Suppose you are an owner or senior level manager of a large organization that operates out of multiple buildings in a corporate park.

Now imagine that a fire breaks out one night in one of those buildings – and some of your employees, who happened to be working after hours, are trapped on one of the upper floors. You’d want emergency workers to be able to locate those employees as quickly as possible, in order to rescue them, right?

Well, depending on how your company’s communications network is set up, there could be a serious delay in carrying out the rescue. You see most corporate phone systems, or PBXs, only come with “baseline” 911 connectivity – that is, they enable any employee to dial 911 from their desk phone, but they don’t provide the 911 center with detailed location information, beyond the main street address. So although rescue personnel will likely arrive at the corporate campus in time, they might not necessarily know where to go once they get there -- i.e. which room on which floor in which quadrant of which building – in the event the victim is unable to communicate where they are. As such precious time can be wasted determining the precise location of the victims.

As a result of this very real risk, many states (16 to be exact) have passed E911 legislation requiring corporations of a certain size (i.e. with a certain number of extensions) to install systems that enable their phone systems to send detailed location information for each phone to the closest 911 center – location information that simply cannot be relayed via the “baseline” 911 capabilities that come with most PBXs – and more states are preparing to roll out similar laws. Organizations must meet these safety regulations or face big fines.

Organizations have several options for how to meet these new laws – in other words how to deliver this detailed caller location data to the local ALI database that the local Public Safety Access Point or 911 Center relies on for dispatching emergency teams. They can deploy special software on-premises, and let the IT department manage the updating of the data manually, when users are added, dropped or moved on the network -- but the more popular option these days is to subscribe to a managed service that automatically updates the caller location data that resides in the ALI database.

E911 solutions provider RedSky offers several options to enterprises that enable them to essentially outsource the updating of caller location data automatically by way of its software – which is offered on both an on-premises and software-as-a-service basis. As we learned in Part 2 of this series, based on an interview with company senior vice president Nick Maier, the advent of IP-based communications and in particular Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) has helped drive a lot of the innovation and capabilities that we are now seeing with E911.

Maier explained that with SIP, the caller “metadata” that gets sent along with a 911 call is getting more granular over time – for example, in the near future the data that gets sent with a 911 call (whether from office or personal phone) could notify the 911 Center that the caller has a particular medical condition. He explained that new standards are being developed which will make it so that every time a phone is plugged into a network, it will automatically send its location data to the local ALI database by way of a “location object.”

“The big change there is that the end point itself is going to request its location when it plugs into the network – so when a SIP phone plugs into the network, it’s going to register itself and say ‘here I am, what’s my location?’” Maier explained in our interview. “There’s an element called the location information server in these next generation IETF architectures that will send a ‘location object’ to the end point. And if that end point dials 911, it can send its object, in the SIP addressing stream. That’s kind of revolutionary because now the location data and the call are being transmitted at the same time.”

Maier said the first commercially available product to deliver this capability is Microsoft’s Lync – which is a unified communications platform handling multiple forms of communication, including phone, Web chat and email.

“Although [Lync] is not a 100 percent standards-based solution, conceptually [Microsoft (News - Alert)] has the pieces in place: The end point registers with the network, the network gives the device its location, the location information server delivers the location object to the SIP end point, and when the SIP end point dials 911, it sends its location object with the call,” Maier explained, adding that RedSky’s (News - Alert) E911 software is interoperable with almost all SIP-based communications systems, including Lync. “So it is safe to say that this is the direction things are moving – and it’s really due to the mobility that SIP affords enterprises – phones can be anywhere, but they’re still connected to the core. So it only makes sense that this [E911 capability] should be handled automatically on the network level.”

As mentioned in Part 2, RedSky’s platform works with either traditional (TDM), IP- or SIP-based based phone systems. Maier said the company initially started out with a TDM-only version but then modified the software so that it could be easily integrated with IP phone systems.

“We certainly had to add capabilities to the product in order to support IP – for example we had to leverage APIs that the call server/PBX (News - Alert) vendors had issued,” he explained. “In TDM we’re basically only reading information from the PBX -- but with IP, we had to be able to both read and write. So there was no need to come out with a different version of the software – an IP-based version -- it was just adding capabilities to our existing software to handle the IP phones and discover them down to the port level.”

Maier said to keep up with the trend toward hosted services and software-as-a-service, RedSky in 2005 migrated its platform, which at the time was written in Visual Basic, to .NET (News - Alert) in order to make it fully Web-based.

“As E911 service becomes more important, we need to continue to be in step with what enterprises are doing in terms of how they deploy their voice networks,” Maier said. “We’re seeing this whole movement toward collapsing everything into a data center, or multiple data centers, and all sites report to those data centers over the WAN – and in that scenario it makes a tremendous amount of sense to simplify E911 – since E911 callers can be ‘seen’ at the data center. Why not just send it to the service and let the service route the 911 call where it needs to go? That way you don’t need local trunks, you don’t need gateways, you don’t need complicated routing tables – all you need is the E911 service.”

Maier said in order to take further advantage of Web-based services and cloud computing RedSky plans to migrate to a Linux platform later in 2011.

(Stay tuned for Part 4 of this ongoing series, coming next week here on the E911 channel...)