Motorola Solutions to Launch Suite of Public Safety Mobile Apps

With the expansion of public safety broadband, interoperable mobile applications are a highly effective way to provide critical intelligence to officers in the field and personnel at the command center.

Leveraging years of in-depth customer research, Motorola Solutions has developed a suite of public safety mobile applications that work across different networks and devices, enabling real-time communication and collaboration that can accelerate time to resolution.

“The need for real-time intelligence has never been more important to public safety users,” said Bruce Brda, executive vice president, Products & Services, Motorola Solutions. “Apps for messaging, mapping and other tasks are part of daily life for citizens, but these capabilities have not yet been developed and deployed for public safety users. Motorola Solutions’ suite of public safety mobile apps is purpose-built for the needs of our customers and provides an integrated, interoperable solution for sharing critical information and intelligence.”

The suite includes a core set of apps for public safety communication and collaboration, to which advanced capabilities such as apps for live video-streaming, electronic citations, database search and collaborative “whiteboarding” will be added.

The communication and collaboration suite is an integrated set of mobile apps including:

• Messaging, which lets first responders securely share text messages and photos with individuals or talk groups across smartphones and two-way radios, enabling faster communication and collaboration. For example, Messaging enables a user to send a photo to a voice talk group.
• Mapping, which enables location-based collaboration by showing nearby officers and quickly creating “geo-fenced” voice- or text-based communication groups with officers in the vicinity. It allows an officer to talk to another officer one block away – even if he doesn’t know the officer’s name.
• WAVE, the company’s push-to-talk (PTT) solution that lets smartphone users securely communicate with a simple press of a button. In addition to enabling groups of smartphone users to easily communicate with one another, WAVE also provides a secure PTT bridge with the land mobile radios police use today, enabling teams to communicate using push-to-talk across networks and devices
• Telephony, which enables users to make secure, encrypted phone calls.

The public safety mobile apps core suite works across networks and devices, giving users access to real-time information whether they’re using a radio on a land mobile radio network or a smartphone on a broadband network. The apps themselves are also designed to work “better together” and are connected by a capability that enables interactions between apps without requiring the user to return to the app launcher. Users can seamlessly move from app to app – for example, an officer can use Mapping to create a talk group of nearby officers, then quickly pivot to a voice conversation using WAVE.

As with Motorola Solutions’ other broadband solutions, the public safety mobile apps suite is highly secure. It requires the authentication of users, devices and infrastructure, and all media is encrypted. The suite also features convenient single sign-on – requiring users to log in only once to access all applications – and a common address book that carries consistent groups and contact lists across apps.

Motorola Solutions’ suite of public safety mobile applications, which will be available this year, will be deployed using a flexible, cost-efficient “software-as-a-service” model.

The suite is the latest offering in the company’s growing portfolio of integrated software solutions, which are part of Motorola Solutions’ new software enterprise led by Andrew Sinclair. Sinclair joined the company in March from the Skype division of Microsoft.