Motorola Solutions is stepping up its drive to capitalise on the cascading amounts of new information produced by emerging technologies in the public safety industry, saying the key focus should be on transforming this data into a significant asset.

“The overarching goal that we’re looking at, especially in the public safety space is:  How do we take that plethora of data and information and actually turn it into something that’s meaningful and actionable?” Kodiak Networks Engineering CTO and EVP Kris Patel told Telecom Times on the sidelines of the recent Comms Connect event in Melbourne.

Patel said Kodiak Networks –  the Texas mobile enterprise productivity firm purchased by Motorola Solutions in August 2017 –  has been developing a range of broadband push-to-talk services since about 2006.

In terms of the value to Motorola Solutions of technologies such machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Big Data Analytics, Patel said these were already making an impact in-house.

“Where there is some sort of mission-critical use case that needs to be practiced, those are the techniques we will use to do that,” he added, noting that in addition, these new capabilities could provide a kind of different vision for the police or the fire brigade to see multiple potential first response scenarios. 

He also touched on the absorption of Kodiak Networks, which specialises in carrier-integrated broadband push-to-talk offerings and how its assets align with Motorola Solutions’ own proposition.

“We have been working towards kind of merging the products – because Motorola also has initiatives on broadband… the push-to-talk products as well as the land mobile radio. The current thing is we’re focussed on getting to broadband, and kind of interconnecting the broadband technologies with other assets,” Patel explained.

“But we have now combined it into one platform,” he said. “Everything is fully standardised [and] we are well integrated, and Motorola, as you know, is a leader in the LMR space. ” 

“They’re also now leading broadband mission-critical push-to-talk solutions around the world.  And we are providing the FirstNet service through AT&T; and with we are contracted to do all the transition off the emergency services network network,” Patel said. “There are [also] customers like Bell Mobility and Telstra customers who will be using it on-prem inside their network solutions.”

Richard vande Draay was in Melbourne as a guest of Motorola Solutions