News Release - June 20, 2006

GIS Connectivity with VoiceGate’s Emergency e-Response, Canadian First

VoiceGate chooses 16th World Conference on Disaster Management to announce Partnership

VoiceGate Corporation, a leader in Mass Message and Business Continuity Planning Notification Systems, is pleased to announce its partnership with ESRI Canada, a leading provider of geographic information systems (GIS) solutions.  The partnership was announced at the World Conference on Disaster Management.  

VoiceGate’s Emergency e-Response is a powerful multi-modal, mass-message notification system designed to 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 geo-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, poultry boards, medical, military, and police forces with an intuitive, powerful geo-spatially managed, mass message notification system.  Designed specifically to pre plan, rapidly identify and select an affected geo-spatial target, the ESRI/GIS powered Emergency e-Response provides emergency managers or business continuity planners the ability to launch and manage in real time, targeted, bi-directional mass messaging notification campaigns.  

“The marriage of these technologies creates a one plus one equals three,” says Paul Perryman – President and COO of VoiceGate Corporation – “It’s one thing to have a dialing or message notification machine that calls a known group of First Responders in the event the power goes out at, let’s say, facility “A”; it’s another thing to notify a dynamic group of contacts in the event a municipality has a train derailment and toxic gas leakage at any point that the railway bisects that region – the ESRI/GIS link delivers just that”.

“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 plane within its boundaries. Municipal ESRI users can now identify houses on the plane that are going to be flooded and push the data seamlessly to the Emergency e-Response,” says Perryman. “It calls the targeted houses and elicits a response. For the houses for which we receive no response, we stream a report, in real time, back to the ESRI geo-spatial mapping solution. Once this happens, the ESRI map changes the colour of the dwellings with which we failed to make contact, identifying to the police or First Responders which houses need to be visited to complete the evacuation.”

“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,” says Alex Miller, President, ESRI Canada.  “This will enable the emergency personnel to spend their valuable time managing the crisis, rather than engaging in time consuming and ineffective manual management functions.”

About VoiceGate Corporation:
VoiceGate Corporation, founded in 1980 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 telephone 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 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., NovaLIS Technologies, Miner and Miner, Telcordia, and Azteca. In order to provide organizations with complete industry-specific solutions we have established an extensive business partner program that includes more than 100 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 defense, 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 www.esricanada.com or call 1-800-447-9778.

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