The highlight of a busy September here at Quiss was our attendance at the Emergency Services Show 2015, at the NEC. The two day event, which started on the 23rd is recognised as the UK’s leading event for everyone involved in the delivery of emergency services and those organisations that support them.
It was another bumper year, with more than 400 exhibitors and over 6000 visitors attending the event, a must visit for anyone involved in emergency planning, response or recovery, both in the UK and abroad.
It’s true, our IT managed services stand looked a little out of place amongst all the hi-viz jackets, fire-fighting machinery and life-saving equipment, but this wasn’t just a random exhibition for Quiss. We work with a number of emergency services providers, including Warwickshire Fire & Rescue and Northamptonshire Fire & Rescue.
We also provide outsourced IT support for the Chief Fire Officers Association, based near us in Tamworth, so we know the industry and know what we offer is relevant to the sector.
Much of the talk on our stand centred on converged telephony and the broader benefits of managed IT services. But one topic that attracted a lot of interest was our new proactive and comprehensive network monitoring solution.
It monitors our clients’ networks using a whole range of innovative technologies and guarantees the availability of components connected to the network, whilst measuring traffic and usage across it. For some clients the loss of a network component or a slowing of traffic might be a major inconvenience, but for the emergency services, problems like this really might be a matter of life and death.
This was our first outing with this relatively new offering. But over the two days, interest in its ability to maintain networks at their optimum, whilst reducing the risk of outages was certainly high, with a lot of follow up meetings expected. As one fire officer said; “this isn’t like a smoke alarm; this is like seeing granddad starting to nod off with a cigarette and taking it off him before he does any damage.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
The show also featured over 40 free seminars, with presentations covering almost every subject, but a few caught our attention as they demonstrated the importance of technology to the future of the delivery of emergency services: Building resilience through app technology; Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme; Digital technology in emergency response.
It’s too early to say if next year’s show will feature in our marketing calendar, but the early signs are encouraging and we made plenty of new contacts, right across the emergency services sector. Perhaps we’ll see you there next year, when we promise to have better giveaways!
Like what you read?
