Peregrine Leverages Software For Disasters

Peregrine Systems Inc. last week unveiled software designed to help government agencies and businesses better respond to and cope with crises. The Peregrine Crisis Response System provides real-time views of assets, from IT systems to employees; a system that tracks the resolution of problems via trouble tickets; and CAD tools that let organizations display drawings of buildings for security purposes. It includes tools to assess an event's financial and operational impact, as well as damage to communications and data networks. Available for testing this week, it will ship late in the first quarter of next year.

The idea for the software took shape just hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when employees began E-mailing suggestions to Peregrine CEO and chairman Steve Gardner. Within a week, Gardner asked VP of business development Ken Boyd to lead a team to build the software. "What we did in managing infrastructure and connecting diverse and heterogeneous systems," Gardner says, "is what the government needed to capture all sorts of data, condense it into data that is actionable, and get that data to people who need it."