Onset Technology's METAmessage Emergency Communications for BlackBerry Chosen by Miami-Dade County

Onset Technology it is completing a 600-seat sale to Miami-Dade County in southern Florida. The county will implement a combination of METAmessage Emergency Communications and Professional features in order to ensure effective messaging in the event email infrastructure is lost and to maximize mobile workers' productivity. Onset's comprehensive "beyond email" solution is designed for users of the BlackBerry wireless platform from Research In Motion (RIM).

"We have a strategic, county-wide BlackBerry deployment," said Angel Petisco, assistant director for the Enterprise Technology Services Department in Miami-Dade County. "When disasters such as hurricanes occur, we must have uninterrupted communications between multiple agencies, and METAmessage on the BlackBerry platform provides a very effective solution. Users in the field or in command centers can send alerts out to groups all at once, and that kind of immediate messaging is indispensable."

According to a company statement, METAmessage Emergency Communications is an out-of-the-box solution for any enterprise or government agency that wants to leverage their BlackBerry deployment into an emergency communications network. The solution lets users:

-- Update accurate PIN addresses automatically;

-- Blast PIN messages to groups and distribution lists;

-- Force message alerts to ensure immediate notifications;

-- Know when messages are received and read; and,

-- Store vital documents on handhelds for access regardless of coverage.

"The Florida coast is an extremely volatile environment where messaging systems need added backup capabilities to ensure that they function non-stop," said Eyran Blumberg, Onset's vice-president of products. "Miami-Dade County, like many other government agencies, chose to use METAmessage to leverage its considerable BlackBerry deployment. They got a dependable emergency communications solution up-and-running quickly with no added hardware investment."

METAmessage is implemented by over 1,400 enterprise customers with over 150,000 users as a complete, out-of-the-box beyond email solution for BlackBerry. Emergency Communications is a suite of capabilities for BlackBerry that ensures effective messaging in the event of a catastrophic loss of enterprise network, email, or back-end infrastructure. Professional solutions for law, accounting, and professional services firms provide fast access to time-and-billing, CRM, and document-management applications, spell checking, printing anywhere and custom message alerts.