EENA Conference 2018, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 25-27 April 2018, Stand 24

EENA, the European Emergency Number Association, is a non-governmental organisation with the mission to contribute to improving the safety and security of people. EENA’s annual conference has become the place for emergency services, public authorities, researchers and industry representatives to get the very latest updates on emerging trends and hot topics in the field of emergency services.

This year’s three day event is expected to welcome over 700 participants, 80 speakers and 25 exhibitors from over 50 countries world-wide. The event also hosts the 112 Awards Ceremony – rewarding individuals and organisations highly engaged in improving and promoting the European Emergency Number 112.

Motorola Solutions will be contributing to the conference and I am looking forward to taking part in this key session myself:

April 26, 9:00 – 10:00: Wireless Communications in a Mission Critical Environment - State Of Play: Critical radio communications are essential for the successful delivery of the missions and tasks of professional users who rely on being in contact when it matters. This session will give an outline of the current developments in this field, from two-way radio to broadband solutions of the future. It will also concentrate on how the work of first responders and control rooms operations change along with this development (e.g. multimedia, geo-location/geo-fencing, situational awareness).

You can catch us in the exhibition too – we’ll be on stand 24, where we will be showing a range of solutions focused on bringing broadband LTE critical communications into the control room – boosting operational efficiencies, delivering improved security and safer cities.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Francois Dontot is Executive Director EMEA Kodiak, for Motorola Solutions

Francois is on LinkedIn

Find out more about EENA on their website http://www.eena.org/ and more about the conference here

Follow @MotSolsEMEA and #EENA2018, @112_sos on Twitter.

Keeping people safe and reducing crime. In simplistic terms, that’s what policing is all about. And the increasing availability of digital solutions designed for the blue light community is helping officers and organisations ‘work smarter’, in terms of improved response time and reduced bureaucracy which ultimately means better outcomes for everyone.

On the Motorola Solutions stand at B-APCO, visitors were able to experience some of the smart solutions that are making digital transformation possible today and also take a ‘sneak peek’ into the future of incident command.

Today, as we collect more and more data from multiple sources, the challenge for public safety is how to turn that mass of data into actionable intelligence available when needed. To allow this the next generation of control room solutions are cloud hosted offering no limits data-storage and easy sharing of multiple streams of data. With platforms and solutions such as CommandCentral and WAVE CRS, operators and analysts can have immediate access to this information so that they can drive the right response at the right time. From the control room to the front line, everyone is connected in real time and has access to the information they need.

And on the frontline, Pronto speeds up end-to-end business processes, delivering faster responses to the officer on the scene, and reducing bureaucracy. Pronto Biometrics finger print identification is the latest use for this flexible digital application. With direct access to police and immigration databases, officers needing to check fingerprints can do this in real time on the street from a smartphone twinned with an affordable finger print scanner. With no need to return to a police station for desktop identification and the avoidance of unnecessary detentions the operational benefits and potential cost-savings on equipment and resource are clear.

Going forward, these simplified electronic processes can give increased accessibility to data that will deliver easy to access statistics and help establish patterns of behaviour. This could in turn deliver improvements in reporting and potentially allow forces to be more responsive to demand through informed resourcing.

Finally, with a glimpse into the future, visitors to the booth were able to experience how the use of augmented reality could deliver rich situational awareness to tomorrow’s mission controllers by giving the ability to ‘see’ officers in the context of their surroundings during an incident. The Mixed Reality Incident Command concept helped visitors understand what might be possible when you can move from trying to visualise and manage an incident through voice only to having rich contextual, information about the situation in front of you.

For more information and to see videos of the solutions live at B-APCO visit our dedicated B‑APCO microsite at www.motorolasolutions.com/bapco

And for more insight into how technology will transform frontline operations, check out this new research paper by the independent think-tank Reform: ‘Frontline online – Smarter blue light services’

Fergus Mayne is Head of UK & Ireland Sales at Motorola Solutions

Fergus is on LinkedIn

Follow #ThinkPublicSafety, #BAPCO2018, @MotSolsEMEA, @BAPCOEvent on Twitter.

As the year comes to a close, it’s certainly been a busy one for the Think Public Safety blog. Big thanks to the 13 authors that have contributed over 25 new posts this year. I hope you have found them interesting. What subjects have been popular this year? What are the most popular blog posts?

1. Top of the blogs, with a share of almost 8% of the overall views is ‘Do Clouds Have Silver Linings?’ - in this post, David Parry asks some key questions being asked around cloud. Will the cloud deliver benefits for Public Safety? Is a cloud approach more or less secure than a traditional on-premises data storage and application server approach? You may be surprised by the answer. He shares some new insight from a White Paper ‘Converting to Cloud for Control Rooms’.

2. Another cloud-focused blog comes a close second with over 6% share: ‘Cloud Control Rooms; Scalability, Flexibility, Security’ - This post is written by Mark Swift. A former Control Room Manager himself, Mark shares his experience on key issues around the transition to ESN. What is ESN exactly? How do we transition? Can we utilise more shared infrastructure? How secure is the Cloud? How can I minimise service disruption during any transition?

3. With a share of over 5.5% of views, Tunde Williams takes on the task of ‘Demystifying Intelligent Middleware’ What is it? Why is it important to TETRA? Public Safety agencies need to understand what Intelligent Middleware is to fully realise just how much they need it. Tunde also introduces our White Paper – ‘Intelligent Middleware- The Invisible Glue To Enable Truly Integrated Communications’

4. In fourth place is Julian Foster with the first of his blog series, reporting on the launch of our UK Innovation Centre, sharing perspectives from senior executives on the future of Public Safety. In ‘A Future Vision For Smarter Public Safety’, Jules reports how Eduardo Conrado, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Motorola Solutions, set the scene by defining the wider technology trends that are influencing our future vision for public safety and how these will impact officers around the World.

5. Paul Hill’s ‘Insights From A Live Hacking Demonstration’ comes a strong fifth. Paul Hill has been raising awareness about the importance of proactive cybersecurity measures for LMR systems with a live hacking demonstration. From his demos, there were some common insights he gleaned from the LMR end-users and system operators. There isn’t room for complacency when safeguarding a mission-critical, LMR system.

6. Number 6 is ‘Avoid The Nightmare Of Network Downtime’ by John Moule. John explains why you have to ‘prepare to fail’ and why a Public Safety system is not a “normal” IT network. Your technology needs to keep first responders safe and needs to be uniquely supported and managed to operate under all circumstances and events – planned or unplanned. John’s blog features the White Paper- Critical Steps To Prevent Network Downtime.

I hope you enjoyed this round-up.

Don’t forget, once you are registered for this blog community, you can comment on posts and subscribe to email alerts.

Best wishes for the holiday season!

Paul is on LinkedIn

Public Safety Editorial Lead for Europe and Africa at Motorola Solutions.

Follow @MotSolsEMEA on Twitter and look out for #ThinkPublicSafety

Our 2017 EMEA Public Safety Survey Report is now available. It makes very interesting reading as Public Safety communications continue to transform. The report identifies key new trends in the growth of video and need for cloud-based apps. The survey also finds several other top-of mind subjects including high speed real-time data, multi-device multiagency communication, cybersecurity, social media and technology management. This first blog article about the survey focuses on video.

Growth in video
The report identifies substantial growth in the use of video, especially body worn. It shows consistent growth in the use of video across almost all types and substantial growth of 80% in responder-worn (body-worn) video since (from 2015 to 2017). Overall use of video has grown too. Today, around two thirds of agencies use some form of video - that has now risen from around half in 2015.

Although we are seeing growth across the board and this exceptional growth in body-worn video, fixed and in-vehicle video are still the top modes of video use:

Barriers to video usage
The report identifies the top barrier to video adoption as administrative overhead and cost, followed by concerns over privacy and new concerns over security of data against tampering.

Is cloud the answer?
Cloud-based applications for Public Safety are a relatively new offering. In the survey, we wanted to find out who is using them and identify key needs. The report finds that agencies are already using a wide spread of cloud based applications. In fact, over one-third of respondents tell us they are already using cloud based reporting, for example.

But what about video? Video comes high on the list of applications that respondents want in the cloud and almost half of respondents want to have cloud-based video storage. Over a third want video analytics there...

More about the report
This latest survey offers insight into technology trends in the public safety sector. The 2015 survey (conducted in late 2015) grew from similar surveys conducted in North America and was the first focused on Europe and Africa. The 2017 survey expanded the reach to Europe, Middle-East and Africa and now reflects the input of almost 200 public safety professionals in 46 countries.

The full report stretches to 12 pages, so I’m only able to share a short portion in this blog post. I plan to share more in future posts. Meanwhile, you can download the complete report here

David Parry is Director, EMEA Marketing

David is on LinkedIn

Follow @MotSolsEMEA on Twitter and look out for #EMEAPublicSafetySurvey