Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

We use it for the email integration portion.

We've created fake units in the CAD system and, when activated, it sends an email to Everbridge. That has allowed the dispatchers to send out quick notifications. Before, they'd have to log into Everbridge, find the right thing, fill it out - do the full Everbridge thing - which always got deferred to later because they were busy doing other things. By creating the fake unit in CAD to trigger the email integration, all they have to do is assign a unit using the system they're already working in and it will send out the raw information from the call. That's been helpful so that the command staff gets quicker notifications of things.

The initial reason we got it was the lightning protection integration. We had a guy struck by lightning at the airport about a year and a half ago. Our lightning system was going off but this provides an extra layer of protection. With it, all the people who have signed up for that notification automatically get an Everbridge notification on their phone as soon as the thing goes off. They know, "This is active, I should do something about that," instead of relying on the horns and sirens that the lightning system uses. It's hard to quantify. We haven't had anyone struck by lightning since, but we hadn't had anyone struck by lightning before either. It is just an extra way for our tenants to be able to be in the loop on what's happening.

The lightning integration has been really helpful, especially for our maintenance department. It was intended for tenants and stakeholders. But the maintenance department, because they're out in the field all day, their director said all their work phones get it, no matter what. Before, they were running around trying to find people to tell them, "Lightning is on," to make sure they were shutting down. Now, everybody out there in the field who has a phone, and almost all of them do, immediately knows the lightning system is active and that they need to shut down.

The email integration, the ability to launch from other programs using email triggers, was the primary reason we got the solution and it's been really helpful. We've been able to integrate our CAD system into it using it. The CAD system is kind of old and it doesn't like to talk to things so the integration is useful.

We also have a lightning protection system and were able to integrate it using email. The lightning was our main purpose for upgrading to IT Alerting but we have found other uses for it since then.

It does have a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you're trying to parse information, instead of just sending it raw. Learning the Regular Expression language, to try and get it to pull out what you want, is a pretty steep learning curve upfront. The steep learning curve is specifically for IT Alerting, its features. And, for the API integrations, you've got to know how to write the REST API code if you want to use them.

The Everbridge system itself was fairly straightforward to learn.

An incident management feature would be nice because, as it stands now, you select different items when you're filling out a form to launch a notification. If those were more conditional it would help. Right now it just puts out whatever you put into the form, whereas, if you could specify a "yes" or "no" and it would input a different verbiage depending on the case, that would be nice to have, instead of having to spell out all the verbiage.

The only thing our users want, because they work 12-hour shifts and it times out if they're not using it, would be to stay logged in for at least 12 hours before it times out. The max is eight hours right now.

We haven't had any issues with stability. For the product as a whole, we have had one delayed notification and we've had the product for two and a half years now. We called support on that one and found out they were having a nationwide problem but it was fixed within two to three hours. They sent out a root-cause analysis a couple of hours after that, explaining to us what happened. They're pretty responsive.

That's the only delay we've had since we've had the overall Everbridge product.

In this budget cycle, we just purchased some more seats for notifications and we're trying to get all of our in-house staff on it. It was pretty simple. We called them, we told them what the deal was. They were willing to work with us, to work with it in the budget cycle process. As far as scaling up and working within the budget cycle, they understood all that and were really helpful in getting it worked out.

We don't have that many problems with Everbridge. The couple of times I've had to engage with tech support they've gotten right back to me, helped me figure it out. Even the one time it was something I was doing wrong, they were able to point me in the right direction and get me squared away. They replied quickly. I don't have anything bad to say about them.

We were using CodeRED. We needed some of the functionality Everbridge had that CodeRED didn't have. CodeRED was fairly solid and was a heck of a lot cheaper, because we were piggy-backed on with our Sheriff's Office. But the functionality of the internet management portion of Everbridge outweighed the cost difference.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Everyone on the implementation team had a good understanding of it and, once Everbridge turns it on, they let you play with it, so that's good. And then they sent out a team to do training. We had a pretty good handle on it, so the training was more addressing our questions. They turned it on about a week before the training crew got out here, to let us start messing around in it. We were able to figure it out, so by the time the training crew got here, it was more like questions and answers, except for our PR staff who hadn't played with it at all. They got a full top-down, step one, step two, training, whereas the Admin folks got a bit more Q&A. They were really adaptable to what were trying to do.

We thought the base product was pretty reasonable. It can pricey once you start adding stuff on, but that's the same with anything. We have scaled up almost every year. We bought the base, 500 contacts, the thing they sell to airports, in our first year. Then we got the IT Alerting because we needed the email integration stuff and some of the scheduling features. This year we've gone up another step in contacts, from 500 to 1,000. We're investing in the system.

We were okay with CodeRED. The user interface was kind of clunky for how we were using it with the dispatchers. But that was more because of how we were doing it. For some of the commands, at the time, they didn't want electronic-sounding messages so they were making the dispatchers verbally record every message. Once we went with Everbridge, we got the command staff to be okay with electronic sounding messages; Everbridge is reliant on electronic messaging. Before, for whatever reason, they wanted voice messages and that's what CodeRED did really well. But it required a dispatcher to record it and it was a whole thing. Once we got everyone convinced that text messages are reliable, and that they'll get an email if the text message doesn't work, that there's an app - all that - it was a pretty easy sale after that.

Also, CodeRED called everything you had at the same time. With Everbridge you can have it switch methods every five minutes. CodeRED was "call everything, every time." It called your house phone, your cell phone, your work cell, your personal cell, your dog's cell, your cat's cell, your wife, your daughter. It called them all, all at the same time. That's why it was called CodeRED, because your whole house went on fire. IT Alerting can be set to call just one phone at a time. That was a big sell too.

Dig into the resources they have, like Everbridge University. Don't rely completely on the on-site training because it's only one day. The best way to learn is by doing. You need to get in there, push the buttons, pull the triggers, etc. My advice would be, when they turn it on, get in there and put in a couple of contacts and start sending messages, to get used to the interface. Take their online stuff, use all the resources they give you. Don't just rely on that one day of on-site training they provide, that's not going to do it for you.

You can go into Everbridge University and type in, "I want to know how to do 'x'," and there will be modules on how to do that. You can watch the courses and it gives you enough to get in there and start figuring it out. There is also an interactive user community.

We haven't gotten much into the API stuff. We need to. We're starting to use scheduling a little more. With our police and fire department and the air-com staff, the staff that I manage, we're trying to get more people involved with it. Because the scheduling is its own thing and it doesn't integrate with how they schedule their staff, it's been a little difficult getting them to stand that up. But that's more just trying to find someone there who is willing to keep that schedule in Everbridge up to date so we can make sure we're not waking up people who shouldn't be woken, and that we're alerting the people who need to know. That's what we're focusing on now.

We like it. It works great. If you ask the dispatchers who do 90 percent of the launches, it's leaps and bounds better than what we were doing before. Back then, they were having to call in and type in all these codes and verbalize the messages. If they misspoke they had to hang up and start over. It was a giant pain. With Everbridge, it's just fill out the form. If "x" is happening you click on that form, you fill it out and hit Go and it goes. You don't have to worry about whether the right person will get it because that's all been pre-programmed. They really like the ease of use.

This has been one of the better products that you buy off the shelf because it just works. With almost everything you buy that requires as much customization as something like this does, you're going to have problems, but we've had very few with Everbridge. It just works.

We went from a manual email system to an organized responsive automated system. It was able to improve our efficiency and improve everyone's responsiveness, because people were not responding to emails. 

It also improved our ability to capture everything in tickets, whereas before, emails and tickets were rarely, if ever, getting created.

The most important features are the scheduling capability and the integration with ServiceNow. The ease of putting in a replacement person who will cover for you, or if you want to switch with two people, this is very easy to do. It is very easy to capture the calendaring and make sure everybody is aware of it. There is ability for it to communicate back and forth with ServiceNow and our ticketing system. This is much easier and more real-time in its capturing what is happening when a ticket opens, a ticket is accepted for work, and it is closed out.

There is also the application that you can install on your phone, which the engineers really like. If allows you the flexibility to choose: Whether you notify your home phone or your cell phone, and whether you get a text first. You get choose in what order, so the flexibility for each engineer is very good.

I swapped two people's weeks, and at least from what I saw, I had to do each day individually. It would be nice if I could swap two people's weeks without having to do it each day. There may be a way to do it, but I just didn't find it, so I did it day-by-day. This would be a neat feature to have. 

It just runs. We have not had a single outage; nothing. There has not been a single issue with it in the time that we have had it running. It just works.

The best thing I could say about any system is that it just works. That is the highest compliment that anyone can give to a system. It is one less headache that I have because I know that it is up and running.

We are not a heavy usage, enormous company, but I see no limitations to the scalability of it. You could use this if you were a small company, and you could use this if you were a 4500 person U.S. company or a 200,000 person global company.

I could see how it would scale up very easily.

Tech support is excellent. They are very responsive. We are able to reach them very quickly. On a scale of one to 10, I would give them a 10. They are very quick about getting us answers when working with us.

Their account team is excellent. Their marketing team is excellent. 

We had a very manual system where we alerted everyone to all system alerts.

With Everbridge, we were able to set up a schedule where only people on call get notified, so everybody was not getting emails and having to somehow wake up in the middle of the night.

We were also able to split out our system alerts so we now have five-minute system alerts that the infrastructure team likes to see. However, we do not need to open up a ticket and have an engineer react to it. We have a separate one now where after 30 minutes, it creates a ticket and alerts an engineer to investigate. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. The configurations took us a day and a half to be completely set up. We saved the last half a day in case we ran into problems. After, a year or two of using it, never found a problem. Therefore, it was very easy to set up.

Their support staff and the installation/professional services team were great.

When implementing, talk to your account team and work with the installation team. Make sure you have a plan as to what you are looking for and work closely with the Everbridge team. They will get you where you need to go.

Their pricing is a good value and very reasonable. They are very upfront about their pricing. There is nothing confusing about it.

We were looking for an IT alerting system. A couple of my peers gave me a couple of different suggestions. I believe I might have met them originally at the ServiceNow Knowledge Conference, and we looked at a couple of other systems along with this. We had a team of people who reviewed different options and functions that each system had. Out of that evaulation, we selected Everbridge.

We evaluated PagerDuty as a potential option. However, the system feels like it is stuck a bit in the past.

I am pretty happy with the way it works. We are very happy with it. We have not made changes to it because it just works.

It does what it says it does. The application works. They have a long history, but the system is advanced and modern. It has a lot of great features and they keep adding to it.

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.

Escalation and incident management.

We have been able to quantify improvements in escalation and time to resolution. It has decreased timeframes and improved resolution by 35 - 40 percent.

We used to have one individual handling a call, along with other duties. So at times, they would have to step away from those other duties to handle the call or reach out to someone else. This solution has allowed them to be on the call for questions, while still being able to escalate outward.

• Incident management
• Ease of integrations

It could use more enhancement type integrations, but no improvements to functionality are needed.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is helpful.

We did not have a previous solution. We were looking at solutions to allow us to better streamline escalation and incident management between teams.

Straightforward. It is software as a service. We had a brief setup and training session.

Pricing is reasonable, based on different customer types.

PagerDuty.

The service and support teams are very knowledgeable and willing to work with you on improving overall functionality and enhancements.

Alerts from our monitoring system to hit on-call and our help desk to create on-call bridges.

We have been somewhat able to quantify the benefits. Users like the ease of use via the mobile app. Also, the simplicity of the on-call process is encouraging stakeholders to use the product rather than to try to call someone directly.

• System availability
• SaaS solution, so no infrastructure
• Mobile app

Powerful conference bridging that rigorously reaches out to stakeholders, which saves time working an issue. The mobile app provides ease of use for our resolvers and mobile push has proven quick and reliable. It also gives us flexibility around creating sometimes complex shifts within an on-call calendar.

One thing that could be improved would be to enable the mobile app to more easily display published calendars via the Member Portal. Currently, it is quite difficult.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Tech support is excellent; very responsive and they provide good follow-up.

We did use another product previously and we switched because Everbridge met our requirements. In addition, our Global Security team was using the Everbridge Mass Notification product, so going with it created synergy.

We selected Everbridge through a PoC process performed early in 2017.

The initial setup was very fast with the controller coming online almost right away. The implementation team assisted us in onboarding our users and calendars. The complex part has been in transitioning our user community to the new system.

Get a clear idea of the number of users (those that manage calendars and/or initiate incidents) and use SSO which greatly facilitates adoption.

xMatters.

Any new system will create adoption challenges, especially if you are migrating off another platform. Emphasize the benefits of moving to it (SaaS, the mobile app, ease of use, system stability) and be sure to conduct both formal training and close follow-up with users.

IT incident management.

It's now a little quicker to get folks together on a bridge. It has enabled us to have quicker times to resolution.

The ability for people to be able to join a bridge with one press of a button. It gives us the ability to contact the correct people via rules, based on conditions. 

The ability for members to change their schedules, and change the person they're swapping with, could use improvement. For two people to swap, both people have to log in, as you can only update your own schedule with a member account.

Suppose I am swapping with Bill for the day because he is sick. It makes no sense that both he and I each have to update the schedule. He has to go in and put me as a replacement for him. Then, the day he is taking for me, I have to go in and put him as my replacement.

It's pretty stable.

It's scalable.

The tech support is great. They're almost always able to solve my issues pretty quickly.

The initial setup was probably somewhere in the middle, between straightforward and complex. I think the some of the harder parts were the importing of all the data.

Definitely use the rules and conditions so you can contact the right people for different outages. The GUI is a little tough to navigate. It's not very straightforward when someone is trying to change schedules.

It's very accurate and, once you get to know it, you can make it meet your needs.

For IT alerting, we are using it for incident management for severity 1 and 2 type call-outs. We are using the calendar for on-call rotations, and we have configured call trees within the calendar to page out based on system and business impacts. 

We have been able to use it to track and verify that people are on the bridge. It has also made it much easier when you have one touch to join the bridge, and we have been tracking our resolution time, which is now shorter. This is partly because of Everbridge and it being easier to get people on the phone. Also, we are able to escalate and track resources throughout the incident process.

They have improved our ability to be flexible in the way that we are setting up our calendar and structure. We can use it for individual call-outs versus an incident versus being able to run a test, etc. 

You can build consistent templates. They give you a couple of different phone numbers, so if you have more than one incident (which we have had), you can page out to different people and have people run different call bridges from that point. 

The other thing that I personally like is the flexibility that we have to do updates four times a day. We do not just do it once a day or once a week. We do it four times a day. If somebody changes their phone number in the middle of the day, we will pick it up and be able to make sure if they are on call that night that we can call the right number. This configuration has been good for us.

The ability to not have to worry about the IT alerting and calendar resources. I would like it to be simpler in the sense of a different cost structure. 

I would like to see: When employees move locations, how does it correct in the system (Everbridge) versus PeopleSoft (which we also run)? I need to check on this functionality.

We have never had any issues with stability. 

From a functionality standpoint, we have been able to go in there, run things, and do things. We have had great success. We have written a white paper about the fact that we had 49 people trapped in Puerto Rico with the hurricanes. We have used it for more than 500 different notifications, tests, etc. I think the way it is configured and setup has been fairly successful.

We are growing with mergers. We have added approximately 500 people over the year. We are merging with some other divisions and had no problems with scalability. We have consistently grown under PeopleSoft.

My biggest compliment is we have great account management people that help us out. We have been able to turn the tool over to IT people that have never used it, and they have been able to run it with minimal help or support. 

We still work with our implementation manager, who has been extremely effective, very consistent, and spot on. I have opened up about 10 tickets with approximately seven of them being very positive with quick turnaround, the support being knowledgeable, and knowing the answer. In maybe just one instance, a person did not listen very well, then I ended up calling our implementation manager. 

We did have a previous solution, but they were bought out. I used this solution for a couple of years.

Since I have already done the setup with our competitor, I pretty much understood the project.

We hired Everbridge to be on site for three days. This was very helpful, because of our resources were strained. We got Everbridge in a room and the project got done, versus trying to string it along. Therefore, I thought the implementation was actually good. 

The implementation was simple. They have Everbridge University online. They have videos and a help desk which will be able to help you if you choose. They have multiple ways to get you to the place where you are looking to be.   

They are one of the top three most expensive products. I also understand if you are going to use them for IT alerting, it is worth it. They are competitively priced, but the IT alerting is the differentiator. The way that they market it and push it out. That is their premier function. 

Their call structure is based on how many people are IT alert people and who is on the calendar, and the cost will be driven by those numbers versus if you are using it for the non-IT alert. As you look at the competition and other vendors, make sure you truly understand your cost structure with them.

When we did our contract, we did a three year contract with fixed pricing. We locked in the pricing for three years. As we have grown, we locked in pricing for additional units of employees. 

We went through about an 18 month RFP process. We issued it to 10 different organizations. We narrowed it down to the top three. We did demos and brought in our senior IT people to participate in the demos from that point.

There are only one or two companies that can even come close to the detail requirements of IT alerting, like Send Word Now and Text Matters, their systems do not come close. They are cheap knock offs. We did demos with them, priced them out, and while they were cheaper, they did not have the scalability and quality that we were looking for, and that is why we eliminated them. 

We also evaluated xMatters.

• Continue to do detailed RFP requirements.
• Know how to differentiate solutions and what you are buying. 
• Demo it and make sure that it meets your requirements and integrate it with your tools and systems. 

If you buy it and don't install it (or you don't install it right then), you are wasting your money. I am assuming that if you are going to invest a couple thousand dollars a year, easily, if not more depending on the size of the organization. 

The tool does not change the process. It facilitates the process. Don't expect the tool to solve the business process. 

They truly take security very seriously on passwords and make you change it frequently.