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MANCHESTER, NH -- (Marketwire) -- 06/06/12 -- Providing fast, reliable communications for emergency responders is the whole reason InterAct exists -- which is why they selected Scribe Software to improve data integration for their internal IT systems.

InterAct installs and maintains 9-1-1 emergency incident response systems for cities, counties and states, and they were in need of a fast, effective solution to help them deal with the increasing complexity of the demands of their customer base.

InterAct had been using an internally developed MySQL database in lieu of simple and robust cloud-based CRM applications. The company eventually realized that they needed to migrate to Salesforce.com and complete the complicated systems integration without dedicating IT staff to the task. This needed to happen seamlessly, because InterAct's customers rely on their systems to provide life-and-death emergency response services.

"We understood that InterAct was facing serious challenges as it migrated to Salesforce," said Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe. "They needed to be able to still use the old application while they were implementing the new applications. We are very proud of the way we were able to fulfill their requirements for reliability and measure up to the standards that they and their customers set every day."

Scribe's data integration solutions not only brought all their data seamlessly to the users that needed it most, it also automated manual processes that had been clogging up the sales cycle. Scribed worked with partner, Massey Consulting, to do the implementation at InterAct.

"It's a big cost-savings and customer support is now working great because of the automation that happens through Scribe back to our Microsoft Great Plains system," says Paul Kielty, CIO for InterAct. "It used to be that when a customer would accept a quote and say, 'We want to buy your system,' it could take as many as six days to go through all the specs and convert that into a project. Now when someone buys, everyone's aware of it immediately because all the systems are tied together, the proper people in project management are notified, and they contact the customer and get the deal done."

This is especially important to InterAct, because they are not simply selling off-the-shelf applications. Each community that contracts with InterAct exists in a different environment; they have differing numbers of public safety officers, or unique landscape features that affect radio transmission, or any number of other factors. The communities rely on InterAct to do things like:

• Capture and transmit all "life critical" information to public safety officers as they respond to emergencies
• Map the best route for public safety officers to respond to emergency events
• Identify where the closest fire hydrants or hospitals are to an accident scene
• Empower police officers to use smartphones such as BlackBerrys to conduct on scene background searches to identify potentially dangerous people
• Tie all the information together into a jail-tracking system to identify which criminals require special handling or care, and which are due for release

These kinds of complex projects mean that InterAct is also dealing with very complex (and sensitive) customer data, inventory data, pricing data, and project data. They are also planning on tying in all the tech-support cases they get from customers into Salesforce, to help plan what will be needed in the next maintenance renewal contracts, as well as running more analytics on their products to help out with marketing efforts.

InterAct had three criteria they were looking at to make their decision as to which integration solution to use: 1) It had to be easy to install, 2) it had to be easy to maintain, and 3) it had to be easy to work with.

"The big advantage to Scribe is that it was very low-impact and quick to get up and running," Kielty said. "It was all there, right out of the box. The connectors were already built from Salesforce to Great Plains, so after a quick install and a few hours of training by one of my staff, Scribe was up and running and she has been using it ever since."

The impact of using Scribe on the end-users at InterAct has been a pleasant surprise as well. Because the connectors worked in the background, there was no need for specialized training or roll-out sessions.

"From an end user perspective, they have information that they didn't have available to them in the past, and it isn't necessarily a function of Salesforce -- it's Great Plains," Kielty said. "That works the other way too -- the people working in Great Plains who previously had no visibility into sales information now do without having to learn another system -- the information they need just 'shows up.' We tied all this together with all our workflow in the back-end, very efficiently, by using Scribe."

About Scribe
For more information, please visit www.scribesoft.com, follow Scribe on Twitter, or subscribe to the Scribe Blog.

About InterAct
For more information please contact pr@interact911.com