Sep 2, 2009
- Sonia Riahi
OIC 2009 Challenge: Benbria
About Benbria
Benbria is focused on meeting the fundamental communications challenges faced by organizations and communities. Benbria offers comprehensive solutions that provide cost-effective alert notification via phone calls, SMS, email, desktop alerts, and paging announcements to IP and analog loudspeakers. Benbria was founded in 2007 and has had five consecutive quarters of revenue growth, adding new customers every quarter. Benbria is a Mitel strategic partner and one of the Wesley Clover group of companies.
Challenge Overview
Benbria has sold into the education and enterprise verticals, with customers in Canada, the US and India. A quickly growing segment within mass notification is local and state governments issuing weather warnings, crime alerts and other emergency broadcasts to their residents.
Government requests for proposals (RFPs) frequently look for integration with new media technologies. Benbria has a comprehensive offering in on and off-premise alerting through voice broadcasting, SMS, e-mail, computer desktops and paging speakers, however currently does not have the capability to broadcast alerts to Twitter, Facebook and another web locations.
Integrating more and more mediums into the product requires significant development effort in integration, as well as changes to the user interface. In short, it is not a decision to be made lightly.
The government emergency notification market is currently dominated by hosted providers who operate central data centers/call centers and offer software as a service to the end customer, with a recurring annual usage fee. Benbria currently sells an on-premise, managed by the customer solution, which has an upfront cost, and only a recurring maintenance charge.
In moving into this market there are a number of questions we would need to answer. These are simply a starting point, we haven’t explored the vertical enough to identify all the obstacles.
- Is the government market large enough to be worth the time/resources?
- Is the current Benbria solution ready for sale into the government market?
- How should the Benbria solution be positioned within this market?
- We have only seen solutions deployed within the US, are there reasons why this product hasn’t seen adoption in Canada, Europe or elsewhere?
- Are there international markets for this service? How would we position it?
- Should Benbria explore hosting its BlazeCast solution and sell it as a service?
- Pricing? Positioning? Liability and risks? Potential to cannibalize existing sales?
- What would a business model for this service look like?
- Which additional broadcast mediums would need to be added to address this market?
- Twitter? Facebook? RSS? Something else?
Technical Details
Benbria’s product BlazeCast uses the concept of an alert to structure information about broadcasts. BlazeCast is built on a modular structure, around a unified web interface and a centralized database. Individual broadcast modules (voice, e-mail, SMS, etc.) do not communicate with each other. When a user triggers an alert, it generates an XML document, which is passed to the individual modules for processing and launching the alert. The user inputs information for each broadcast method separately, so the format of the XML document is highly influenced by what information that particular module requires. A sample is below:
<alert>
<contacts>
<! – This element contains all the information the recipients as a series of recipient elements –!>
<recipient>
<!—Recipient contact information stored in self-explanatory elements–!>
<firstname></firstname>
<lastname></lastname>
<contactpath>Could be phone number, e-mail, username, etc.</contactpath>
</contacts>
<message>
<subject>Used primarily for e-mail subject line, could be relevant in other places
</subject>
<format>could be audio file, or text</format>
<message>path of audio file, or text string</message>
</message>
<priority>{Emergency/Regular} – emergency broadcasts always interrupt a regular broadcast
</priority>
</alert>
Depending on the broadcast medium, not all the information in the above broadcast will be necessary, and additional information may be required. The system is flexible enough to generate the XML document required by your solutions.
The other key feature of the BlazeCast system is its real-time reporting features. During a broadcast, each module frequently sends updates back to the central controller. The way this integration works is too complex to be integrated in 48 hours, so for the purposes of the challenge, exporting time-stamped reports in the form of XML documents containing the list of recipients and the status of contacting each one – either confirmed, delivered, in-progress, queued, etc., depending on the broadcast medium.
Deliverables
Benbria is looking for real, ready to implement solutions for moving into the government market. A well-rounded solution should answer the following questions. Is this market large enough to be interesting, what would the business model look like, how would the product be marketed, and which countries/regions should be targeted? Benbria uses a channel sales strategy, in order to leverage the limited resources of a start-up company. Who are the key partners we would have to bring into our channel, and how should Benbria sign up those partners? In essence, what is the go-to-market strategy for Benbria to enter the government emergency notification market.
From a technical perspective, which broadcast mediums should be integrated into the product? Prove that these mediums are feasible – an early prototype is ideal.