In this podcast, BlackBerry discusses how the AtHoc solution provides secure and reliable communications to protect and reach the public community from a centralized and common operating picture.
Speaker 1: On behalf of BlackBerry and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around protecting the public through effective communication where BlackBerry at hawks public safety lead, Michael Akpata will discuss the capabilities at Hawk critical event management provides to equip organizations with the ability to plan, respond and recover in emergency situations.
Michael Akpata: My name is Mike Akpata. And I'm the North American lead for policing public safety investigations for BlackBerry AtHoc, we're going to go over what BlackBerry AtHoc can do to enhance your communications plan, and thereby make you and your folks safer. And tell you a little bit about me. And you'll understand why not only because my background, but hopefully it'll tie to some of the points that I bring up. Prior to joining BlackBerry. I was a police officer in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, across the river from Detroit for 21 years, carried out multiple functions at the police department, including drugs and gangs, left as a fraud and arson investigator work in the training branch and of course, uniform patrol and any other duties as assigned by the Chief enjoyed policing very, very much. Concurrently, while I was a copper I also was an army reservist for 26 years and fought in Afghanistan in 2007. I came home bored to tears, like many of my colleagues and soldiers do, ran for a second term sitting city councilor le sol, Ontario, where I live with my family. Why I say that is when we start to talk about crisis and critical communication and keeping people safe. I've either responded to incident domestically or overseas, and now have the privilege of having responsibility for the South police service in the fire service as part of the members of the lustau Council. Simply put, as an adult, I have responded, I have participated, I've mitigated and I understand critical incidents. And hopefully some of those points will resonate with you as we go forward. Simply put, one of the things I want you to think about is how do you communicate when times are good? And if you have that answer, how do you communicate when times go sideways, if there's one thing that we can talk about 2020, and into the mid of 2021, it is tested all of us, it is tested our infrastructure, it's tested how we interact with each other or don't. It's tested how we communicate. But it's also poke some holes in how we are not connecting with each other. Imagine this 2019, you're able to walk into a place you didn't have to sign in, depending on what state or country or into, you didn't have a mask on your face, you could recognize people, you could go forward. In some parts of 2020, we were locked down where you're not allowed to do these things, where you couldn't communicate with each other face to face and the way that we were used to. And because of that, one of the things that the BlackBerry AtHoc solution has done is it's proven its worth in connecting people, not only in a time of crisis, but also to promote business continuity. And a seamless communication strategy for senior leaders. Why that becomes important is hopefully you don't exist in a world of crisis every moment of your day. Sometimes it may feel like that. But for businesses and entities to move forward, there has to be some time of stability. And I use an example that hopefully will resonate in the public safety space, every police department wants to helicopter. First of all, they're cool, they sound neat, and they look good flying in the sky. But how often are you going to use your helicopter, because you have to plan for what the storage costs are going to be, you have to make sure that it's stored in a heated facility. And if your helicopters flying 20 473 65, you better have an up to date and very good maintenance plan. So for us, in the AtHoc crisis communication space, we want to point out that not every moment of your day, I hope you're dealing with a substantial crisis. And that is the thing that the value, add the ROI, if you will, that BlackBerry AtHoc brings to the folks that are using it is an enhanced crisis communication system on those horrible days when you need to be connected, but also enhancing your standard comms plan throughout your enterprise. Because you never want to have something that sits on a shelf and is not usable or doesn't give that value at on a go forward basis on a regular basis. And we're very pleased that BlackBerry AtHoc is able to do that. What does it allow you to do? It allows you to communicate and collaborate. What does that mean? It keeps people tied together. For us. It is our privilege to work in the government space in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. And around the world. We look at our business continuity and duty of care for folks. What does that mean? Every single employer has a responsibility to make sure that people are safe as they can possibly be. That's why we have locks on doors. That's why we have fire extinguishers. That's why depending on your enterprise, you may be issued steel boots, goggles, or a safety vest. So we suggest that knowing where your folks are, and being able to communicate with your employees at all times enhances their safety. Think of the lone worker, think of the UPS driver, think of the nurse practitioner who is on a loan mission. We have numbers of people that work by themselves and travel extensively alone. Does the employer know that they're safe? We leverage our 36 years and our history of BlackBerry safety and security and privacy to make sure that the data that people entrust us with is protected and secured. And the thing that we resonate with the most is the people that trust us. I give you an example. Unfortunately, some of our incidents have come out of those bad days, we protect the politically protected persons for the Government of Canada, from the prime minister to all of the senators to all of the persons who have responsibility for running Canada. In 2014, an active shooter shot a soldier at the Tomb of the Unknown, and made his way to Parliament intent on doing harm to our persons, the MPs and members of Parliament and the politically protected persons sheltered in place. And the incident was quickly taken care of by the sergeant at arms, with only the shooter being injured. From that perspective, one of the things that they discovered was there was a moment in time where they didn't know where the prime minister was where the Minister of National Defense was, and where the other senior leaders were, because they'd never thought to prepare for such a circumstance. When they adopted the AtHoc solution, the Government of Canada was able to connect everybody on Parliament Hill in a time that dropped from 90 minutes through phone trees and conductivity to 90 seconds, which means that should something go awry on the hill again, with a push of a button. All politically protected, persons can be tied together and can be notified that something is not normal. The key components to BlackBerry AtHoc are displayed on your screen. And I'll go over them alert. As the name describes. BlackBerry alert is a device agnostic solution, which means that we will run on any laptop will run on any smartphone. And what do we do? We push SMS text and email messages directly to your individuals. How do we do this? Through either the Active Directory of your large corporation or your large enterprise or from a simple CSV file from smaller ones, we are able to ingest all of your folks into a bucket. And what I mean by a bucket is we can segregate that bucket depending on what your people do. So all of the IT people in one bucket, all of the security staff in another bucket, the senior leaders in another one so that they depending on the specialty can be contacted exclusive of the entire Corporation, you're able to slice your data the same way you're able to do with your folks inside your environment. What I mean by this is, in some of the manufacturing facilities that I work with, where they have a responsibility to have X number of folks CPR, first aid trained, those people's special skills can be attached to them. So that if a medical emergency happens on the shop floor, only those people that are working that are CPR defib first aid qualified, are notified that there's a need for them to bring their special skills to a certain point, the alert runs right to their smartphone, or it can go to their desktop, or it could be a phone call, or because of blackberries unique API's. We can connect to anything that can receive a signal from anything that can send a signal with some of our federal entities that we work with. Some people are still receiving faxes from us, because that is how they need to have their alerts validated and verified. We can connect to alphanumeric pagers, we can connect to handheld radios, and in various other spaces, were able through devices or through an appliance to connect to fire alarm panels, radio systems, loudspeakers or like I said, anything that can receive a signal. Our goal is to make sure that folks need to know that something is not normal on those bad days. But I also spoke about ROI because not everyone lives in crisis. So one of the use cases that has resonated in our healthcare industry is imagine a large hospital that has 20,000 employees that have the title, nurse, and then have various specialties. If seven med surg nurses don't show up to work because they're sick, then perhaps surgeries will not proceed that day. The old calling list or having the charge nurse, get on his phone and call other members of the med search team is not an effective use of that person's time. What if you were able to load all of your folks in by seniority if it's a unionized environment, and by specialty, so that with the push of a button, you could say I need seven med surge nurses to come to work now. And those alerts went to those designated people and kept going until seven people responded that they were inbound. That's one of the returns on the investment that we've been able to identify is we're able to take routine, mundane communications that are required for business continuity, automate them and put them in the hands of the right people. By doing that, not only do we add value, but we make sure that the acceptance of the solution is understood that when an alert comes in, it is relevant. Because if we look at the number of dings and emails that we get on our devices, the last thing we want to do is to send out an alert that it's Mike's birthday, and cake and coffees in the lunchroom. We use it for business continuity or emergency purposes, but collect functionality. As described. With most folks having smartphones or smart devices when they work. We're carrying recording devices. And what we're able to capture is relevant for business. Imagine if I said at the main gate, there is a vehicle that I think has a bad person in it, because that's all I can put through. Now suppose that I'm able to actually take a picture of that vehicle as I walk by and send it to the security team for them to begin to mitigate the risk. So that they know exactly what the person looks like. Collect, as described, allows your employees to collect information that's relevant to business continuity, or relevant to any type of investigation that your folks are doing. In one of our large transportation yards. Imagine the person who's responsible for tires on tractor trailers, going out and saying trailer one, the red one, not the blue one, the red one with the two stripes needs to have new tires, as opposed to using their smart device to take a picture of the number of the trailer that needs to be switched to make sure that there's no mistake. Collect serves that purpose of turning every soldier into a sensor and allowing them to collect information that's relevant for decisions for senior leaders to make and keep it within the walls of your iteration. Remember, before when smartphones first came out, you might take a picture and send it to your boss using your Hotmail, your Gmail account? Well, those individuals have to decide who is funguy3803@hotmail.com. Is it an employee? Is it something we need to follow? Or is it just somebody sending us something ridiculous into our environment account. Post incident mitigation is something that weighs heavy on senior leadership, I use an example of a fire drill in a corporate environment. Once a year, we evacuate the building, we stand outside and muster. Inevitably two or three people will disappear for a cigarette, or three or four people will go to the nearest coffee shop. And we'll shop for a bit, which is what happens in some of these environments. Imagine now it's serious. You are the muster commander at a muster site. Your building is on fire. It's a large warehouse with chemicals and other explosives. The fire Captain comes to you and says are all of your people out so that we can begin to battle the fire from outside the building? Or do I have to send my firefighters in defined people. Those are the circumstances and situations where account comes into effect. You're able to geo locate by drawing a circle on a map or a square or whatever shape you'd like and identify all of your people within that area of concern. Or to make sure that all of your folks are outside in the muster area, post incident and pre incident. It gives senior leadership the insights into what resources they have available to deploy and what resources are taken away because of the incident Connect, connect much like LinkedIn ties entities together for a single information source. Why this becomes important is I give you an example from my time I was presenting in Ottawa, in the government area, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job. The introduction was good. There was some light hearted humor. There were some smiles. And there is a standard sort of I'm at the front of the room and I'm talking and we're going through the presentation and I start to watch people look out the window. Which, you know, as a presenter, you go, I didn't think I was that bad. But obviously, I've lost this person and that person. And then suddenly, I started to realize that more and more people were looking out the window until somebody got up and actually went to the window and looked out, I'd lost the room. And I'm not gonna lie to you, my ego was a bit damaged, not that I'm super sensitive. But when you're presenting, and you have people looking out the window, that's a clear sign that you've lost the room. When I went to the window and looked out, I could see another government building beside us just had people flowing out of the doors, and gathering in the parking lot. So in most government buildings, the worst thought that people had was either terrorism or there's an incident that we don't know about. So when ended up happening, our building evacuated, and we ended up going outside only to find out it was their yearly fire drill. And the fire Captain at building a had forgotten to call the person at building B to let them know it was a drill. Using Connect, you can tie your information strategies together, so that senior leaders can talk directly to each other. So that miscommunication is avoided with some of the entities that are using it, you're able to look at state and local support. An example the FAA, the FAA utilizes AtHoc for all of their communications about a plane incident. So Heaven forbid that something happened in your municipality or in your state, that individual from the FAA is able to directly tie into the communication strategies of those folks, and put the information directly into their hands without anybody wondering if it's vetted, or valid, because you know that you've joined their iteration and situation response. In every facility. In every office, there's someone who keeps binders, the talk about what to do in case of crisis, who to call, and to make sure that we do everything correctly to mitigate the incident that's going on. If you can automate situation response, which is what we have done to the push of a button, it will start to go through the communication strategy to make sure that if this is a tornado event, all of the right people are communicated to, you've got the comprehensive audit functionality, that you know that the people have received the message. And it will automatically walk you through what to do as far as your incident goes, thereby relieving the stress of the person who's dealing with it. Because as we know, critical incidents never seem to happen at noon, on a bright sunny day, maybe three o'clock in the morning on a long weekend, when you can't find another person who's dealt with that type of thing. But situational response, allows that complete collaboration to work. We have a number of incidents where things have gone awry. Let's look at the chevron incident in 2012. Chevron had a very large plant that had an incident. And you can see that on the screen. Imagine now you are in charge of plant safety. How do you contact all your people? How do you let people know? How do you reach the fire department? How do you know that your EA, your best friend who works there is safe from this incident in 2012 10,000 people lived in the city around it of the 10,000 people 15,000 or 15% went to hospital with breathing related issues. You still have a responsibility to communicate with the public, you still have a responsibility to communicate with your staff. And you still have a responsibility to do your best to begin risk mitigation and incident mitigation. And like I said, the chevron plant is now a user of AtHoc making sure that they're able to be connected to all of their employees and contractors, making sure that they're able to push messages and information out to their conjoined and connected enterprises, including police fire and the trauma centers, because they want to make sure that they do the right thing for the people who live next to their facility, a success story where no one was injured. Eastman Chemical October 4 2017, in Kingsport, Tennessee, at 10am. At the processing plant, there was an explosion, a Shelter in Place Order was pushed out, and everybody was able to immediately take cover, despite the facility exploding at the gas, coal gasification component, the 6500 employees that are protected and the 3000 contractors all receive notifications that something was not normal. And therefore, they were alerted immediately to take cover. Like I said, the value in the solution is that conductivity. But luckily, these things do not happen on a daily basis. So we're able to keep in contact with people. And we're able to come up with other use cases. I give you a very simple one. In most police departments, whether it's state, local, or municipal, there's a call in list. We're specialists are called and be at collision. reconstructionist Be it you need an extra supervisor and it's called the call in list because you get on the phone and you call that person and Usually a senior leader who's authorized to bring someone else in, that's making that phone call, I will suggest to you that if you load the staff in, and you load them in by specialty, and with the push of a button, anyone who's authorized, can bring those people in. But senior leaders are able to turn their attention to higher level of functionality, and therefore keep the organization working at the speed of suppose this executive order 13407 talks about I pause the integrated public alert and warning system, but says that these are the national system for learning. And that shall be done in order to save people's lives, we can do it through the alert system, wireless technology, or public or private. So again, depending on the enterprise that you're working with, or for, you might say, my plant needs to let people know in the area that something is normal. I use an example that I responded to, there's a large chemical facility in the city that has a policeman in and once every four or five years, they used to clean their paint tanks. And because it was paint, they'd use high pressure steam. They didn't notify the neighboring community when they did the cleaning one year. And you imagine living next to a chemical facility and seeing large towers of something coming out of the facility. Well, it's scared a lot of people, no one was injured. But think of the reputational damage that that company suffered, because they didn't have an ability to connect to all of the neighbors around to let them know that while you don't see this very often, everything is okay, there's no need to panic. So I'm not going to suggest that we're only pushing out negative messages. It could be Today's a cleaning day, you're gonna see a tower of steam, simply pay attention to what's going on. For protecting the public, we have all of the things that we experienced in 2020. It has been a year of the pandemic, it has been a year of civil change and civil unrest. And unfortunately, it's also been an active shooter year. Despite the pandemic, we still had this thing that takes place that is difficult to understand where someone can come into a workplace, a place of worship, and actually bring a firearm intent on harming other people. How do you notify your staff that this is not a drill that this is real? And with our ability to connect with other sensors, I use wildfires as an example. In northern Canada, we've been testing hydrocarbon connected sensors, when there's a fire the amount of hydrocarbon in the air changes. And thereby, people are able to know if you've got a wind sensor that the wind is blowing from the west at a certain speed. And there's an increased amount of hydrocarbon in the air, which may lead people to believe that there's a forest fire and give a Northern Community a different ability to evacuate. We've connected to flood sensors, and also connected to water sensors, that test for water contamination. Our strength is multiple devices, and the ability to send texts, emails, voice, integrate into social media, push information out through the iPod system and connect to digital displays. So all of the road signs that you drive by could say there is a major incident, please exit the highway now, as opposed to being trapped on an interstate for three hours. Had you known that you could have gotten off an exit she passed? It's a single user interface. So when you're dealing with the public, you simply say, we have a portal where you can go and give your information, your phone number, your email address, and you can register. And once that's done, you've opted in, we're now able to connect with you and hold your information safely and closely. The solution, AtHoc can run on premises, as some of our government entities require. It also can run on a public or private cloud. So we have the hybrid component as well. We work well with both Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft as your and of course, bring the security certificates of these cloud iterations into our space. So compliance across the board is something that BlackBerry is very pleased that we're able to make if you look at the people that are using us, the US government, the Canadian government, the British police, which is one police force across the entire country, are using BlackBerry AtHoc and came to use it after the Ariana Grande day bombing where Royal Commission looked into the response to that incident. As you can imagine the British police the first line officers don't carry guns, they do have an armed Response Unit. So one of the things that they came about was you shouldn't send unarmed officers to a terrorist incident. You send the armed officers first and you also send the fire brigade at the same time because they have the medical practitioners. So we have learned and we have brought people together in a single platform in order to enhance their communication strategy and our Operational response. Mike, how does it work? This is the SMS opt in that you see running on your screen right now. So the person simply swipes their finger, and they can opt in. So imagine when we have sports events, again, protecting a large hockey game, or football game, or any function, a large concert, you could say to everyone, we want you to when you come in, here's a QR code, take our solution. So we can alert you of things if something is not normal. And that way, people are able to stay safe. For us, one use case that resonates with folks, again, is in the medical sector, the charge nurse or the person who's on the floor, is the first facial contact with people that come into that floor. And they have responsibilities outside of answering everyone's questions. So we're not trying to dissuade human contact, what we're trying to do is make the folks that are out in front more effective. So imagine if you could come in a parent, a loved one, a child has gone in for surgery, and you're able to track their progress through the hospital. So you know that my son is in the fracture clinic, he's getting x rayed, my son is not going into surgery, they've fixed his leg, and he's going up to recovery room to be and you get alerts on your phone all the way through the medical process. We're not suggesting that's the only use. But we are suggesting that communications. And the ability to communicate to people is enhanced by the thing that most of us always have on us all the time, that smart device. If you look at how we use our smart devices, perhaps I'm going to suggest this, the AtHoc solution makes our devices smarter, because it allows us to know with certainty, what is going on. And what I mean by that is in my hospital example, you know exactly where your child is, you know exactly what's transpiring in some of the other critical communications components, you know that the incident is being mitigated by whomever in your facility, or you know that this is not a fire drill, or you know that you need to come to work because you are the only cardiothoracic surgeon. And we need you now, these are the types of things that AtHoc brings as its value adds. It's simple. It is intuitive, and it allows people to deal with things right away. You can register at the registration portal, and keep your folks safe. Very simply, what it does is you say, yes, I want to come in, you can collect and connect on your name. And you're able to do it seamlessly. I'm going to suggest that all of us in today's day and age, if you're working from home, or you're still going into the office every now and again. We have done this recently with some sort of device, or some sort of connectivity or something that we've needed to get things done. So it's inherent in us right now that we know how to do this. And if we make it intuitive, it becomes easier for people to connect and stay connected. And you say, well, Mike, I don't know if this is something that's going to resonate with people. I asked this, when I was a detective, I looked at two fraud cases that affected two municipalities, the Atlanta ransomware hack, and then the it attack at New Orleans. If you were the IT director in New Orleans, how do you get your staff to get off their computers? How do you let people know that the swipe card system is down? Because it's part of our integrated paneling? If you're in Atlanta, how do you push information to people, when some of the smartphones that were direct connected to their infrastructure were down by staying outside of the direct infrastructure and what I mean is in the hosted solution, or the on prem solution, and having connectivity back and forth between we're able to maintain that level of connectivity, regardless of the circumstance. So as an IT outage or an IT backup solution, it runs incredibly well, allowing your IT professionals to push information to senior leadership to let people know that they know that that entire system is down, but to also let people know that this is a denial of service attack. It's a foreign government attacking our infrastructure, or it is some type of illegal act that is trying to undermine our business process. What I always do is I always say to people, have you sandboxed and white boarded the last incident that happened in your facility. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. And then here's where that one person lets sits in the back of the room becomes very important. I call him or her the what-if person, they're the person that four o'clock or 358 when the day is done at four Put up their hand and say, well, what if this happened? Those are the people that you want on your crisis mitigation team in today's day and age. Because if you had told me two years ago, that North American business, global business would for the most part shut down. Because of something we can't see. We wouldn't be traveling, you'd have individuals who were told we could never leave the office, working from home and business continue, we would have been more aptly prepared. So one of the things I asked when you speak internally or speak to clients or speak to other people about this is what would resonate with you to keep your infrastructure running your people safe? And how can we look at an incident that's taking place in your environment, to show how the AtHoc solution can help you. And what we're very proud of, with this solution at BlackBerry is we know what the customers that we have, and the uses that we have, we save lives. And I say that in a very respectful manner. Our goal is to keep every individual running the solution safe. Our goal is to let people know that there's a fire. Our goal is to let people know that there's an active shooter, and to hide in place to shelter in place. Our goal is to bring those nurses in our goal is to bring those firefighters in, our goal is to harden the comms plan of every individual that has a responsibility for other people's safety within the organization, because that is what our solution prides itself on doing. As I said, we are used worldwide by governments and corporations and other entities that require security. So security as at the top of the BlackBerry history of the family that we have. We run on cloud solutions, both Amazon as well as Microsoft, and now have a full integration with Microsoft Teams. Why that becomes important is because as we move forward, we're looking at the number of entities that are adopting Microsoft Teams as our comprehensive strategy and their comprehensive communication plan internally, what does integration mean? That means a single panel, it means being able to send off an alert through a team's meeting, or bringing people into a team's meeting if something is not normal. We've all done this before. And alert publishing. How do you push out and alert is simple. All you simply do is BlackBerry has a standard number of pre-built templates that are multilingual, which means for folks who are in countries like in Canada, where there's two languages, we have the ability to push them out in both English. And in French, we also have the ability to make sure that we can push them out in other languages. So we have a host of languages that we run, we have the ability to simply and quickly push out this information so that your people are safe and can be properly taken care of. So we're not talking about a substantial amount of effort in getting your alerts published. We're talking about pre built templates, for storms, for active shooter, for fires, or for anything else that is relevant in your enterprise. And the ability to customize your templates becomes simple as well. Because during crisis, if you think about what happens to the human body, gross motor skills start to disappear. And that's why things become difficult. So the last thing we want to do is have people go through a multiple number of screens, or a multiple number of taps. It can be done by pushing a button, sliding an arrow and hitting send. And that way you know that the information has gone out and you know that your people have been kept safe. For us. We are very privileged and proud to be BlackBerry AtHoc and to be working with business partners and professionals that understand the responsibility of leadership. Because at the end of the day, this is a leadership decision. It may be the IT leaders who simply say this, we need to be connected to our folks at all times. It might be the business continuity, people who say, to shut the line down costs x, if we can mitigate ever shutting the line down by a mistake, we're going to save why it might be the CTO or the CEO or security people saying my worry is not about the line shutting down. It's about a person who shouldn't be in the facility making their way in. It is those horrible worst day use cases that sometimes people don't want to think about. And because we operate in that space, we're privileged to suggest this to folks. We can start off very, very simply by tying the integrations together by just using SMS text and email. So when we approach a person interested in BlackBerry AtHoc, I'd like to talk with them. I'd like to find out what their use cases are, what their needs are, so that they get the best value for every dollar that they spend. And what I mean is this, the full meal deal that fast food restaurants operate on is not how we like to move our business case forward. We want to make sure that we meet the requirements through discussion of all of the entities that we engage, we want to give them what they need. We want to make sure that it's deployed, we want to make sure that the safety of their employees is paramount and is in the forefront of everything that we do. We are very privileged, again, like I said, to protect some of the most important entities that exist out there. An open source example that I give from a US military was there was an active shooter at Twenty-nine Palms, the Marine Corps Base in California, about seven months ago, a young Lance Corporal was approached by a news channel and showed the alert on his phone. And that got people talking about how they were able to mitigate that incident, keep everybody safe, and keep everything locked down until the incident was resolved without injury, even to the bad guy, BlackBerry AtHoc is that type of solution. And we are privileged to bring it for you forward to you. For us, we are here. My goal is to make sure that the folks that you talk to understand how we can help. My goal is to make sure that you understand the solution. I will do everything with my team to make sure that you are fully supported. I will do everything with my team to answer questions that you may not know, I will do everything to make sure that the use cases aligned with what the business goals are of the entities that you're dealing with. And we will also show you how we use it. Because one of the things that we at BlackBerry are very proud of is we drink our own champagne. Our IT folks use BlackBerry AtHoc for it outage alerting to make sure that all of the systems that we have an all of the clients that we support are consistently running, but we have a more recent use case that I want to bring to your attention. BlackBerry is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, and the province of Ontario has the most restrictive COVID recording reporting requirements for employees in North America. So what did BlackBerry do, we imported the template of the government of Ontario's COVID reporting forums and sent it to every employee in Ontario, thereby making sure that AtHoc was a resource to double check and make sure that they were all COVID negative. The audit functionality said that everyone had received it. And bi weekly, an alert is sent out ensuring that your COVID status has not changed. This is used so that as we return to work, the check in functionality of BlackBerry AtHoc allows me when I go back to the office to check in outside of BlackBerry office so they can do contact tracing. And also know that Mike has filled in all of his government forms because the penalties to an entity who's got responsibility to make sure that their employees fill out the COVID requirements are substantial. So BlackBerry is able to compare swipe card data to COVID forms to check in to know that everyone in the facility is safe, and that everyone corporately has complied with the legislative rules as set down by the province of Ontario. Because we were able to geolocate only the folks in the province of Ontario received the alert. But we have the ability that of somebody from Quebec or somebody from New York who's a BlackBerry employee comes to the province they will receive the alert because their geo location is known. So once again, the use cases for keeping people safe. BlackBerry employees, myself included, have the AtHoc solution running on our devices and are meeting legislative requirements and keeping each other safe by using the solution. It is simple. It is intuitive. It runs on desktop laptop, smartphone, pager fax machine, if you have UHF or VHF radios, satellite phones, in facilities where the ambient noise is greater than 80 decibels, we can put alerts on screens, we can interconnect with anything that can send a signal to anything that can receive a signal to keep people safe. Because at the end of the day, the history of BlackBerry for 36 years is that of a competent security company. If you remember when you received your first BlackBerry and were able to do BB me messages without going through all the numbers and letters on your flip phone and the excitement and pride that you felt and I say this in a funny way. I was in the Drug Squad when I got my first BlackBerry. And I was called into the office by the inspector who said, Bring your notebook. And if you know policing, that's usually not good. But what happened was, here's your phone, write down the serial number, keep it, use it for work. And I remember the feeling of getting that first BlackBerry bowl and holding it and going, I have the most secure communications device on the planet, we have now become device agnostic. And we bring that level of security and use case to multiple enterprises on multiple devices. But we never have forgotten our history. And therefore we're privileged and pleased to serve and assist enterprises in business continuity, keeping people safe, and allowing communication as a regular course of business. But being there on those few and far between, but horribly bad days, where it's good to know where your people are, push information to them, and know that they've received the notifications that have come from you. It's our privilege to continue to work in this space to support public, private and corporate interests in keeping employees, members of the public, senior leaders, police officers, firefighters, nurses, it people and everyone that can carry our solution as safe as we possibly can. My name is Mike Akpata. I work for BlackBerry AtHoc, I am here at your disposal. If I can help you in any way, shape or form, please do not hesitate to reach out and connect. Do not hesitate to shoot me an email, do not hesitate to Colby, My responsibility is to make sure that at the end of the day, we've done our best to enhance the safety and security of those persons that we touch and give the leadership cadre a mechanism to be in constant contact with all of the people that they have the privilege of being responsible for by their position as senior leaders. It is a task that our teams do not take lightly. And I appreciate your time and attention today. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or BlackBerry can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at bbmarketing@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.