xMatters Acquires Bamboo's Mobile Crisis Technology

xMatters Inc. announced on Wednesday that it acquired Deloitte Australia's Bamboo solution. The mobile incident management app appears to be a good fit with xMatters' role as a relevance engine provider.

Relevance engines send critical information to users in times of crisis or emergency. The type of information sent depends on the recipient's role in an organization and the nature of the crisis. Since stress and panic often accompany crises, finding critical information, such as emergency procedures, becomes a difficult task.

San Ramon, CA-based xMatters was originally founded in 2000 as AlarmPoint, which developed alert management systems for IT departments. Since then, they have expanded that objective to serve all departments of a company as well as those outside the company who need to be informed in a crisis.

Bamboo delivers critical plans and procedures to smartphones. Any updates to information are sent out when any changes or additions are made. One of the biggest benefits of this technology is that the information is still available in the event of network failures.

xMatters CEO, Troy McAlpin, addressed this issue saying, “To effectively harness the power of mobile, personal devices in the workplace you must plan for a loss in connectivity when crisis strikes.”

A good example where this technology would be helpful is in a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy. With mobile service interrupted, incident teams cannot look up information via provider networks. With Bamboo, these response personnel would have had the information pushed to their phones ahead of the disaster. The information would have resided on the phone and been retrieved once it was needed.

Features specific to Bamboo include a map that shows the location of incident team members; an alert that gives the sender's location to the other team members; a call-tree feature that can retrieve team members and contact them by SMS or phone calls and a map that shows relocation sites.

xMatters has made what appears to be a smart move in acquiring Bamboo technology. It is a good fit for xMatters' overall mission and its support for mobile technology complements existing xMatters solutions. It's ironic that mobile technology can be used so effectively during times when mobile service is not available.