iLert started as a master’s thesis project in 2009. Birol, iLert’s CEO and co-founder, set out to develop a context-aware and centralized notification service, which automatically delivers alerts from different applications to the person who can best resolve the issue. While a major part of the thesis was how to incorporate contextual information when deciding whom to alert for a specific incident, Birol quickly discovered that the general problem of alerting anyone already involved a great deal complexity, let alone using contextual information such as skills or workload.

Companies solved this problem by building inhouse solutions using some combination of spreadsheets for on-call management, a PBX system or SMS gateway for alerting and a dedicated mobile device for the on-call person, which is handed over to the next on-call person between shifts.

Birol saw an opportunity and decided to build a service that provides a simple solution for this problem: one that didn’t require any telecommunications equipment and worked well with existing monitoring tools. Along the way, Birol partnered up with two of his former colleagues, Christian Fröhlingsdorf and Roman Frey, to help him create iLert.