that in your own market space." Whereas Everbridge and a couple of others were providing some good indicators that they were stepping up their game as opposed to backing off their game.

I wasn't actually doing the install, I was leading the program and working very closely with the folks who were administrators of the tool. The feedback I got was that it was actually very intuitive until you'd get a little bit into the weeds. Some of the complications of the environment resulted in a few challenging topics. They weren't showstoppers. We never felt like we couldn't keep the ball rolling

It was a little bit of both. The initial response felt very reasonable, very intuitive to the extent it's possible, but it's a sophisticated enough system that there were parts of it where you scratch your head and you say, "Well, where do I go for this? How do I log in and change the administrative configuration of group names?" That sort of thing.

That's where some of our initial Professional Services help came in. We did pay for the implementation Professional Services. That was worthwhile, it was appropriate to do that, and they helped a lot. Wherever we did find some of those points of confusion, those were good learning experiences for us. They were good usability conversations with them.

They continue to develop, and they're very good at taking feedback from their customers and figuring out how, or if, to include that feedback in future releases. And their release cycles have gotten faster. When we first signed up with them, they were probably doing two a year, and now I think they're closer to four a year. And some of what we fed into them is already making its appearance in their code base.

One of the things we were attempting to measure when we established the program is time to restore service. One of the things that IT Alerting helps us do is bring an IT service back online faster than we did before. One of the ways it does that is by getting those right parties to the table at the right time. Our mean time to restore, or mean time to repair, has diminished by a couple of percentage points, saving the company upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That was one of our key measures going in, and it's been demonstrable so far.

For us, the pricing is a good value. I can't say whether or not their list pricing looks favorable to everyone who's checking, but I can say that the process of sourcing and procurement with them was very professional, comfortable, and friendly. The negotiations were done well on both sides, and in the end, I'd say the price was very effective.

My suggestion would be, do your homework. If you know what the marketplace will support, I think it is fairly traditional. Not every market or every product fits this, but it's pretty normal that list prices are designed to be discounted. Very few, especially on the enterprise scale, are going to pay full sticker price for a software product. So do your homework, know where the discounting can get you, and know what you're willing to pay. Because if you say, "This has a value of X for me as an organization," if you articulate your position well, you have some very real opportunity to get either close to or at what you perceive to be the real value of the product in your negotiations. It's never an easy step but, done well, I think that people will find that Everbridge is a great listener and is willing to meet in the middle.

We also looked at TelAlert and xMatters.

We went through a pretty traditional solution-selection activity where we prepared and documented our requirements for the market leaders and included our incumbent, an existing solution that was doing some of what Everbridge does. In the end, one of our key selection criteria was relationship, and Cargill and Everbridge already had an agreement in place for their business continuity product, non-IT, which is used to do things like notify employees when there is a weather event or a security or concern, a risk event in a particular region of the world. We were already using that product, and it was an Everbridge relationship that was already in place. One of our deciding factors was, "How strong is that relationship?"

Scope the project well. What I mean by that is, don't bite off more than you can chew, but don't do less than you need to do. Scoping it well means that you've identified the happy medium of, "I'm going to get great value to start, but I'm going to get more value as we continue to grow into the solution." That's the approach we took. We said, "Hey, if I can get the 80/20 rule applied, where 80 percent of what we're expecting to get out of the gate is achievable in our first deployment, that's pretty solid." If the other 20 percent isn't crucial - figure out how to prioritize what you do need and what you don't need - it's okay to let it go. 

Part of what we saw with our own project was the danger of scope-creep, where we said, "If our first objective is a like-for-like replacement of the incumbent, then be prepared to sacrifice some golden opportunities if those golden opportunities will cost us time and money that we don't have right now."

If we said, "Implementation date is an important milestone and cost of implementing is an important measurement," then I need to measure inside of those scoping guardrails. Don't do more than you can handle, but don't do less than what you need. I think we accomplished that pretty well. I think we sacrificed a couple things that several of our stakeholders would have loved to see out of the gate, but it would have cost us time and money that we weren't really prepared to spend.

I would start out with rating this product at eight out of 10 because there is always room to improve. I'm not sure I'd rate anybody a 10. I've been in this for a long, long time. I don't know that I've ever seen a true knock-your-socks-off 10. But this solution is a solid eight in that they provide the core functionality we were always interested in obtaining, and they are very engaged at the table in discussing how they get better and how their getting better can help us get better.

It is for our Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). We use it for its functionalities. It is a part of our alerting systems. Because it's a global company, we have a GSOC and some of the functionalities that we use it for are tracking security threats, monitoring, and notifying our staff and contractors. We also use it for emergency response usage.

The product started off on-premise, then was migrated to a Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure.

We are in the process of automating a lot of our processes. Because it has a SaaS version, the APIs are easily integratable, and we are able to consolidate functions and vendors. This saves money, because of the downturn in the industry, as everybody is penny-pinching these days. We are able to find ways to cut back. This product is very helpful with that since it is a good tool for consolidating functions for security purposes and all of the security functions that the GSOC needs.

• It is easy to integrate. APIs connect to it. Because it is easily integratable with other software that we use, even homegrown, it does save money.
• With SaaS, we can implement in other regions without having to physically go to there.
• We monitor all our security threats globally on our big video wall, which is great visually. 
• The response time is real-time alerting. It is very helpful, because it makes things a lot easier. All we have to do is put a circle around a geo-fence and shoot off a message. For vessel support, they can be notified if there is inclement weather close by.
• We are able to do incident messaging for emergency notifications. We are able to monitor our security alerts. We are able to link all of these functions together. 

I would like them to add GPS going forward. I think they may be working on this, but it is not implemented yet. We want to be able track our shipments, people, and every asset in real-time. With global positioning, especially in oil and gas, we might have a fleet in a pirated area (with active shooters) and have to move fast in situations. We need to know where our people are, how to locate all our assets, and secure them, regardless if they're people, places, vessels, or structures.

The company would also like to have super detailed analytics, as we integrate this with our security software, e.g., camera systems. We want to see ant walking on the ground type of detail. That is the pinpoint analysis that we are looking for in this solution.

The stability is good. Right now, it is a great product. We are just trying to enhance and automate it as much as we can. 

Scalability is pretty good. We haven't had any issues.

Our GSOC is using it right now, which is give or take 20 people. However, it rotates and shifts personnel, so they are not using it all at once.

It probably took a few months to deploy because we go through tests and configurations before going live. We have to test it out in different environments.

This product has helped us save $200,000 from being able to get rid of vendors and consolidate functionalities to doing incident reporting. 

We use it to consolidate and remove a lot of manual processes from the enterprise notification space.

What it allows us to do is integrate with our CMDB. Within our CMDB, we have everything including the ownership, from the executive level down to operational. It enables us to quickly and easily identify who the target audience is through the subscription model that is embedded in Everbridge. It helps with targeted communication and accuracy and timeliness. On average, it saves us roughly five to seven minutes, when we compare all of the manual processes we used to have versus using the tool as integrated into our ticketing system. We send about 15 to 20 of these broadcast messages per day, on average. So the time savings are definitely substantial.

The most important feature, from our perspective, is the integration with our ticketing system. That eliminates wasted motion and time in drafting and sending and finding the right distribution list. It's all integrated with the ticketing system, so from the ticket itself, we manage all of the notifications that we send. We're able to manage an incident within the confines of the ticketing system at something like 70 to 80 percent accuracy. The integration feature with the ticketing system is of extreme value.

Everything could always be a little bit easier, a little bit faster, but I'm not sure that I can really name anything else off the top of my head.

We haven't had any downtime-type problems. At some time within this calendar year, there was a temporary outage for a few minutes of some function within the system, and I'm not even sure it was one that I leverage. I get notifications from them through their communication systems telling me what the statuses are of the various components of the system, and I don't recall any point where the system was unavailable in its entirety. The stability has been excellent.

Scalability seems to be very robust. When I look at not just what we're doing with it but what it can do, if we were to put the proper amount of effort behind some of the integrations, the scalability is good.

I'm looking at changing a number of things in 2019 and there will be opportunities for more integrations so that we take better advantage of the platform. From a scalability standpoint, that headroom is there. It is just up to us to identify those opportunities and take advantage of them.

Everbridge's tech support is amazing. I've been in IT for the last 20 years and I've had a lot of interaction with a lot of vendors for a lot of reasons. The Everbridge team is head-and-shoulders above virtually all of them. Their technical account manager is nothing short of amazing. They spend the time to build the relationships, which I really like. They visit every so often, we have quarterly meetings, we have weekly meetings. They're very responsive. They're really fantastic in that way.

That can be the most valuable aspect of choosing a vendor. The fact of the matter is that you can use a lot of different systems. There is always competition out there. Some do some things better than others and there are little nuances to all the systems. But at the end the day, personally, I'm not a transactional person. I like to build those relationships and build on them and I think that shows in the platform.

We had a conglomeration of a number of tools that were similar in that space but they were not being used anywhere near the way we're using Everbridge now. They were mostly for disaster-recovery types of functions. But we did not use them anywhere near to the same extent as we are now using IT Alerting. We eliminated all of those tools, as far as I know. Some of them were homegrown escalation and on-call type tools. Some were third-party competitors to Everbridge, and we eliminated all of those and consolidated on this platform.

The need for an improvement over what we had was self-evident for an operations person: What was efficient and what wasn't. We could see, fairly easily, what was taking more time than it should. If you're technologically savvy and you know what an automation opportunity looks like, it presents itself.

The initial setup was more complex than I anticipated. Initially, we were using their UI to send our notifications. It wasn't quite integrated with the ticketing system yet, not at phase one. Phase two was the integration with the ticketing system. All of the required data integrations and the normalizing of the data and customizing it for our needs and purposes took more time than I anticipated. Perhaps that was just me, but I was anticipating that it would be a little bit less difficult than it turned out to be.

From phase one where we were using their UI, until we had phase two, which was the initial deployment with the ticketing system, it took about three to four months.

Our implementation strategy was to take a phased approach to get us to our end goal with the integration and our notifications. We had specific business goals: the original deployment, the creation of the templates, and the basic operating model of the system, through to the integration and, now, to the improvements that are in the future-state of the platform. Next is leveraging some of the features within the system that are more intelligent. For example, when you send a notification you could have it posted to the application. There are a whole bunch of more advanced functions that we're still working towards.

One of the other problems we had, which we did not anticipate, was: If we send out a notification to everybody in the enterprise, that's a significant number and, technically, those messages source from "not your domain." There had to be some fine-tuning to make that work in light of things like the spam, IronPorts, etc. on the front-end servers, the mail servers. It took a little bit of work to get that the way we needed it to be.

Including the developers on the ticketing-system side, the deployment took six to eight people on our side. They made the majority of the decisions and handled the testing and implementation. The phase we're in now is more of a business-as-usual release cycle and enhancement type phase. It doesn't require the density of attention that it did.

We used the Everbridge TAM for most of it and then our own ticketing-system people and our own resources.

We definitely have seen ROI. When we have an incident or an outage, we can focus on what we need to do, which is fix the problem, instead of finding forms and sending emails and cobbling together inefficient manual processes. The ROI is clearly there.

We looked at xMatters and at Send Word Now. We also did an internal proof of concept to spec out what it would cost to develop our own system and run it, but for the cost we were looking at to develop it and implement it and run it on a daily basis, it was more cost-effective to use a third party.

This was something that I had actually been working on for a number of years before we adopted Everbridge. I had any number of sessions with some of my operations partners in the company where we would sit down and do a bake-off among those competing tools. As I said, there are nuances to everything, but at the end of the day, we decided we like the Everbridge user interface better. There were some other smaller decision points. Some of it was around cost, but ultimately it was the user interface. And certainly, some of it was due to the people at Everbridge. They were excellent.

My advice would be: Do your homework. It's a matter of looking at your specific needs. To me, it's like buying a car, it's the fundamentals of the system. Does it do what you need it to do, what's important to you? And look at what the future capabilities of the system are. That's part of it as well.

My team, IT, uses the system on a day-to-day basis and the others who use it are the developers on the ticketing-system side. Our team is using it for IT support and I have about 50 or 60 individuals who are working in the system and using the integration, 24/7 and 365. But there are other slices of our organization, which are not IT, that are using it for communication. There's Customer Operations and Field Operations and others that are also using it for similar purposes but different use cases.

In terms of usage, it's integral. We use it many times every day, all day. The various organizations within the company are using it every day for communication and coordination. There are other integration possibilities in some of the existing features that we're not taking advantage of. And in the future state of the platform, there are some interesting possibilities that I see with integration with our monitoring tools and some of our other services and applications.

Everything really seems to integrate pretty well. The support from Everbridge is really excellent. When we want changes or we need improvements, we get those fairly quickly and they're very communicative with regard to the product's platform itself and the enhancements. They seem to be looking very intently at the future to see the space grow and what it's going to evolve into. They're doing a pretty good job with that.

They have helped us with some of the moving parts of the integration with the ticketing system. There are enhancements we wanted with the mobile app, any number of changes with integrations and APIs. We've actually had a lot of improvements to it, even in the last year since we deployed it.

I would rate it a good, solid eight out ten. I'm not going to give anything a ten ever. There is some room to improve the initial-rollout functions which are a little bit painful.

We use it for technical engagement and stakeholder communication during major IT outages.

It has made the technical engagement process more efficient, going from approximately five minutes to generate a page down to 30 seconds.

The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors.

The integration with other solutions needs improvement. I am not at liberty to share the name of the application/vendor we are trying to integrate with, but I can tell you that it is our incident management tool. Due to issues with the libraries provided by Everbridge, we have not been able to integrate IT Alerting with that tool.

Everbridge has been able to deliver in accordance with their SLAs.

Scaling can be a tedious endeavor if users and contacts are manually created.

The technical support is excellent. They routinely answer problems on the first call.

I’m not at liberty to name it but, the previous solution required us to manually look up and engage. This was time-consuming and prone to errors. Those are the reasons we switched.

The initial setup was straightforward as we had a consultant with us. The consultant was helpful. There was a lot of prep work that we could and should have completed prior to the consultant arriving onsite. Had we known to do this, it would have made the engagement more productive.

The deployment took approximately two weeks. Our goal was to configure the teams we engage most often. Those 30 teams represent 95 percent of our volume.

A consultant was used, and the experience was very positive.

The current pricing model is adequate. We feel that the pricing model for our IT Alerting solution is competitive with similar solutions on the market.

We did evaluate other options but I'm not at liberty to comment on them.

My advice is to leverage any of the integrations you can. In addition, do the prep work, including creating contacts, users, and groups, prior to the consultative work provided by Everbridge.

We have over 500 users, a majority of whom are group managers along with some organizational and account admins. We have two FTEs supporting Everbridge and their roles range from configuration management, to vision and strategy, and vendor relations. The product is used extensively, with roughly 25,000 messages sent through the tool annually.

Our use case is using it to reduce the time to assemble everyone, especially when reacting to major incidents, and to reduce the time spent doing manual call-outs and engagements in the course of them.

The background, and why we looked into getting a tool in the first place, is that when we were engaged on an incident and it rose in severity or the scope of impact broadened, there were many different checkboxes that we could check: "Okay, now we need to re-engage this person, this person, and this person." Also, just in the average incident-information process, we needed additional speed in getting people engaged, rather than manually looking up the on-call information to see who's engaged or on-call. We would have to manually call them and possibly get voicemail and have to try the second number.

We use it for every bridge call that we host and every engagement of an on-call group that we need. We use it multiple times a day, every day.

Our performance showed us that, for major incidents, we spent over 40 minutes just making manual call-outs. That is why we implement the tool in the first place and that time has been cut down to two or three minutes. We've had tremendous gains on that.

It's a lot easier to create and manage schedules, especially in comparison to the on-call scheduling creation in ServiceNow. That has always been something of a bear to operate. We've found it's a lot simpler in Everbridge.

It enables everybody on our team to focus on their primary responsibilities, driving toward restoration, instead of being distracted by manually calling folks.

Creating the templates and being able to create my own variables are helpful features.

Their latest features are going to allow me to be a bit more flexible with using Everbridge for internal communications. We started using it for internal incident notifications a few months ago, and having that group lookup, allowing me to create a relation between a property and a variable in the template, and who should be contacted as far as a group in the organization goes, is going to allow for some nice self-service for our internal folks when we transition to a different Everbridge organization for our internal coms.

With their templates, you can only have a maximum of three phases: new, updated, and resolved. It's not always that easy when we open up a call, that we identify who we need, page out, and we're good. A lot of time it requires multiple page-outs. Being restricted to those three phases, there's no way to say, "I want this variable to be persistent, and this one to not be." Everything that you select will be brought over as you continue. In our environment, as we have many different call-outs that have to happen, even though they are incredibly simple to select and execute now in Everbridge, it is quite the long list. I would like to make it a bit easier and more intuitive. I would like to see a bit more flexibility and tighter control over the templates and the variables you can create.

Also, they still have a limitation due to their partner, I believe it's Twilio, where, if you're on an incident call, there is a four-hour time limit. We often have calls that go over four hours in length so people have to drop and rejoin to reset their four-hour timer. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's not ideal. That is pretty persistent with any IT alerting partner you go with.

We've been using it for a year. There have been a couple of instances of our encountering some weird issues with the calls being dropped, or people not being able to hear. That was more towards the beginning part of our go-live. We ended up identifying it through troubleshooting with Everbridge and Twilio and different networks. It was an issue with an AT&T circuit somewhere. They were kind enough to give us a different set of bridge numbers so that we were going on a different path. Since going to those numbers, we haven't encountered that same sort of instability or call-quality issues. 

Other than that, occasionally a service advisory will go out from Everbridge where a certain communication path is having issues. But those are typically quickly resolved. We are pretty comfortable with the stability.

We've had no problems with scalability. We brought in Everbridge shortly after we had bought another company and started merging together into a new, unified company. That, obviously, brings some substantial scaling challenges. But we've encountered no issues with adding many, many more users to the system over the last several months.

We only have a couple of hundred people directly interfacing with Everbridge, maybe a few hundred. But as far as the users we're communicating to, it's a few thousand and that keeps increasing as we progress.

Everybody I've dealt with at Everbridge tech support, barring one individual on their staff, has been pretty nice to work with. They're knowledgeable, they're helpful, they want to assist. There have been a couple of times that it's been challenging to get the escalation that we were looking for. We were hoping to get some more urgency, especially when we were first going live, with the instability issues we were seeing. It took a little longer to get that escalation that we were looking for, but once it happened, we certainly got the amount of attention that we needed on the issue. For the most part, after that experience, it's been pretty good.

We were not using a different solution previously for IT alerting. The on-call schedules were managed and stored in ServiceNow. As I said, the reason behind getting IT Alerting was that everything was manual. We weren't using a competitor like PagerDuty or xMatters.

The initial setup really depends on the environment you are operating in. They can easily integrate and do imports from an HR system and from ServiceNow and from many different applications. They do have a lot of good options that you can easily get things set up with. For internal reasons we couldn't do it, but I definitely saw that the ability was there to do it. I would call it straightforward.

We did the deployment in under a month. It was a pretty aggressive time frame.

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. We were focused on getting the users that we wanted to bring over from ServiceNow identified and on marrying up that data with what was going to be in Everbridge. You can pass that information along through the API connector. We ended up just doing an export and then manually uploading it to Everbridge.

It was a matter of identifying who was in the system that we needed to get in there as a contact. From there, our strategy was to get meetings scheduled with the high-level folks who pass information down through the disparate on-call groups that they're in charge of, so they could let them know what changes were coming.

One big part of the overall strategy was having executive backing, because going from one organizational culture, where folks are used to having a certain amount of time to respond to a bridge call, to Everbridge, where we wanted to have the system escalate, and escalate quickly - since when we engage those folks on a bridge call, it's because we're losing money and our customers are losing money - you have a lot less time to respond to a call before it escalates. Obviously, people who are living on-call schedules are not going to like that kind of news. If you don't have that executive backing, then people aren't going to be as quick to adhere to the new organizational culture of, "you need to be on a call within a few minutes, if we start paging you." There would be no more of this, "I'll be there, when I can, in 15 minutes."

We had our integration consultant from Everbridge on hand. There were no third-parties.

We have definitely seen ROI, not in terms of dollars and cents, but the mean time to restore from major incidents has been more than halved in terms of duration. Being the company we are, in the financial world, and with how many transactions are processed through us in a second, the potential financial savings from even just a minute of reduced outage time can be substantial.

For the one-way license, which refers to someone is just on the receiving end, it's very affordable. I was actually surprised that it was a really good price. The two-way license, like for an on-call resource who is actually going to be in a calendar and be paged, it is a bit more expensive, but for the gains that we've realized, it's certainly worth the price.

We looked at MIR3 - they are called OnSolve now - and we looked at xMatters. MIR3 just didn't check enough boxes. It didn't seem like a good solution for storing and managing and quickly engaging people on bridge calls. xMatters and Everbridge seemed to have a better, more intuitive user interface, more robust options, better reporting options, and more flexibility.

Get that executive leadership backing, and make sure that you're not just going to use Everbridge to page out to people in a different manner. You should look to set that "timer" pretty low on bridge engagement and get people used to responding and getting on bridge calls immediately, because every minute of an outage is lost money.

Determine up front if you are going to do the group integration from whatever application you might be looking to do the user-sync with. If you are going to have an application with on-call schedules maintained, such as Service Now - as I believe there is an option to turn on group sync - be careful about turning that group sync feature on. User sync is pretty straightforward but we were warned against using the group sync feature for various reasons, even from within Everbridge.

Our users are support staff, on-call resources, on-call leaders, incident commanders, communication managers. There are a couple of senior leaders who know how to use it, but it is mainly incident management and communication management.

Our deployment team was just a handful of folks. We needed a little bit of partnership from our ServiceNow folks to get the API into place. You could go with a half-dozen people on the integration. For the maintenance aspect, it's even less than that.

There are four of us who administrate the tool. I'm the communication management piece of it. My manager handles major incident and critical communications, so he's incident management as well, and he does a lot of admin work in it. Our project manager is the incident commander and communication management.

We have support staff who don't have the rights to kick off Everbridge to automatically engage people, but they'll still access the Everbridge Member Portal to manually look up resources and call them for lower-priority issues. We use it pretty heavily right now and we are definitely looking at other ways of utilizing the tool. We expect it to increase pretty substantially, as we go forward.

One of the big things that we're looking to do is integrating it with event monitoring. We're looking to further reduce the mean time to assemble for major incidents by bypassing the current process. Currently, event monitoring takes in a ticket and it gets assigned to a queue in ServiceNow where an agent will see it, and they'll call out the support person. That person will say, "Okay, well we need a bridge call for this." What we are trying to do is identify, with the various application support teams, among the events that are creating tickets, which ones are deemed "critical" that could be a precursor to a major incident. We want to identify those and create incident conditions in ServiceNow that will engage an Everbridge template to get the incident management team engaged right away, rather than waiting on those manual actions to happen. We're still in the early stages of that, and we are looking to increase that sort of usage for Everbridge to gain more efficiencies.

Some of them are live right now. We call them the "Everbridge critical alerts" and we have many that are already in production. We are looking to expand that even more.

I would rate Everbridge IT Alerting at eight out of ten, overall. It's a very powerful tool. We've made a lot of efficiency gains but there are definitely things that, from an enhancement standpoint, we would like to see added to the tool. The progress on that hasn't been as quick as we'd like. Its been pretty slow going.

With what we already have in place, it's enabling us to do a lot. I absolutely love having the tool. I would not rate it as a ten out of ten, but they're definitely heading in the right direction. From what I've seen, as far as what they are planning on having, I would say it could be a ten out of ten this time next year, if things go well in year-two. But for year-one, I would say it's an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of how we started using the product was to add contacts to Everbridge as if it was an Active Directory. We have logins for manager and member portals. The manager portal gives total access and member portal is given to everyone with partial access.

We also use it to send out communications, such as emails, during major incidents from our command center. We have expanded its use as an emergency notification tool.

The rotation and replacement options save our managers a lot of time.

When scheduling, it gives us the option to amend times or replace someone (with an explanation). 

The rules option has been helpful, as we can adjust the conditions in the template.

Explanations are limited to 500 characters in description fields.

While the reporting is good, we are having a problem with one particular report which is creating a large manual process for us.

We don't have stability issues.

We have been able to expand the tool and are planning to take it to the store level.

In our organization, we have 390 management users currently. We are looking to add 250 more. We have requested to have 650 management user licenses in the future.

We currently have 9000 member users. We are looking to add another 3500 member users, so we have requested 12,400 member licenses.

We would like the tech support to have better response times. Since we are looking at going global, they have told us Everbridge has told us that they are working on the issue.

Overall, their responses have been good.

I personally would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Previously, we were using xMatters, then we moved on to Everbridge because we thought there were some limitations xMatters when we used their templates and there were a lot of delays with sending out notifications. We also did not feel that xMatters product was user-friendly.

Initially, we thought it wasn't complicated. However, we did have some issues with stability and had to reach out to the support team. Later on, it wasn't difficult.

The deployment took about three to four months.

We have four team members on our Everbridge team.

It saves us a lot of time.

It is the best tool that I have ever used.