After being asked to help a UAS manufacturer propose their system to the Department of Defense, Tony “Pooch” Pucciarella, founder of AlarisPro, says he was surprised to learn that the company was unfamiliar with standard aviation reliability and safety metrics such as mean time between replacement and failure.

This led Pucciarella to start designing the architecture for AlarisPro, UAS fleet management software that helps keep track of vital information regarding drones.

Among many things, the software provides detailed reports, flight and maintenance logs, and a dashboard that includes pilot status, UAS status and alerts, with colors — green (good), yellow (caution) and red (item is past due) — to indicate the current standing.

In an interview with Unmanned Systems, Pucciarella says it took the AlarisPro team 18 months to get the first version of AlarisPro ready for beta testing. In 2016, Alaris debuted the software during AUVSI’s Xponential conference in New Orleans, with the goal of obtaining a core group of customers to help the company refine and develop AlarisPro.

Since that time, Pucciarella says Alaris has added “lots of customized features” to the software based on their customer’s requirements. One of the company’s prominent customers is the New York City Fire Department, who are heavy operators of small drones.

Pucciarella says that the FDNY has had some specific requests around customizing the flight log entries.

“We enjoy working with our customers to understand their needs and then incorporate new features to meet and exceed what they wanted,” Pucciarella says. “This has been the most rewarding part of developing AlarisPro over the past few years.”

Pucciarella adds that “around 75 percent” of AlarisPro’s new features and changes are ideas that they get from existing customers.

Before the debut of AlarisPro, a small business in France that operated small UAS for high-end real estate customers found AlarisPro on the internet and subscribed. That customer told Alaris that he would present his AlarisPro reports to prospective customers during the quote process as a means of distinguishing his operation from his competitors.

According to Pucciarella, that company is still a customer, and Pucciarella said that he planned on connecting with them during the show.

“He’s still a customer and I’m having dinner with him in Denver during Xponential,” Pucciarella said.