Features
Incident Xpress software targets mid-tier customers

A new incident management software solution has recently entered the market, designed for medium-sized businesses.

Incident Xpress is aimed at users who may not have the need or appetite for complex enterprise suites, according to the company’s founders, yet still require a solution that will help them manage security incidents.

Incident Xpress comprises a four-person team: Denis O’Sullivan, managing director; Cora Bolianatz, marketing director; Danny Oh, technology director; and Gerry McCracken, financial director. All four were once part of PPM 2000, an Edmonton-based incident management company founded by O’Sullivan in 1988. That company was sold to a private equity group in 2014 and ultimately became a part of Resolver.

When O’Sullivan sold the PPM business, his original plan was to retire from the security industry, but the idea of a simplified approach to incident reporting sparked a desire to return. “It’s always been at the back of my mind that reporting software should be less expensive,” says O’Sullivan.

The company incorporated in 2019 and spent a year building a platform. Incident Xpress soft launched in November 2020 and is now actively scouting for clients. “Now we’re very happy that we feel like we have a very stable and good product,” says O’Sullivan.

Bolianatz says Incident Xpress is targeting a North American customer base, adding that customers could include small colleges, health-care facilities, retirement homes or satellite offices of larger companies. When users sign up, they can choose from four industry verticals: corporate, education, health care and hospitality. Feature sets and reporting templates are geared to one of those four, and designed to simplify the set-up process for the user. Features include reporting tools, email notifications, audit functionality, Excel export functionality and a privacy setting that will allow reports to be locked down and protected once an incident has been closed.

To try or buy Incident Xpress, customers can visit the company’s website. Video tutorials explain the software’s features and how to use them. The interaction is designed to be simple and basically self-serve, says Bolianatz, though the company is able to offer support services during regular business hours. Users can also submit tickets through a dedicated help centre. “We wanted to make it as simple as possible for people to configure our software [and] learn how to use it,” she says.

The software runs in the cloud on Microsoft’s Azure platform, which provides a level of customer assurance, adds O’Sullivan. “Using Microsoft Azure gave us access to a lot of security features. So the data on their server at rest is encrypted, and it’s encrypted in communication between the user and the server,” he explains.

The company also prides itself on up-front and simplified pricing. Every system starts with five concurrent users for an early adopter price of $49.50 a month. Customers can scale with 10-user packs for an additional $49.50 a month or $495 annually. “We want to be an affordable, easy-to-use solution to those companies that are in the mid-market,” says O’Sullivan.

“The fact that we have cloud-based software and work with this low-touch model, it works really well with what we’re trying to do,” adds Bolianatz. “People are looking for solutions like that — something they can find easily online, learn about easily online, test out themselves. If they have simple questions, they can come to us and we can answer those questions for them, but basically we’re putting everything into their hands.”

With a staff of only four, the company is deliberately small and nimble, says Bolianatz. But as the company grows, there may be expansion on the horizon. “As we grow, we’ll manage that to the best of our ability, but our goal is to keep the price down for our subscribers,” she says. “That’s the whole point of this — to provide them with comprehensive reporting software [that’s] affordable.”