VoiceGate's Emergency e-Response is a powerful multi-modal, mass-message notification system designed using open industry standards, capable of delivering messages to thousands of people simultaneously, on multiple devices: phone, answering machine, voice mail, fax, SMS, pager or any internet ready device. ESRI's GIS tools are used to help manage spatial information (data and maps) for emergency planning and response. Combined, VoiceGate's Emergency e-Response and ESRI Canada's GIS will provide municipalities, power and water utilities, medical, military, and police forces with an intuitive, powerful spatially managed, mass message notification system. Designed specifically to plan, rapidly identify, and select an affected area by location, the GIS powered Emergency e-Response system provides emergency managers and business continuity planners the ability to launch and manage in real time, targeted, bi-directional mass messaging notification campaigns.

"The VoiceGate and ESRI Canada solution will enable business continuity officers and emergency response managers to communicate quickly and accurately in the event of an emergency," said Alex Miller, President, ESRI Canada. "This will enable emergency personnel to spend their valuable time managing and responding to the crisis, rather than engaging in time consuming and ineffective manual management functions."

The real power in this union is providing ESRI users with the ability to identify emergency locations on a map and notify the appropriate stakeholders. "A good example of this is a municipality with a flood plain within its boundaries," said Paul Perryman, President and COO of VoiceGate Corporation. "Municipal ESRI users can now identify houses on the plain that could be affected by a flood and push the data seamlessly to the Emergency e-Response system. It calls the targeted houses and elicits responses. For houses that don't respond, the system streams a report, in real time, back to the GIS. Once this happens, the map changes the colour of the dwellings with which the system failed to make contact, identifying to the police or first responders the houses that need to be visited to complete the evacuation."

About VoiceGate Corporation
VoiceGate Corporation, founded in 1978 is an innovative leader in the voice processing, call logging, and instant wireless messaging industry. VoiceGate is a privately owned Canadian Corporation with its head office and design facility located in Markham, Ontario. It also has offices in the United States and India. Sold and supported worldwide, its powerful Integrated Communications Server family of products incorporates leading edge, standards-based modular architecture, open platforms, and years of customer design input. Working with its partners to deliver "best in class" communications solutions, its product offerings cover virtually all messaging and call processing applications. From speech enabled voice mail to integrated instant wireless messaging, to call accounting, emergency preparedness dialing engines and voice logging, VoiceGate has a solution to fit the smallest SOHO application to the largest most complicated central office based installations. VoiceGate's diverse customer base includes government, medical, ISPs, education, emergency response, military, public safety, utility, transportation, and business industries. For more information, please visit http://www.voicegate.com/

About ESRI Canada:
Established in 1984, ESRI Canada is a Canadian owned company specializing in geographic information systems (GIS) solutions. We distribute the world's leading GIS software solutions from ESRI Inc., Miner and Miner, and Azteca. In order to provide organizations with complete industry-specific solutions we have established an extensive business partner program that includes more than 125 Canadian organizations. ESRI Canada also provides professional services including consulting, training, technical support, and enterprise GIS implementation. We are leaders in providing world-class enterprise GIS solutions for many industries including local government, utilities, public safety and defence, business demographics, education, natural resources, and transportation. ESRI Canada has thirteen regional offices across the country, with headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. For more information, please visit http://www.esricanada.com/ or call 1-800-447-9778.

Media Contacts:
Heather Adams
Communications Specialist
ESRI Canada
T: 416-386-6463
E: hadams@esricanada.com
W: http://www.esricanada.com/
 
Bryan Minnes
Project Manager
VoiceGate Corporation
T: (905) 714-0656
E: bminnes@voicegate.com
W: http://www.voicegate.com/