Michael Bryant from End2End Public Safety Information Systems talked to me about the company’s domain name, ARMS.com. It loosely stands for Computer Aided Dispatch and Records Management System, of which the company is the industry leader.
Mike: Can you give a little background on your business?
Michael: The company name is End2End Public Safety. www.end2endpublicsafety.com. Our best known software application is ARMS, www.arms.com. We also have FirePoint, www.firepoint.com and OnGuard, www.onguard24x7.com.
ARMS and FirePoint and a couple of other companies merged to form End2End in 1998. ARMS being the largest division, has been around since 1988.
End2End Public Safety is a privately held company that focuses on applications geared specifically to small and midsize public safety agencies throughout the United States. We develop, deploy and support our applications and systems for all areas of public safety including; police, fire, parking & traffic as well as security departments. All of our ARMS enterprise applications are written in Microsoft’s .Net and utilize Microsoft® SQL Server. Our customer base spans many different markets including; municipals (local and county), colleges & universities, airports, housing authorities, hospitals, school police, park police and private security. Our software design philosophy can be summed up in a few simple words: easy to use, built on industry standards, dependable, able to grow as you grow. In fact, many of our customers have run ARMS for over 15 years, with several since 1988! It is this dedication to our customers, that is provided by our service and support team that has allowed us to keep the software current in the face of the constantly changing computer industry.
End2End has been dedicated to providing feature rich applications to the public safety market since 1988. We provide applications that have always leveraged the latest in technology thereby protecting the end users investment in the system. Applications were originally designed and maintained by public safety personnel that contributed real world experience into the applications. Today End2End continues this tradition as we serve over 700 customers from coast to coast in all facets of public safety. All of End2End’s owners and senior staff have years of public safety experience from dispatching to senior management at both the local and national level. Our technology continues to evolve as the needs of our customers evolve. We have been and continue to be committed to our customers public safety technology needs.
Mike: How long you’ve been in business, number of employees, how long you’ve had your site online, etc.
Michael: We have had a web presents since the early 1990’s. As you can see, we were the original registers of arms.com.
Mike: Has has owning the domain arms.com impacted your business?
Michael: Actually probably very little if any. We don’t sell fire arms or prosthetics. We are known as ARMS and it does help for our customer to locate us, but our industry is such a niche industry that I can’t say our web site drives a lot of business to us. I do receive several emails a month from overseas buyers wanting firearms :).
Public safety uses so many acronyms for communication. The ARMS product is categorized in the industry as a CAD/RMS system. In the private sector CAD is Computer Aided Design, but in law enforcement this is Computer Aided Dispatch. So it is difficult to find a web site that would be a easy hit when a public safety department is looking for information.
Mike: Below, Michael has provided a snapshot of Google Analytics for the site:
Mike: Do you have any other online marketing strategies that you follow such as Google ads, seo, banners on other sites, etc.?
Michael: We have tried a little of all you mention. This is such a niche market, software for public safety departments, that many of the traditional marketing techniques do not seem to work.
Mike: How do your customers react to the domain name ARMS.com?
Michael: We are best known for ARMS. If we are at a trade show, with shirts that say ‘End2End Public Safety’ our customers will walk by without noticing, so we focus on the name recognition of ARMS.
I feel that ARMS.com shows that we have longevity in the industry. We started in the days of the MAC and DOS. Many of us remember the first dial up connections and running our message boards with a server with several modems. So I think our competitors that are not fresh out of college, recognizes that by having arms.com, we have been around for a while or made a big investment in the name. As stated, we have been around for a while.
This is very minor, but it is much easier when giving someone a URL or email address to say, ARMS.COM….
Mike: Do you think you would be willing to sell your domain at any point? Have you ever received any unsolicited offers?
Michael: We are true capitalist so everything is for sell. We always receive email inquiries, and we typically say we will start the bids at a million dollars.
Mike: Any advice for start ups, small business, or business of any size for that matter on choosing the right domain name?
Michael: Again this is such a niche industry that I can’t say our domain drives customer to us. We have a very limited market. At last count there were only 14,000 +/- law enforcement agencies in the US.
