Letter from the CEO of American Messaging
March 13, 2014
Dear Valued Customer,
Re: Our Commitment to the Future
As Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of American Messaging it is my pleasure to work with a group of individuals that are committed to our Mission, which is to be the best most trusted provider of critical messaging services in the United States – to be the Dependable Choice. We established our Mission statement and “the Dependable Choice” tag line shortly after forming American Messaging in June 2005 based on a strong belief that we could differentiate our company through service delivery.
We also had a core belief that the unique attributes and the discrete functionality associated with our messaging networks were such that demand for traditional paging services would continue well beyond most expectations. This was a contrarian view from which we have not waivered and which has remained the basis for our continued investment. Fortunately, this view has proven correct as we have become one of the largest critical messaging companies in the United States, while simultaneously delivering strong shareholder returns. In fact, dating back to early 2009 American Messaging had no debt, considerable cash flow and yet we faced a changing landscape and emerging risks.
This led to an in-depth review of our business and the beginning of a substantive effort to broaden our product suite while continuing to invest in traditional paging. Over the past three years we have invested almost $15 million to develop a new “modern” paging device we call The CUE®, mobile and desktop applications called IntelliMessage® that operate on Broadband and Wi-Fi networks, updated and enhanced customer supporting software, created integrated messaging software and we built over forty dedicated networks. Today we are more than just a paging company – albeit we remain committed to paging and our core belief remains unchanged.
In conjunction with our traditional wide area and dedicated messaging networks, we now use Broadband and Wi-Fi networks with our suite of mobile and desktop applications to simultaneously deliver critical messages to pagers, smart phones, tablets and personal computers. We also construct and operate dedicated messaging networks for individual customers providing redundancy and more rapid message delivery. Message delivery is easily initiated, monitored, archived and responses can be viewed using IntelliMessage® mobile and desktop applications or through customer supporting software, all of which is included at no incremental cost as part of our overall service offering.
Our investments were purposely made to embrace other technologies so as to increase the value of our services without incremental cost to our customer. We did this believing that if we could meet the dynamic needs of our customers’ customer – the end user – at no incremental cost to our customer we could extend our relationship and preclude consideration of stand-alone offerings of the same technologies we have embraced.
Fortunately there is increasing evidence – in the form of new customer relationships and adoption of our new product suite by existing customers – that our strategic thinking and corresponding investments were well founded. We are obviously very pleased with this outcome however it has also made clear that our traditional paging business will remain a core component of a comprehensive critical messaging system well into the future. In other words, we continue to retain our contrarian view subject to one reality – our traditional paging networks must work reliably. We know this and are committed to modernizing our network infrastructure and to improving our redundancy/backup systems.
To this end, we are investing several million dollars this year to build a new, completely redundant back-up facility in Stockton, California, leveraging an existing facility acquired in our recent acquisition of Cook Telecom, Inc. We are also replacing aged network components and/or “one-off” components that can negatively affect network performance. We are doing this pro-actively as part of a comprehensive preventive maintenance program established to ensure the long term viability of our network infrastructure. Finally, we are continuing to invest in our software applications to ensure they are compliant with the recent Omnibus ruling and the highest HIPAA standards.
Please be assured our commitment to service delivery remains unchanged and know we are investing heavily to expand our product suite and to ensure the reliability of our networks well into the future. We believe these investments will prove mutually beneficial and ensure our collective success.
