IBM and VirtualAgility revamp Missouri disaster response system to improve coordination among emergency responders across 68,000 square miles

IBM Business Partner Case Study

Industry: Government

IBM Business Partner: VirtualAgility Inc.

Products and services of VirtualAgility are used to implement easy-to-use, quick-to-install solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture, enabling organizations to ensure continuity and interoperability across organizational lines even under stressful circumstances. VirtualAgility is based in Winchester, Massachusetts.

It’s hard enough to achieve smooth, timely coordination of people and activities within one organization of any significant size. The challenge grows exponentially when the coordination must span dozens of different organizations — public, private, nonprofit, volunteer, etc. — especially if scattered across an area of 68,000 square miles. Trying to do all of this in the middle of a disaster, when lives are at stake, and one can begin to imagine the scope of the problem.

That was the challenge the State of Missouri faced in establishing an up-to-date information technology infrastructure for its Office of Homeland Security.

The solution was found in IBM middleware and collaboration products and in IBM Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), delivered through the advanced visualization technologies of VirtualAgility, Inc., an IBM Advanced Business Partner. VirtualAgility delivers real time operational decision support solutions for interagency and task force coordination and information sharing.

For Missouri’s 5.8 million citizens, the cutover to the new Missouri Emergency Resource Information System (MERIS) came in the Spring of 2008, and it was none too soon. “Altogether we’ve had 19 presidentially declared disasters in the last two years here,” said Paul Fennewald, coordinator of the Missouri Office of Homeland Security, “and five of those occurred after we got MERIS up and running.”

The solution features the VirtualAgility OPS Center™ and WorkCenter™ systems and includes IBM WebSphere® Portal Server, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Tivoli® Directory Services, IBM DB2® Universal Database™, IBM
Lotus® Sametime® and IBM System x®. In addition, applications from NC4 and Safeplans are included.

Exactly where

“The difference in our ability to manage the response to events was dramatic,” Fennewald said. “Almost as soon as we got MERIS implemented we were hit with ice storms that knocked out normal power for as many as 17 days in some parts of the state. Before MERIS, it would have taken several days to see where exactly we needed to send auxiliary generators. Now, within hours, we had a much better picture of the situation across the state. We had the generators in the right places at the right times, and homes and businesses were up on emergency power a lot sooner than they would have been otherwise.”

In a disaster situation, awareness of the placement and readiness of various resources — bulldozers, helicopters, police, firefighters, and volunteers — is critical for state emergency managers. In Missouri, before MERIS, they had only the telephone, radios, paper maps and colored pushpins to keep track of things. With MERIS, they are able to see in near real time who and what resources are available at any given moment.

Before, responder agencies were prevented from sharing information with others quickly. With MERIS, information is shared instantly across organizational lines — be it the National Guard, the fire marshal’s office, law-enforcement agencies, healthcare workers and others. All responder agencies, near and far, now use the standard National Incident Management System (NIMS) framework to coordinate and collaborate on the MERIS centralized response platform.

Components
VirtualAgility personnel assembled MERIS using the SOA approach to integrating and simplifying information technology environments. Key middleware components of MERIS were installed on IBM System x 3850 M2 servers in two data centers for redundancy and high availability. Connected by the VirtualAgility OPS Center portal were:

• IBM WebSphere Portal Server, which aggregates Web-based content and applications via any standard Web interface.

• IBM WebSphere Application Server, the foundation for building and managing SOA applications and services.

• IBM Tivoli Directory Services for locating, managing, administering, and organizing network resources.

• IBM Lotus Sametime to support instant messaging, Internet phone services, Web conferencing, and related collaboration tools.

• IBM DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Server Edition, to support crisis-management operations across the state.

• NC4’s E Team incident management application

• Safeplans Emergency Response Information Portal (ERIP)

In three months’ time, from October through December 2007, VirtualAgility had integrated the IBM software and a broad mix of emergency-response applications — including GIS mapping and incident-management applications — into its OPS Center and WorkCenter systems, effectively bridging the information gaps among multiple organizations. After two more months of training and testing, MERIS went live on March 8, 2008.

“Front-line emergency personnel across the state got their first experience with MERIS through VirtualAgility OPS Center, an IBM WebSphere portal customized for our needs,” said David Finch, special assistant for homeland security. “They integrated Lotus Sametime into OPS Center to give us additional capabilities for the team and person-to-person collaboration that we need. It’s been incredibly valuable.”

DB2 also comes in for special mention. “Our crisis management application depends on DB2,” said Finch, “and we’re getting fantastic response times — about four times faster than what we were getting on the Microsoft® SQL implementations we had seen.”

Taking advantage of IBM partner benefits

VirtualAgility participates in IBM PartnerWorld®, which offers a rich set of benefits to all IBM PartnerWorld members who want to team with IBM to build their vertical market capabilities, expand their partner network and attract customers in the markets they serve.

Stuart Rudolph, president and CEO of VirtualAgility, knows the value of being an IBM Business Partner. “It has been instrumental in helping us maintain our leadership in this very competitive marketplace,” Rudolph said.