The General Services Administration (GSA) has selected Everbridge’s Mass Notification platform to secure the agency’s employees, facilities and operations, the company reported on Monday.

“The threats that organizations face are constantly evolving. Leveraging a unified solution with situational awareness to know where your people and assets are, combined with the ability to coordinate and communicate across all stakeholders, could be the difference between success or failure,” said Mike Mostow, vice president of Federal at Everbridge.

Everbridge’s CEM platform will help keep employees safe and informed across a variety of threats such as a global pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires, cyberattacks, IT outages and more.

The company’s platform supports more than 70 federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Departments of Defense (DoD), Commerce, Energy (DOE), Interior, Justice (DOJ), and Health and Human Services (HHS) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), among others.

With the selection, Everbridge will expand its Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Agency Authorization. The FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO) has certified that Everbridge meets the standards for the 325 controls in the FedRAMP Moderate baseline and passed the security and risk management renewal process required to support the operational resilience needs of federal agencies.

Everbridge received its FedRAMP authorization in 2018. “Our FedRAMP initiative has been a multi-year, strategic project with the goal of expanding our overall addressable market for our broad Critical Event Management suite,” said Jaime Ellertson, executive chairman of Everbridge’s Board of Directors.

“We are proud to enter into a partnership with the General Services Administration to help them mitigate risks quickly and decisively,” Mostow added.

Avaya has extended its Amazon Web Services (AWS) relationship, to expand artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience capabilities for Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers, Avaya reported on Tuesday. Avaya will serve as an AWS Partner offering AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions. 

“Avaya continues to expand AI capabilities that are evolving the contact center into what is now the customer experience center,” said Eric Rossman, VP of Technology Partners and Alliances for Avaya. 

In partnership with AWS, Avaya can enable customers to leverage AWS AI Services and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to enhance customer and employee experiences across voice and digital channels. Avaya will integrate natural, conversation-driven interactions, leveraging AI and ML.

Avaya’s integration with AWS CCI will strengthen its portfolio of contact center solutions by providing enhanced customer engagement through greater insights, building brand preference and improving operational efficiency. 

The integration with AWS CCI will extend Avaya’s AWS-based cloud efforts and grow Avaya’s vision for AI in the contact center. AWS is also a member of A.I.Connect, an Avaya-led initiative that unites vendors and developers that develop AI-driven solutions. 

“With AWS, Avaya delivers new AI and machine learning innovation that improves the performance and efficiency of customer experience teams, but more importantly, enables deeper and more meaningful human connections between organizations and their customers,” Rossman added. 

About Avaya

Businesses are built by the experiences they provide, and everyday millions of those experiences are delivered by Avaya Holdings Corp. (NYSE: AVYA). Avaya is shaping what's next for the future of work, with innovation and partnerships that deliver game-changing business benefits. 

Our cloud communications solutions and multi-cloud application ecosystem power personalized, intelligent, and effortless customer and employee experiences to help achieve strategic ambitions and desired outcomes. Together, we are committed to help grow your business by delivering Experiences that Matter. 

MetTel has partnered with Geotab to deliver government vehicles access to a suite of managed services that provide critical intelligence, MetTel reported on Tuesday. The suite will help streamline compliance and reporting; reduce total cost of ownership and improve citizen and employee safety; and minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

“Government agencies are looking for ways to provide more transparency, while providing the tools to help reduce costs and increase the safety of government employees and the citizens they serve. MetTel-enabled IoT solutions help provide that, through an easy to use “single pane of glass,” said Robert Dapkiewicz, senior vice president and general manager of MetTel Federal.

Under the partnership, Geotab will leverage its telematics and MetTel will provide its full service fleet management portal to enable government fleets to increase visibility into their vehicles to create efficiencies and help reduce overall costs.

The MetTel-Geotab team will help managers of government vehicles have access to critical intelligence that will deliver enhanced visibility into MetTel-enabled vehicles. The companies’ offerings will include reduced costs; improved driver safety; streamlined compliance and reporting; GHG and EV battery reporting and compliance; and increased efficiency.

The offering will provide a configurable dashboard and reporting software to reduce mundane processes of manual reporting for government regulations, odometer readings and fuel economy. Featuring increased visibility into the availability of vehicles will enhance data-based decisions concerning vehicle and driver utilization.

“We are excited to add our leading telematics platform to MetTel’s expansive technology offering for the U.S. Federal Government,” said Jean Pilon-Bignell, vice president of Business Development, Government and Smart Cities, Geotab. “We are committed to connecting Federal agency vehicles and integrating them into broader IoT strategies.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has recommended operating three satellites over the U.S. as part of the proposed Geostationary and Extended Orbits satellite constellation, SpaceNews reported Monday.

NOAA’s national satellite, data and information service considers the Geo-XO constellation as a potential replacement to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R Series and expects it to help track ocean color and air quality in addition to obtaining lightning observations and imagery.

NOAA expects to equip the GEO-East and GEO-West satellites with ocean color instruments, lightning mappers and infrared imagers. A hyperspectral infrared sounder, atmospheric composition sensor and a partner payload would fly on the GEO-Center satellite.

“The approximate investment that would be needed for the Geo-XO constellation is that GOES-R $12 billion number inflated to the Geo-XO timeframe,” Pam Sullivan, GOES-R system program director, said Monday during the virtual American Meteorological Society meeting.

The agency intends to carry out the first technical review of its plan for the Geo-XO constellation in March 2020 with plans to conduct a system requirements assessment by 2022, preliminary design review by 2025, critical design evaluation by 2027 and initial launch by 2032.

Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), told Defense News in an interview published Monday about technology projects DIU plans to transition into service in the near term and those include work on predictive maintenance and time indications and warning.

“That’s a combination of rapid launch capability, which we’ve been helping with some of the prototyping efforts,” Brown said of DIU’s work on time indications and warning. “And then the analysis of the commercial satellite imagery that comes from that, we’re working with some of the vendors that are looking at artificial intelligence- and machine learning-infused algorithms so you can analyze that and enhance what you might be seeing. 

So that’s an incredible capability if you think about putting all those together, in terms of getting a more real-time view, globally, of what’s happening." Brown discussed the organization’s efforts to improve its transition rate for tech projects and encourage contractors to work with the Department of Defense (DoD) . 

He also mentioned the Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure and Clean Sweep as some of the projects that DIU started as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. When asked about how DIU incentivizes vendors to work with the Pentagon, he said the unit should work on “commercial time frames.”

“We need to be evaluating commercial vendors. And we need to think about how do we work in their world — not ask them to conform to ours,” Brown added.

The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps will implement a centralized approach to buying cloud services under a new policy signed in December 2020 to gain more visibility into their commercial cloud spending, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The Department of the Navy will move cloud purchases via the Naval Digital Marketplace, an electronic provisioning service run by the program executive office for digital and enterprise service, beginning in March. PEO Digital will oversee DON’s cloud contracts and decouple such purchases from larger contracts.

“One of the great lessons that we’ve learned was that when cloud was wrapped up within [other contracts], it created risk to the Department of Navy in understanding where our data was and how security was being implemented,” said Travis Methvin, project manager for the Naval Commercial Cloud Services office.

“It also reduces the amount of time and effort it takes an organization to let their own contract if we can focus on enterprise availability of those things. We’re also looking at how we support our partnership with the cloud offices within DoD and their and their desire to get to an enterprise environment.”

PEO Digital will establish new mechanisms to track DON’s commercial cloud consumption and Methvin said the program executive office will initially focus on the department’s fielding of Microsoft Azure cloud services.

“Over the next four-to-six months, you’re going to start to see the ability to use API-driven self-service deployments for things like infrastructure-as-code for our agreements with Azure, you’ll start to see software-as-a-service with our partnership with ServiceNow, and we’ll be looking at other opportunities for industry partnerships that allow mission owners to start to work a little bit more efficiently,” Methvin said. “What used to take nine to 12 months for individual applications, we’re really trying to reduce the barrier and get it into a week’s time.”

Air Force Research Laboratory's Aerospace Systems Directorate demonstrated high-altitude precision airdrop during a test flight in November 2020.

AFRL said Friday that it dropped bundles of the Optimized High Altitude Low Opening cargo delivery system that weighed over 1,900 pounds, with batches of four, six and 16 units.

The tests ran from Nov. 16 to 19 in Yuma, Arizona. Researchers divided the bundles between legacy and modern systems to properly differentiate performance rates.

“The main goal was to demonstrate the capabilities of the Optimized High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) technology, which includes probabilistic airdrop planner algorithms and variable transition altitude in wireless activation device,” said Daniel Schreiter, the program manager for precision airdrop at AFRL.

The new HALO technology is designed to allow for high-altitude drops, and AFRL plans to further modernize airdrop capabilities as future requirements arise.