With lives on the line, every second counts.

That’s why first responders need the absolute best in connectivity and coordination.

A 2025 Cisco Partner Innovation Challenge winner is giving them just that. With their SignalPoint platform, Iron Bow Technologies connects fragmented teams, manages torrents of data, and with advanced location services, triangulates 911 callers within five meters — so first responders can reach them quickly, even under the harshest conditions. All while helping organizations meet new government requirements for faster responses and planning for an agentic AI future.

“In highly uncertain life-and-death situations,” said Greg Stemberger, Iron Bow’s chief technology officer, “it’s very critical that you have the maximum information available to make decisions.”

“We provide automation and integration,” Stemberger added. “And that ultimately leads to much more precise and actionable intelligence around the information being delivered to emergency response services.”

A key member of the rescue team: Cisco technologies

A wide range of Cisco technologies are integrated seamlessly into the SignalPoint platform, as Jeff Ward, Iron Bow’s practice director for infrastructure automation explained.

“We started off with Catalyst Center as our source of truth for the network data and physical locations,” Ward said. “We then feed the wireless LAN controller into Catalyst Center to provide access-point live data. From that point, SignalPoint takes data and sends it to Call Manager, Emergency Responder, and Red Sky — to perform that automated update loop to keep emergency response locations in sync with the locations that are identified on the map.”

The result is ever more precise insights into exactly where a 911 caller needs help, thereby accelerating the response time.

“If we go deeper,” Ward continued, “we leverage Cisco Spaces for the Bluetooth tech telemetry data and Splunk for call tracking. With that call-tracking location, we can narrow it down now to not just the floor level, but to a room level or it’s oftentimes within a five-meter radius.”

Innovating, meeting compliance, and embracing an AI future

SonarPing is another key innovation. It can help first responders navigate a building even if obscured by smoke — and reach a person in crisis quickly and with pinpoint location.

“With the Sonar ping, we’re providing auditory queues as first responders navigate through the floor,” Ward said. “So, they don’t have to continually look down at the floor map to figure out where they’re navigating. As they get closer, the pings gets louder and the beats get closer together. So, they know they’re on the right path immediately.”

SignalPoint’s main purpose is to save lives. But compliance is a key part of that. In the United States, first responders must meet recent regulations like Kari’s Law and RAY BAUM’s Act, which set standards for response times and efficiencies. Fragmented systems were a key barrier to meeting those regulations. SignalPoint bridges many of the data gaps.

“There’s a federal mandate related to the Ray Baum Act,” said Ward, “which essentially defines a requirement around providing accurate dispatch information any time a 911 call is made. And what we’ve done is try to reduce the barrier and some of the friction related to how that’s done by providing automation and integration and then ultimately leading to much more precise and actionable intelligence.”

Of course, Iron Bow never stops looking to the future, especially with agentic AI.

“What’s exciting is that there’s a nice tie-in to AI,” Stemberger concluded. “We see our application transitioning to what we believe will be an AI assistant for emergency services. We could see a copilot type of scenario where emergency personnel show up at a site and they have an AI assistant guiding them and recommending an optimum route to reach an individual that’s made a call. So instead of just telling them where they are, what about telling them the fastest route so they can get there quickly and efficiently.”

The Cisco partnership will remain critical as Iron Bow adopts these new technologies.

“Iron Bow views Cisco’s AI-centric partner ecosystem as critical to its next-generation emergency response and situational intelligence,” Ward said.

Cisco’s 360 Partner Program, which offers training, tools, and demo environments, will bring further support to Iron’s Bow’s journey forward.

“Expanded enablement resources including advanced training, solution labs, and demo environments directly support Iron Bow’s ability to innovate faster and drive measurable growth,” Stemberger added.

In short, Iron Bow will continue to seek out the innovations and expertise that will help them in their core mission: supporting first responders with the most actionable, real-time intelligence — to make their operations safer and more effective, no matter how steep the challenges.