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.

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.

We switched because there is more capability in one place. We were using Dataminr. Dataminr is weird because it has different functions, but they're trying to become a direct competitor in all capabilities. Dataminr is now morphing to mass notification and other capabilities. We still use Dataminr, and I have used it in previous positions too because it tends to be more timely, but there's a lot more noise. It didn't have the notification portion of it, but now they're getting that capability.

For mass notification, I've used OnSolve and Send Word Now. I can't remember all the ones I've used.

In my previous company, that's one reason why it took us 45 minutes to engage personnel. It was all manual. At this company, I do not know what they had prior to Everbridge.

This is our first time using this kind of solution. We were doing it manually before. We were sending out emails and WebEx conferences manually.

We used xMatters and switched, as we had licensed Everbridge Mass Notification already and found that xMatters was complex to manage.

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.

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.

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.

Our previous solution was to get on the phone and on email and try to remember who needs to be notified. We switched to this product to assure standardization of notifications and to create groups of people who need notifications.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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