Calling on WhatsUp Gold Professional Services for Faster Time to Value

Talladega County 9-1-1 receives 99,000 requests for assistance and manages 252,000 calls without any interruptions.

Talladega County 9-1-1’s Challenge

For Talladega County 9-1-1, countywide consolidation of incoming calls for police, fire departments, EMS and more into a single call center network was only the beginning. The next challenge was how to manage the complex mission-critical network for zero downtime.

Talladega County 9-1-1 Consolidated Communications Systems Center

• Coordinates incoming emergency and non-emergency calls for 5 law enforcement agencies, 4 municipal fire departments, 15 volunteer fire departments, 2 municipal EMS services, and 4 other private EMS services
• Serves a 760 square mile county with a population of over 80,000
• Includes phone equipment, computer-aided dispatch, countywide microwave connections, and support for the business office

WhatsUp Gold Professional Services to the Rescue

According to Talladega County 9-1-1 director Victor Kennedy, “I was happy enough with the monitoring and email alerts our consultant Lee Moore had set up during installation. But I really had no idea of the full potential of WhatsUp Gold.”

After a conversation with John Ward, Talladega County 9-1-1’s account manager at Ipswitch, Kennedy decided it was time to tap into more of the capabilities of the product.

Mike Nyland, WhatsUp Gold Professional Services Consultant, worked onsite at Talladega County 9-1-1 for two days. Nyland adjusted some of the device setups, added SNMP monitoring of the microwave network, and set up reports based on the organization’s detailed emergency response requirements.

Nyland comments, “Talladega County 9-1-1 has extreme mission-critical requirements. Most businesses want to know when something’s been down for 5 minutes or an hour. But with a 9-1-1 center you need to know immediately. WhatsUp Gold ensures that the devices on the network are actually up – or if they’re not, that administrators are notified well before the backup device goes out.”

Talladega County 9-1-1 After Professional Services Consulting

• Grew to 300 licenses; expanding to 130 devices managed
• Monitoring the microwave network via SNMP
• Monitoring vendor-managed network components for added redundancy
• Investigating possibility of monitoring the radio communications system
• Troubleshooting vendor-managed components for faster problem identification
• Established detailed device set ups and thresholds
• Set up comprehensive reporting to support business objectives

Kennedy – a communications and IT professional professional since 2001 – ”realized I had only scratched the surface of WhatsUp Gold until we worked with Mike. In just two days we developed a complete strategy with the monitoring and reporting structure to support it. I can’t think of any software I’ve ever worked with that’s come anywhere near to delivering the value we get from WhatsUp Gold.”

In its first year of operation, Talladega County 9-1-1 received 99,000 requests for assistance and managed 252,000 calls without any interruptions.

Nyland says Kennedy’s experience with Professional Services is typical for Ipswitch customers. “Victor could have spent months studying the user manuals and figuring all this out. But his time is more important than that.”