8
News
ESN sees progress but
draws fire from PAC
www.criticalcomms.com July 2019
Motorola Solutions
acquires WatchGuard
Motorola Solutions announced
on 11 July that it has acquired
WatchGuard, Inc. (www.
watchguardvideo.com) – a US company
specialising in mobile video solutions.
WatchGuard designs and
manufactures in-car video
systems, body-worn
cameras, evidence
management systems
and software. It
manufactures its
products at its
headquarters
in Texas.
John Kedzierski,
senior vice-president,
video security solutions
at Motorola Solutions,
said: “WatchGuard provides
industry-leading capabilities,
from capturing an incident from more
than a dozen vantage points to technology that
enables users to recover and upload video from
events hours or days after they happened.”
The acquisition expands Motorola
Solutions’ mission-critical ecosystem and adds
to the company’s video security solutions
platform that includes fixed cameras and
Interworking between the Emergency
Services Network (ESN) and Airwave
has been demonstrated by Motorola
Solutions, which will allow users and
control rooms that still operate on
Airwave to communicate with users
who have moved over to ESN. This
functionality will initially be made available
to the UK’s emergency services as
part of ESN Direct 2 – the second of
three versions of the prototype software
package that when mature will become
ESN Prime, the fully functional solution
that is needed for national transition to
ESN. Further capabilities will then be built
into the Direct 3 release.
As part of its contract to supply
smartphones and related accessories for
ESN via a framework agreement for the
Home Office and user organisations (if
the latter wish to use this arrangement),
Samsung has been working with Sonic
Communications to provide a Bluetooth
remote speaker microphone (RSM). The
Home Office reported in a social media
post on 24 June that the first of these
had arrived in that week and that a wired
version will arrive at a later date.
The RSM was later tested at the
Glastonbury Festival. Members of the EE
ESN Customer Engagement and South
West ESN teams worked with the local
three emergency services to understand
their operational priorities and plans, and
also tested coverage in and around the
900-acre site.
However, the programme has come
under fire from the Public Accounts
Committee (PAC). Its latest report on
ESN states that despite the reset of the
programme in 2018: “We are not yet
convinced that it the Home Office has
done enough to turn the programme
around. The plan for delivering ESN is still
not sufficiently robust and the Department
does not yet have the skills to make it
work. The programme faces substantial
levels of technical and commercial risk,
and failures to date have undermined the
confidence of users that the programme
will deliver a system that is fit for purpose
and meets their needs. On current
evidence it seems inevitable that there will
be further delays and cost increases.”
advanced analytics from Avigilon, and licence
plate recognition (LPR) cameras and software
from Vigilant Solutions.
“We are excited to join the Motorola
Solutions team,” said Robert Vanman,
WatchGuard’s founder,
chief executive officer
and chairman. “This
acquisition enables us
to continue providing
market-leading
mobile video
solutions to existing
customers while also
leveraging Motorola
Solutions’ global
footprint and growing
video security solutions
portfolio.”
The companies have
not disclosed the terms of the
transaction. Back in April, WatchGuard
announced a pay-as-you-go/as-a-service
programme for law enforcement agencies
seeking to avoid the upfront costs of adopting
body-worn video cameras. This includes
WatchGuard’s VISTA body-worn cameras
and its cloud-based evidence management
platform, EvidenceLibrary.com.
French firms team up on
airbase threat detection
Etelm has, as part of a consortium
of French small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs), been selected as part
of the PRODEF challenge, which was launched
in early 2019 by the Defense Innovation Agency
(AID), to develop a solution to aid France’s
military in the identification of threats to
airbases and its response to these.
The proposed solution is based on a secure
private broadband multimedia radio network,
based on standard LTE technology that would
cover a permanent or temporary airbase or
an unexpected incident or crisis site, and be
integrated with a set of autonomous sensors
that can be deployed quickly. This network
will work in concert with an application that
will aid decision-making through visualising
data in an intuitive manner and provide
advanced capabilities for field operations. The
nine companies involved are: 4G Technology
(mobile autonomous video devices for threat
detection); Etelm (4G radio infrastructure);
Halys (LTE EPC core and SIM cards); Diginext
(hypervisor 2D/3D/4D); Drone Protect System
(autonomous surveillance drones); Sorhea
– Vitaprotech Group (perimeter intrusion
detection); CINES (cybersecurity); Cerbair
(drone detection); and Mentor Consultant
(technical and industrial architect).
According to Nicolas Hauswald, Etelm’s
CEO: “The companies within the consortium
are used to working together and most
components that will be used in the project have
already been tested with each other (and some
deployed on the field). Field deployment of the
overall solution is expected for next year.”
/www.criticalcomms.com
/www.watchguardvideo.com
/EvidenceLibrary.com