APD Expands CORTEX solution in the United Arab Emirates
APD has successfully rolled out its CORTEX ICCS (Integrated Communications Control Solution) across the five Northern Emirates in the UAE.
Police in Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah have seen complete control room solutions supplied by APD go live.
APD has successfully operated in the Middle East since 2005 and has deployed solutions in every emirate for some of the region’s most respected organisations including the Abu Dhabi Police and the Emirates Group.
CORTEX enables true inter-emirate control room working; all available TETRA ports are accessible at all the operator positions across the five Northern Emirate sites. Integration at two separate switch sites provides a high degree of resilience. The solution is fully scalable and more ports can be added in the future with no disruption to service.
Gary Parkin, Operations Director at APD said: “It isn’t just about technology. We’ve applied our 30 years of expertise in delivering operational policing solutions and have used cutting edge technology to make these control rooms of the future.
We will continue to work with our partners in the Police and the Ministry of Interior to optimize their use of these systems, in order to achieve their strategic goals.
The Northern Emirates have a fully scalable platform which we can move forward on, together, to take advantage of new technology and continually improve the levels of service delivered to citizens of the UAE”.
CORTEX integrates the control of telephony, radio and CCTV systems within the control rooms through a highly resilient distributed software architecture and integrates with Sopra Steria’s STORM CIHS, Redbox Voice Recorders and uniquely with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager as the only ICCS provider approved by Cisco for handling emergency calls.
Unlike most ‘centralized’ hardware architectures from other ICCS suppliers, APD have a distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software based solution, enhancing resilience and ensuring that no single point of failure exists. In addition to communications and resource management, each of the control rooms host full display screens showing call statistics and available Police resources. Full reporting ensures that management can make informed decisions to ensure operational excellence.
