About Us

To provide you, our customers, with an Emergency Notification System that you can rely on anytime and anywhere you need it, to keep your charges safe and informed.

Begun in 1995 by company founder and president, Samuel Asher, Ashergroup has grown from an engineering company specializing in telephony applications to its position now, building, operating, and maintaining its own hosted IVR service bureau.

In 1999, Ashergroup embarked on the development of its first product, an emergency notification system known as Hyper-Reach®.

At the time, the value of a hosted notification system was barely understood, most notification systems then being comprised of purchased equipment and telephone lines that were hosted by the organization doing the notification, or being provided by live operators.

This meant that notification of any meaningful scale could only be afforded well by communities with very deep pockets. The process for starting a notification campaign was extremely cumbersome, often requiring a phone call to a vendor's gatekeeper who would take some notes and actually start the campaign.

Sam Asher saw the huge potential for building an large scale service dedicated solely to emergency notification and providing that shared service to a number of clients. The value of the shared service stems primarily from two insights: that by pooling resources, a group of customers could receive a much higher capacity and more feature rich system than anyone could afford alone, and that it would be rare for customers to exhaust that capacity at exactly the same time. Having developed telephony applications of the highest order since 1979, from switching software to high speed networks and protocols, he also saw the huge potential for an automated system that was directed entirely by the customer and easy to use.

In 2003, Sam was asked to sit on the NENA (National Emergency Number Association) committee that was then developing a Standard for emergency notification systems. Included in the Standard are: system security, features, mapping systems, and availability/response times for maintenance issues, among other topics. The Standard that Sam helped develop was adopted by NENA and is currently in use by the industry.

Samuel Asher, founder and president. Sam has worked in the telephony and network communications world for 30 years, both in industry as well as in higher education. His background includes developing software for an early digital switch, board level firmware, internetworking protocols, building large systems of communicating processes, compiler development, operating systems development, and project management. Sam received his Bachelor's Degree in combined Computer Science and Music from the University of Rochester's College of Arts and Sciences and Eastman School of Music, respectively.

Timothy Oertel, VP Engineering, joined Ashergroup in 1997. He has done numerous assignments from low-level firmware design and development to the design of our entire Telephony Service Bureau platform, TelSO. Tim received his BS in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1994.

Russ Bell, VP of Sales. Russ brings the Ashergroup 18 years of solid business and management experience in multiple engineering fields. His extensive HR experience includes seven years in the placement arena hiring and managing all types of IT professionals. During the past six years he has served as Account Executive, Branch Manager, and VP of Sales for the Ashergroup. Russ's educational background includes mechanical design and engineering with a focus on management issues.

Campus-Reach is a part of the Hyper-Reach® family of Emergency Notification service products. Campus-Reach specifically addresses the mass notification needs of universities and colleges.

Hyper-Reach also has service offerings specifically for cities, 9-1-1 PSAPS, fire, police and EMS.

This includes the most advanced Mapping and Search System of any mass notification product on the market today!

The Whisper-Reach™ Confidential Tip-Line provides a channel for people to report problems before they become disasters. Unique among reporting lines, Whisper-Reach has options to maintain the anonymity of the reporter, often necessary in settings where the informant may be concerned about retalliation.

Ashergroup has been developing, expanding, and improving the Hyper-Reach® family of Emergency Notification services since 1999 with a goal of giving a twofold benefit to EN users: build a system more scalable and powerful than they might otherwise be able to afford while offering this system at a lower price than any competing system in its class.

Since EN systems are typically used in emergent situations, our development efforts have been guided by the principle that Hyper-Reach and Campus-Reach must be the most intuitive and easy-to-use systems available.

The only way to provide this system was to build it ourselves, from the ground up, using our extensive experience with world-class, telco grade, hardened automated telephony services.