We think the work we do at Amatra is pretty important: Being able to communicate with large populations quickly and efficiently when the need arises is crucial in today’s fast-moving society.

But it’s been just as important for us to create strategic partnerships that help propel our business forward, educate more people about our software solutions and share our deep knowledge of multichannel communications. One of those partnerships is with IBM.

Why a partnership?

Amatra has been a Premier IBM Business Partner for more than three years, both as an independent software vendor partner and software reseller. Our expertise in mass notification also helps build on IBM’s capabilities.

IBM’s business is organized by industry. Its Government sector includes state, local and federal governments and agencies, as well as education. There’s also a cross-industry Public Safety sector where Amatra has created strong partnership ties.

Amatra’s founder, Kishan Siram, has traveled with the IBM team — and other partners whose services are complementary to ours — to various industry trade shows, including the International Association of Emergency Managers Annual Conference, and APCO’s International Public Safety Broadband Summit & Expo. Our SmartSource technology is also in place in five of IBM’s worldwide Innovation Centers.

Working toward a Smarter Planet

Thanks to Amatra’s SmartSource™ solution and strong expertise in the multichannel communication space, IBM approached us to participate in its government industry initiative and, later, in its Smarter Planet initiative, which is all about coming up with solutions that address the problems we’re facing across the globe. We talked to IBM’s Tom Roberts, a global partner executive for independent software provider and developer relations, about why a partnership like this is so important to everyone involved.

“People have become tremendously interconnected, which has resulted is an amazing amount of data created, both structured and unstructured,” Roberts says. “And across many industries, including public safety, you have to be able to make sense of this unstructured data.”

“This applies to services like what Amatra provides,” Roberts says. “We’re able to capture large amounts of data, analyze and sort through it, and use it to engage with this hyperconnected society of iPads, iPhones, BlackBerrys, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. We can take advantage of that to reach people at the end of those communication channels.”

We’re looking forward to fostering even smarter communications for a Smarter Planet in the future; our partnership with IBM is helping us be more agile than ever.

“There’s a demand for more software and tools with these capabilities,” Roberts says. “It’s driving relentless innovation for IBM and our partners to be best positioned to provide them to our customers.”

You can read more about Amatra’s mass notification and communication solutions for government on our website. And for an in-depth look at our unique partnership at work, read Amatra’s case study, “Anderson University increases campus safety with better emergency communications.”