Their clients getting the message

BEACON OF HOPE: David Baeder, CEO of notification-software company Alert Solutions, says that the industry is of value to a variety of sectors, including education, retail, government and even churches. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
BEACON OF HOPE: David Baeder, CEO of notification-software company Alert Solutions, says that the industry is of value to a variety of sectors, including education, retail, government and even churches. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Getting a message out quickly – whether it’s a school closing due to a snowstorm, a lockdown because of a threat to public safety or a physician checking the results of a patient’s lab test – has become a global priority in the 21st century.
Alert Solutions Inc. in Cranston is full-steam ahead in the swiftly moving current of international communications.
“Our world has a single, very important requirement – high-speed access to knowledge, events and interactions,” said Alert Solutions President and CEO David Baeder.
Early incarnations of Baeder’s notification technology were broad-based, because such a wide range of businesses, organizations and communities could make good use of the systems. The company then zeroed in on finding the segments of the market that could make the best use of the technology.
“The school is probably the single largest user in today’s market, next to the medical industry, that has a real-time need to distribute information in a timely fashion,” said Baeder.
“So we focused on schools to find the best way we could deploy relatively complex technologies to educators so they did not have to learn the technology, but rather is was a simple workflow process through their normal course of work,” said Baeder. “We are simply a button in the regular software they use.”
Alert Solutions works with educational-software companies to embed a button for alerts, which are emergency elements, and notifications, the nonemergency messages.
A teacher, or someone else in school administration, can press that button in the software, and select one or many students, parents, staff or community representatives, type in a message and send it via email, fax, voice, SMS or Facebook.
“However they’ve decided to receive their messages, our system will create that interface between the software and the recipient,” said Baeder.
If a suspicious person on a campus turned out to be gunman, for example, the emergency-notification system would allow a principal to select “all students and all staff” and hit “go.”
“It would immediately bring out a preset template and broadcast that through every channel possible and distribute that to tens or tens of thousands of people simultaneously,” Baeder said. In the case of something like an “Amber Alert” for a missing child, Alert Solutions has a system.
“You could go to our software, in that particular case, select that button and select to have your population displayed on a Google map, you draw a circle around that house by 10 miles and it would broadcast to everybody inside that circle,” said Baeder.
The preference for type of contact can be given to the school, a church or registered on a website.
“The reason we’ve been so successful in schools, and we’re responsible for close to 2 million students and their parents right now, is ease of use and simplicity of the integration,” Baeder said.
The list of notifications that can be included for a school includes bus delays, school closings, balances on lunch accounts, tardiness, absences and parent-teacher communications.
Alert Solutions clients span the globe, including one in every state in the U.S., as well as Singapore, Australia and the entire country of Guam.
Business has been on a steady, upward course in the past three years, said Baeder.
In just one segment – education – the reason is visible.
“There’s a lockdown every day. Actually, all over the country, there’s more than one lockdown a day,” said Baeder.
“What makes it a billion dollar industry is that alerts and notifications provide meaningful value to every element of the marketplace – for example, shopping malls for things like a gas-main break, a suspicious package or a gang fight.” he said. Churches and office parks are other examples of segments that make good use of such systems.
Building on its expansive client base in education, Alert Solutions is expanding to the medical industry and is always in search of good workers.
The company has doubled its workforce over the past year to reach 36, with 30 at the Cranston office and six who telecommute.
“We grew 32 percent from 2011 to 2012,” said Baeder. “For 2013 … we’ll probably grow 42 percent. Next year, we project 50 percent growth. … If we can hire, we can grow faster.” •

COMPANY PROFILE
Alert Solutions Inc.
OWNER: Three owners, including David Baeder
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Software services for alerts and notifications
LOCATION: 201 Hillside Road, Cranston
Employees: 36
Year Established: Originally established in 1989 as Business Link International, rebranded in 2010 as Alert Solutions Inc.
Annual Sales: $6 million to $7 million

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