Centra-Larm Monitoring, a UL/UL2050 listed, CSAA 5 Diamond Central Station located in Manchester, New Hampshire, provides monitoring services in geographical regions that tend to experience seasonally extreme weather conditions. Kevin Helmig, President of Centra-Larm Monitoring, added the Openvoice Outbound solution from Bold Technologies to enhance their Manitou system and handle the significant volume of low-priority alarms that present during a storm. According to the company, since introducing the Openvoice solution, not only has their ability to respond quickly during storms improved, but Centra-Larm has advanced their communication to end-users and is providing better service for emergency alarms.

Centra-Larm added 96 outbound lines of Openvoice that run on four T1’s on a 24/7 basis. According to Helmig, it now takes hours instead of days to handle the massive amounts of low priority signals in the queue during these storm events. “During a catastrophic weather event, there can easily be over 20,000 alarms in the queue - the vast majority of them being of a low priority nature. Despite a room full of operators working round the clock, each dispatcher can only dispatch one alarm at a time and must focus on the high priority alarms," says Helmig. “Using the Openvoice system for low priority signal notifications affords us the ability to make an additional 96 simultaneous calls in order to quickly handle these alarms."

The Openvoice solution from Bold Technologies has been submitted for a 2014 Maximum Impact Award.