As Students Return to School, Technology from Washington-Area Company Helps Keep Them Safe

Omnilert now is expanding its emergency messaging technology to companies, cities - even kid soccer leagues

By Bob Keefe | August 20, 2010

With students preparing to return to campus, colleges are getting out the books, cleaning up the classrooms - and installing systems to alert students and faculty about emergencies ranging from snowstorms to school shootings.

At the center of the still-budding technology is Omnilert LLC, a Washington-area firm that pioneered emergency electronic notification technology and now claims to be the market leader in the space.

The company's Web-based messaging system, called e2Campus, instantly connects campus security officials to students and faculty via email, text messages, electronic billboards and social networking sites such as Facebook.

In the past several months, Leesburg, Va.-based Omnilert has won contracts with universities ranging from little Wor-Wic Community College in Massachusetts to Palo Alto University in California. It is now used at more than 750 colleges and universities.

The company generally charges about $1 per student per year for its system.

"I don't know if it's because the economy is turning around or what … but ever since July 1, things have really picked up," said Omnilert vice president Bryan Crum.

With events like this year's massive snowstorm that pummeled the East Coast and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, an increasing number of schools are installing electronic emergency messaging systems like Omnilert's in the lead-up to a new school year.

A 2009 survey of college administrators by the National Campus Safety and Security Project showed that about 58 percent of all colleges and universities now have an emergency message communication system in place.

About 95 percent were e-mail based; about 75 percent were text/instant messaging based and about 60 percent relied on telephone networks.

Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to all of those systems. Cell networks can get overloaded if everybody on campus is using their phone at the same time. Text alert systems typically require students and faculty to opt-in. Power or Internet outages can render email and telephone networks useless.

What Omnilert's e2Campus system offers that some others don't is that it works across multiple communication platforms, said Ara Bagdasarian, CEO of the privately held company.

"Our system is designed to be able to constantly add communication points," he said. After all, "five years ago nobody had heard of Facebook."

Versatility is partly what Palo Alto University was looking for when it began searching for an out-of-the-box emergency messaging system.

"We have four branch campuses and were having problems getting urgent information to the community for things like power outages, email outages, road closures, campus closures, and things like that," David Leavitt, director of information technology for Palo Alto University said in a statement via Omnilert.

Within an hour after implementing e2Campus, Leavitt said, the school's emergency notification system was up and running.

Bagdasarian and a partner co-founded Omnilert in 2003 after reading about a Lehigh University student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a killer who was known to be on campus.

The company piloted its technology at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, and in 2004 the school became the first in the country to install an emergency text notification system, according to Bagdasarian.

In April 2007, after a student killed 32 people and wounded dozens more on the Virginia Tech campus in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, interest in Omnilert's products soared.

Along with expanding to colleges and universities across the country, the 50-employee company is pushing into other areas as well.

Shortly after launching its system for colleges, Omnilert rolled out a similar system called Amerilert for corporate and government users.

In 2005, while coaching his kid's soccer team in northern Virginia, Bagdasarian stumbled across another application. A game was on the verge of getting rained out, and he needed to notify other parents. After realizing the hassle of calling all those parents, he created Rained Out, an application that sends an automatic text and email notification to parents.

"We had 2,000 people signed up in a couple of weeks," Bagdasarian said. To pay for the messaging system, Rained Out relies on advertising from local merchants - so local pizza parlors and other businesses can get their names not just on kids' uniforms but on the text alerts sent to their parents.

What's next?

Bagdasarian said Omnilert is planning to roll out a new system in the next several months that will let local municipalities contact residents by text message and email with weather alerts, emergency situations and other information.

"We think it's really going to change how communities and municipalities communicate with residents," he said.



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