During an emergency situation, the last thing anyone should be worried about is whether school officials or municipal officials can communicate instructions on what to do next quickly and clearly to everyone involved.
Biamp’s Vocia networking paging and voice evacuation system is at the forefront of the mass notification sector. Paul Hand, senior product manager for building infrastructure at Biamp, recently talked to Dan Ferrisi, group editor for commercial and security at Emerald, about how the system can play a crucial role today.
“Even with the advent of personal communication devices, having an integrated audio system is really critical to get the content to the listener, even if their phone is turned off,” he says. “Being able to push that throughout a facility or to a very specific zone or an intended area inside a space, that’s something that’s very powerful. It can provide very specific guidance or instructions in the different parts of a facility.”
Hand calls Vocia “a tried-and-true solution with mass notification at the heart of it that also provides background music functionality built with robustness from the ground up.
“It’s a fully decentralized system, meaning no one component manages the entire mass notification architecture. That means if I have a single component go down, the rest of the system completely operates on its own,” Hand tells Ferrisi.
Hand also touts the importance of Vocia’s scalability and reliability, noting that any downtime on a mass notification system is too much.
“In some of those awful scenarios, like a school shooting or a weather emergency, that’s not the time to find out that something horrible has gone wrong with your system,” he tells Ferrisi. “Through the Vocia system, it’s going to be up and running, either through its primary system or a resilient or redundant backup.”
Here’s the full conversation:
