Crossing the mission-critical tech threshold

Critical Comms sat down with Motorola Solutions’ Tom Guthrie to talk software, managed services, public safety and Twitter.

Public safety communications giant Motorola Solutions has been steadily transforming itself in recent years, placing an ever-increasing emphasis on software-based solutions. Part of that transformation has been internal, while a steady flow of strategic acquisitions has brought in expertise from outside.

One recent acquisition was Australian company Gridstone — which develops software solutions to mobilise public safety workflows by leveraging broadband and mobile communications devices — with whom Motorola Solutions has worked closely in recent years. Others include Airwave in the UK; Spillman Technologies, a CAD and records management company in the US; and in Chile, InterExport, a company that provides managed and support services for communications systems to government, public safety and enterprise customers.

“It’s a natural transition,” Motorola Solutions VP Tom Guthrie said. Responsible for Motorola’s portfolio of smart public safety solutions, Guthrie is the former CEO of Twisted Pair, a firm that developed the WAVE PTT software for mobile phones and other devices. Twisted Pair was itself another Motorola acquisition (in 2014).

“Yes, we’ve made a lot of hardware in our history, but you’re going to see more and more software solutions and services… and specifically around the software solutions side we are going to more formally organise that to provide some increased focus,” Guthrie added.

“You’re seeing additional acquisitions to bring more software capabilities to the table, but then also moving to where we’re more and more being a managed service provider and operating a lot of these capabilities for our customers.”

So is it fair to say that Motorola Solutions is heading more in the direction of aiming to supply the smarts for the customer, no matter whether they’re using Motorola hardware or not? “Absolutely that’s the case,” Guthrie said.

“But you’re going to see that expand much further… it’s moving more into the IoT space, whether [that’s] intelligent biometrics, [or] it could be smart sensors,” he added. “The role we still want to play on the communications side is to be the collector… and the aggregator of the information back-end for public safety.

“There are all kinds of devices and wearables that will come out that we’re not going to manufacture, but we want to be kind of the hub that pulls all that information back together, and collects it into the data lake for public safety and applies the analytics so that it’s useful to [the customer].”

Sticking to the data aggregation theme, Guthrie sees a future of greater collaboration between the private and public sectors. “We’re seeing more public-private partnerships [where] public safety and commercial organisations work together, because there’s data that’s collected for the purposes of security for ‘company X’ that could be useful to public safety, and vice versa,” said Guthrie. “And there’s information that’s collected and analysed by public safety, which could be provided out to commercial organisations. Whether that’s criminal hotspots, trends, patterns, things like that. There’s a symbiotic relationship between private security operations and public safety operations.

“The more data we collect, the better positioned we are to also be an intelligence broker, an information broker of aggregated information that was pulled together for public safety.”

Capitalising on new technologies

Guthrie also pointed out that public safety organisations are not yet leveraging all the technologies that we now take for granted in our daily lives. “It’s kind of crazy, if you think of it, how today we have all these apps [and] the way we use our mobile devices — but if I have an emergency, I call Triple Zero. Really? Is that the best we can do?” he said. “And even then when I call, you can’t always tell where I am. I mean, an Uber can get closer than public safety [first responders], which is a little crazy.

“I think what we’re going to see more and more is citizens will engage with emergency services through different affinity groups,” he said. “It comes down to money. [If I were an insurance company] I could probably save money on claims if I had advanced technology that enabled you to get help faster, or to provide a more precise location of where you are when you break your leg or have a heart attack.”

Guthrie said that what he and his group do every day is look at technologies that 90% of the time were developed for some other purpose. “Cameras weren’t developed for public safety. Broadband LTE wasn’t developed for public safety, but we look at it and say, how can it be applied to the workflows of public safety?” he said. “Public safety tends to only incorporate technology once it’s crossed a threshold of being mission critical.”

Guthrie’s also a big fan of using the ‘agile’ software development methodology to engage with the company’s customers. “What if we have the structure of almost a hackathon, but instead of having developers make up an idea of what they think might be useful, why don’t we just have the customers come in and state their problems?” he said, adding that the “arduous process of hiring consultants and writing RFPs … won’t inject technology into public safety fast enough. The technology’s coming too fast, and I think we’ve got to be more creative in how we very quickly assess the potential application of a new technology.”

Guthrie points out that what has advanced a lot of technology isn’t public safety, but Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And he wants to leverage those companies’ experience in machine learning.

“Use Twitter as an example,” he said. “A piece of data comes into their cloud. Two things need to happen. One is you immediately, real time need to say, ‘Who needs to know about this?’ Somebody tweeted. ‘Who’s following them?’ I need to get that data to them immediately.

“And then there’s the slow path — I need to store it, ‘forever’, so that I can analyse it later or people can access it later.

“My role is to determine how I can apply [those capabilities] to public safety.”

Images courtesy Motorola Solutions.

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