BlackBerry Limited announced that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has awarded a $20 million multiple-year delivery order against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Solution for Enterprise-Wide Procurement Government-wide Acquisition Contract for the continuation and extension of the AtHoc networked crisis communications platform supporting the VA Notification System (VANS) and VA Personnel Accountability System (VA-PAS). The award, made to AtHoc's reseller partner Four Points Technology demonstrates VA's commitment to leading the way in protecting and accounting for all of its employees, contractors and visitors during crises. This order extends protection to over 600,000 VA personnel as well as expanding scope and functionality of the system.

The system includes alerting across telephones, text, pagers, fax, desktops, smartphones, as well as integration with other VA systems such as digital media systems. The VANS system enables alerting to, and response collection from, all targeted users for crisis management at the local or national level. The VANS system is fully integrated with the U.S. Navy SPAWAR Personnel Accountability and Assessment Systems (PAAS).