Hosted VoIP

Catawba County, in west central North Carolina, has nearly 155,000 residents. Protecting their lives and property is the Catawba County 9-1-1 Center, which provides emergency and first responder dispatch services for 45 agencies and departments in the county. These include the Catawba County Sheriff's Office, five police departments (Catawba, Claremont, Conover, Longview and Maiden), 25 fire stations, six rescue squads, seven EMS stations, and Catawba County Emergency Management.

The 9-1-1 center is busy. It handles more than 85,000 emergency calls and 206,000 administrative calls annually. Reliability and flexibility is therefore key to its operations. The center has grown from one person per shift to a shift schedule that consists of five-person first and second shifts and four-person third shifts.

In response to these needs Catawba County has deployed PlantCML’s VoIP-based call processing solution, Sentinel Patriot (News - Alert), and a suite of managed services. This application also shows just how reliable VoIP has become: enough so to be used in truly mission-critical environments.

 

The Sentinel Patriot solution is a PBX (News - Alert)/ACD with automatic number identification (ANI) and automatic location identification (ALI). Its IP functionality i.e. voice as data permits easy reconfiguration, affordably enabling connectivity to multiple offices as well as low call-handling costs. It also has enhanced reliability with features such as automatic hot redundancy of servers and no single point of system failure.

Catawba County 9-1-1 Center also has obtained round-the-clock direct and secure connectivity with PlantCML's Service Management Center (SMC). This ensures the integrity and reliability of its solutions with the following managed services specifically designed to protect 9-1-1 call centers from vulnerabilities, and which reduces the publicly-funded centers’ support costs:

--Monitoring and response, a remote monitoring service of each approved, on-site device

--Virus protection, providing anti-virus software and virus definition updates to Windows-based PlantCML servers and workstations

--Patch management, which automatically updates Windows-based PlantCML servers and workstations with Microsoft (News - Alert) software patches

“Answering emergency calls from [our] citizens and dispatching first responders from a majority of the county's agencies can be overwhelming, yet an outstanding opportunity for our call center,” said Jerry Boggs, communications administrator, Catawba County 9-1-1 Center, in a release. “When the opportunity arose for our center to deploy a more regionalized configuration with the Sentinel Patriot call processing solution, allowing the county to benefit from one centralized call center, we quickly determined the funding source and moved forward.”

“The approach Catawba County 9-1-1 Center took when deploying the Sentinel Patriot call processing solution -- taking into consideration the future direction of the 9-1-1 industry and its positive impact on the smaller, more rural areas of their county -- is the next-generation approach more emergency call centers should take,” added Carlos Avila, vice president of sales, PlantCML. “Jerry [Boggs] understands the need for historically underfunded agencies to band together to implement an interoperable emergency call center.”