Zetron's control room mission

Zetron's mission is to 'own the control room'. We find out how the company plans to do it.

Through one form or another, Zetron has had a local presence for around 25 years. Ranjan Bhagat, VP and GM of Zetron Australasia, came to Australia in 2005 to run and grow the APAC business. He has a master's degree in electrical engineering from Washington State University and started off as an engineer before diversifying into project management and then management of technology businesses.

“While I certainly enjoyed the technological aspect of things, what I really enjoyed more was dealing with customers, setting technical and business strategy," said Bhagat. “It's nice to be in a role where you can actually try and set a business strategy and, more importantly, continue to course correct along the way."

We spoke with Bhagat to get a feel for where Zetron is heading, and how changes in the industry are challenging the company.

Ranjan Bhagat, VP and GM of Zetron Australasia.

CC. You must have seen some enormous changes in last 10 years?

RB: There is no doubt that, like all industries, we're not immune to change. We've seen LMR systems changing from analog to various flavours of digital trunking. And now, of course, you hear about LTE. These are all technology changes. The main thing I think that I've personally seen is in a term that is commonly used in industry right now, and that's 'digital disruption'.

To give you an example, if you take plain old telephony, from the time it was launched in 1878, it took over 75 years to reach 100 million users worldwide. And then came mobile phones, launched in 1979, which took only 16 years to reach the same number of users. And you fast forward to a few years ago, with things like WhatsApp — WhatsApp took only three years to reach 100 million users. The pace of change is quicker than it ever has been, and it's primarily due to what I call the rapid speed of innovation velocity, and what that really is, is innovative ways to solve problems.

CC: So does Zetron see digital disruption as a threat or an opportunity?

RB: We see it as a very, very good thing. To give you an example of digital disruption in our industry, say, PTT over mobile — it is forcing many LMR handset vendors to rethink their whole strategy. The way Zetron sees it, historically we've been very good at integrating the different flavours of voice, whether its P25 or TETRA, analog or digital or DMR. And now because of this digital disruption, as well as the emergence of broadband, data applications are becoming almost as important, and probably will become more important in the future. From our perspective, we are what we consider [to be] the 'intelligent glue' that ties it all together, whether it's data, video or location services.

Our mission has been unchanged for many years — our mission is to 'own the control room'. We're continuing to focus on making sure that the command and control room converts all these forms of communication and information into decisive, actionable intelligence, because that's the end game.

CC: So apart from being the glue, how heavily does Zetron get involved with innovation?

RB: We are continuing to improve our breadth of capability through our own R&D. We invest about 17% of our turnover annually in R&D, which is about three or four points above average for the industry. And secondly, we realise we can't do it all. So that's when you partner. So as an example, we just launched a few months ago, a security and analytics business. What we're understanding now is that in the control room, it's not just the voice, but in a lot of control rooms — especially with homeland security and so on now — we're getting a lot of video feeds, and some of that video needs analytics.

Each vertical market is different as well. So with public safety for instance, body-cams are going to be very important for troops in the field. Well, the body-cams are only any good if that information is being fed back into a Zetron console that is intelligently taking that information and then translating it into actionable methodology.

Now that may not necessarily apply in the utility business, or oil and gas. So we have to continue to listen and understand the different requirements of the customers, because they are going to be different.

CC: What's the next step for control room operations and interoperability?

RB: One of the other things that's important is to try to work toward open standards. We've worked very hard toward that on the voice side, with P25, TETRA and DMR — we're very actively involved in the [standards] bodies, ensuring that the interfaces with different vendors are based on open standards. That's good for us, but it's also good for the end user. The same thing needs to eventually apply to data applications, because if each one is doing its own thing, well you could still interface to them, but it's not going to be very efficient, and certainly not easily repeatable.

So take LTE for instance, which is starting to gather momentum in some parts of the world. Some people are looking at public safety, saying “maybe my next-generation system will be LTE". Well that's all well and good, but it's no fun if Vendor A's LTE is different to Vendor B's to Vendor C's in terms of interfaces to applications or to companies such as Zetron. So open standards are an extremely important part of this.

Businesses generally are getting mature enough to understand that the world and the market is big enough, and we'll all be better off, and able to sell more, if we follow open standards. Open standards means customers will be happier, which means they'll be buying more.

CC: What do you think will happen to companies that don't go down that path?

RB: I'll give you a perfect example. I call it, 'just Uber it'. The businesses that will survive 10 years from now are those that are continually adapting and course correcting themselves to the rapidly changing needs of the market. And when I say adapting, it's a mindset, but it's also reflected in technology and their use of technology