Speed and Reliability

Most mass notification systems offer a wide range of eye-catching functions, but above all, there are two features that users simply cannot take for granted: speed and reliability.

You need a notification service that delivers messages rapidly, without delays or excuses. Your community cannot wait 24 or 36 hours for critical information about urgent situations.

Blackboard Connect™ meets the highest standards of speed and reliability, based on three key criteria:

Capacity

Timeliness is a key factor of successful message delivery. In order for a rapid notification system to deliver messages in a timely manner, system capacity, and call speed must be at optimal levels.

• Blackboard Connect can deliver more than 3 million one-minute voice messages per hour, as well as nearly 2 million email and 2 million SMS messages per hour.
• On a typical day, Blackboard Connect uses about 2 percent of its system capacity.

Multi-modal Message Delivery

No institution can rely on a single channel to communicate important information. You need to deploy a multi-channel approach to ensure the broadest and most timely dissemination of information. Blackboard Connect offers the widest possible range of communication channels to reach your audience when it matters most—from recorded voice, text-to-speech, SMS, email, TTY, Facebook, Twitter, RSS, to fax, pager, and common alerting protocol (CAP).

Redundancy

To be most effective, a mass notification system must be available at all times. The Blackboard Connect platform was built from the ground up with redundancy in mind, so that your message is delivered without a hitch. Here are some of the steps we take to avoid any single point of failure in our system:

• Multiple Network Providers: Blackboard Connect uses multiple providers for voice and data transmission to ensure uninterrupted message delivery, even in the event of a significant service interruption to one or more providers.
• Multiple Data Centers: In order to provide uninterrupted data access, Blackboard Connect distributes its data across multiple data centers. Within our data centers, applications and data are housed across redundant load-balanced servers, with redundant backup systems, network firewalls, and Internet uplinks.
• Network Monitoring: Even with sufficient capacity and redundancy, network traffic on the country’s long-distance, wireless and local switch networks can impede important messages. Blackboard Connect employs sophisticated algorithms to analyze network congestion at regional and national levels to maximize delivery speed and reliability at every given point of the telecommunications infrastructure.
• Throttling and Load Balancing: Large numbers of alert calls can overwhelm local telephone switches. Blackboard Connect manages call delivery in urgent situations with call routing, throttling, and load balancing expertise. We also blend message delivery via standard telephone lines and VoIP to help disperse the load placed upon all of the various pipelines available. These steps maximize speed of delivery in the face of extreme traffic at either the local or national level.