From right: Greg Brown, co-CEO, Motorola, and CEO, Motorola Solutions; and Gene Delaney, president, Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Motorola Inc.

Motorola is committed to public safety and ensuring that public safety agencies can build on current solutions to position themselves for NG9-1-1, according to Greg Brown, co-CEO, Motorola, and CEO, Motorola Solutions, and Gene Delaney, president, Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Motorola Inc.

“Motorola is back to profitability,” said Brown in a media briefing on May 17. In February, Motorola announced plans to separate into two independent, publicly traded companies. One will include the company’s Mobile Devices and Home businesses, and the other will include its Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Networks businesses. “We are marching forward to a successful separation in Q1 [2011],” said Brown. He indicated that the Enterprise Mobility Solutions business should come out of the separation at the Fortune 230 level and be “investment-grade out the gate. … How we’re going to grow the Enterprise Mobility business is next generation public safety.”

“The promise that we give first responders around the world is technology that’s second nature so they can focus on the mission not the technology,” said Delaney. “All of our employees make decisions based on this. For the last 75 years, we’ve been taking technology, and we’ve been looking at it through the lens of the first responder.”

Delaney said that Motorola sees itself as public safety’s trusted partner, and he emphasized the company’s commitment to seamless connectivity for first responders. “When a first responder needs to communicate, he needs to communicate. When he pushes that button, it better work.”

According to Delaney, Motorola also recognizes that any money that gets spent in public safety on communications equipment has to last a long, long time. “The core of our next generation mission critical [systems] is already installed,” said Delaney. “It’s already being deployed, and we’re going to build off of that.”

Agencies need the ability to build on what’s already installed. “Municipalities will acquire pieces of a next generation public safety network at times that are appropriate for them,” said Delaney. “It may be time to look at an investment in interoperable solutions … or at broadband. … They need to know it’s part of a plan, and they’ve got to know that not a single dollar — not a single dollar — is wasted when they invest in a next generation public safety system from Motorola.”

The goal of Motorola’s next generation of public safety strategy is to maximize operational effectiveness and allow first responders to realize true mobile broadband connection speeds and access to rich-media applications, by converging voice, image, data and video communications from a multimedia, integrated command center and extend the reach of current mission critical communications networks.

To achieve this goal, the company has defined six key areas of innovation: mobile broadband, interoperability, integrated command, video security, advanced devices and workforce mobility. These priorities are designed to outline how public safety agencies can leverage their investments to “enhance situational awareness with real-time, rich-media collaboration, improve productivity for day-to-day operations and heighten disaster preparedness.”

“We know the challenges are becoming increasingly complex and our customers must do more with less, which is why they need to find greater value in their technology investments,” said Brown.

Motorola is committed to open, standards-based networks, such as P25 in the U.S. and Tetra in Europe, said Delaney.

“The two, top challenges for public safety [interoperability],” said Brown, “are available funding and efficient spectrum utilization. … We’re doing our part in making products that are more spectrally efficient, … but the other part of the equation is to make more spectrum available to public safety. … The federal government needs to do their part in making more spectrum available to public safety.”

Commenting specifically on the availability of broadband spectrum for public safety, Brown told Public Safety Communications, “We have not been proactive in [urging Congress to allocate the D Block to public safety]. Our customers are the ones that are representing the view to Congress. We do believe that the D Block should not be auctioned and should be allocated to public safety. … [However,] we don’t see a need to reinforce [the message] at this time.”

During the media event, Motorola also demonstrated several of its public safety solutions, focusing on its integrated command center, CAD, video, the APX multiband radio, license plate recognition and e-citation solutions, and LTE broadband plans.

For more information on Motorola’s “next generation of public safety” strategy or solutions, visit www.motorola.com/nextgen.

About the Author
Keri Losavio is the editor of APCO’s Public Safety Communications. Contact her via e-mail at psceditor@apcointl.org.