BlackBerry has announced that the Pentagon Force Protection Agency has awarded a contract to renew and expand its use of BlackBerry’s AtHoc Networked Crisis Communications Suite.
The Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA) is a civilian agency within the Department of Defense charged with safeguarding the occupants, visitors, and infrastructure of the Pentagon building and sixty-nine other defense installments in the National Capitol Region. This crucial mission is accomplished with officers of the United States Pentagon Police, anti-terrorism and protective services agents, plus threat management agents including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives technicians.
“We are honored by the continued trust in AtHoc by the Pentagon towards protecting its personnel,” said Guy Miasnik, President of BlackBerry’s AtHoc Division. “Their trust in AtHoc reinforces a shared mission for early warning, personnel accountability and cross-organization information sharing during times of crisis.”
Before implementing AtHoc, important resources inside the Pentagon were not connected to a common messaging and emergency notification network, and the PFPA was unable to effectively communicate directly with organizations outside the Pentagon building during a crisis.
AtHoc has enabled the PFPA to establish secure alerting and permission-based crisis communications internally and among numerous external organizations that, together, can respond to whatever threats might arise.
The renewed one-year contract between BlackBerry’s AtHoc and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency includes multi-year options extending through 2020. The agreement includes 37,000 Department of Defense users, including Enterprise Alerting for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Security Services, and the DoD’s Washington Headquarters Services.