"AlarmPoint 3.1 delivers significant customer-driven enhancements that further strengthen our customers' ability to resolve IT incidents before they can impact their business," said Troy McAlpin, CEO of AlarmPoint Systems. "Through our alliances with market leaders Avaya and RIM to co-develop several areas of new functionality, we now offer our customers key communications-based technologies critical to facilitating collaboration and ensuring important IT events are quickly resolved."

Significant new areas of functionality in the AlarmPoint Enterprise 3.1 release include:

• Enhanced Communication Capabilities with Voice over IP Support. Through its collaboration with communications leaders such as Avaya, AlarmPoint 3.1 now supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for use with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems. Customers now have a massively scalable option to receive notifications of IT events by voice - without needing to purchase additional costly hardware. With SIP support, AlarmPoint can capture relevant IT events, and route them to any network-based communication device in addition to using traditional means of communication. In the case of broad-scale disaster scenarios, this will allow customers to dynamically scale their "virtual" phone lines so that notifications can be sent without the use of a third-party service provider - saving significant operating costs and increasing a company's control over the disaster-recovery process.

"To be competitive in today's real-time world requires greater business agility than ever before. Organizations and their people are working faster, and have to respond ever more quickly and effectively to real-time business events," said David Butler, director of business solutions and partners in emerging technologies, Avaya. "By integrating AlarmPoint and Avaya solutions through open SIP standards, we can provide customers with richer communications choices enabling more effective event resolution."

• Support for Users of Popular RIM BlackBerry®. Through its co-development efforts with Research In Motion (RIM), AlarmPoint 3.1 now allows customers to message important IT events to employees directly through their companies' BlackBerry® Enterprise Server (BES). With its native support for BES push technology, AlarmPoint 3.1 helps customers increase the scale and reliability of their IT-event messaging, remove many potential failure or throttle points (such as the public Internet or internal email server traffic), and provide greater two-way incident-response capabilities. Additionally, companies with more stringent data-security requirements - such as today's financial services institutions - can now protect their messages behind the company firewall.

"In the past our process was to broadcast messages to multiple people and essentially hope someone would take the issue. Missed incidents or events where we are slow to respond could have a negative impact on the business. Now with AlarmPoint and BMC Event Manager, important service-impacting events are captured, targeted, sent to appropriate personnel, and escalated until cured," said John Russell, senior systems administrator, Pacific Life Insurance Company. "The addition of AlarmPoint's new module for BlackBerry Enterprise Server will allow us to use our company-wide deployment to quickly notify our mobile staff and take resolution actions from our BlackBerry smart phones before service degradation occurs."

"AlarmPoint's support for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server can provide IT organizations with a robust, feature-rich ability to manage their IT infrastructure from virtually any location," said Jeff McDowell, vice president, global alliances at Research In Motion. "The ability to facilitate mobile workforce event notification and resolution further extends the value proposition of the BlackBerry platform, and presents another opportunity for customers to maximize the return on their wireless investments."

• Broader Enterprise Integration with Support for Web Services. For large organizations - which typically house many custom-developed applications - AlarmPoint 3.1 now offers a Web services integration approach using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Eliminating the need to write custom code, the AlarmPoint Application Programming Interface (API) allows customers to easily push and pull relevant data into and from the AlarmPoint application - providing customers with greater integration capabilities across the multiple systems and applications in their enterprise. The addition of Web Services support furthers AlarmPoint's goal to become the standard notification and resolution application across a company's entire IT and business application infrastructure.

Availability

AlarmPoint 3.1 is now available from AlarmPoint Systems and authorized reseller partners.