VAR Spearheads $20 Million Contract With VA For Crisis Communications Platform

AtHoc, a division of BlackBerry, on Monday unveiled a $20 million multi-year contract extension to support the Department of Veterans Affairs' enterprise-wide crisis communications platform.

Four Points Technology, a Chantilly, Va.-based value-added reseller that focuses on data center infrastructure, mobility and security, will spearhead the deployment of AtHoc's networked crisis communications platform to support the VA's notification system and personnel accountability system.

Four Points Technology's commitment to the VA stems from the company's own president and CEO, David Gilchrist, a service-connected disabled veteran who provided oversight for the instruction and supervision of more than 200 personnel during his last active duty assignment.

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"As a service-disabled veteran-owned business, our focus is on supporting the VA," Joel Lipkin, chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, told CRN. "We act as the prime contractor, we deliver the maintenance and support for the AtHoc software, and as we roll forward, we anticipate we'll have the opportunity to work with the VA to enhance the offering of AtHoc technology further."

The contract, which became effective in September, will run 39 months and extends the original contact between AtHoc and the VA, formed in 2010.

San Mateo, Calif.-based AtHoc, which was acquired by BlackBerry in September, touts its networked crisis communications platform as a secure cloud platform with an array of applications leveraging mobility, hybrid cloud and the IP network to facilitate real-time collaboration in crisis situations.

The platform will extend protection to more than 600,000 VA personnel and expand the scope and functionality of the VA personnel accountability system.

In addition to enabling alerts across phones, pagers, FAX machines and desktops, the platform also allows for integration with other VA systems such as digital media systems.

"The VA took an innovative approach to what they needed. … They needed to be able to alert all their employees and contractors, and they needed to be able to account for all their employees during a crisis," said Dubhe Beinhorn, vice president of federal sales at AtHoc.

This platform will be extremely useful during crisis events, which the VA has seen in the past with Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard shooting in 2013.

But the platform will also have important implications for the VA at local levels, when the VA needs to communicate with employees and deliver up-to-the minute information about operational status.

"AtHoc's system allows you to partition the software down to certain local levels or even buildings, [which] enables the autonomous operation of everything from a single local point," said Beinhorn. "More often and specific to the VA [are] incidents occurring in VA medical centers across the country that are centric to where that event is."

Four Points Technology's Lipkin stressed that the contract indicates how BlackBerry, is reaping the benefits of its recent acquisitions of both AtHoc and mobile device management company Good Technology, which the Waterloo, Ontario-based company bought in November as part of a strengthened focus on software and services, as opposed to hardware.

"As a reseller, it is really interesting to see BlackBerry, AtHoc and Good Technology coming together under one umbrella," said Lipkin. "It's an extremely strong play, especially for the federal government in the mobility space. You now have the device and security aspect, with AtHoc's best of breed notification and emergency management system."

Lipkin added that Four Points Technology, which was founded in 2002, has seen an array of changes in the federal government vertical with the transformation of mobility, particularly in the crisis communications space.

"We're definitely seeing the intersection between the cloud, big data and mobility, and how that enables us to better offer cloud-based back end solutions. ... Mobility is a really fascinating place to be right now," he said.

PUBLISHED JAN. 19, 2016