NICE, Intrado to develop joint NG-911 solution
NICE Systems announced yesterday a partnership with Intrado that it said would result in the development of a joint next-generation 911 solution. The solution will marry portions of NICE’s software portfolio to Intrado’s IP network architecture in order to create a platform that will allow users to access a wide variety of data culled from myriad sources quickly and efficiently.
The NICE/Intrado solution will aggregate and categorize data automatically based on user-generated parameters, according to Chris Wooten, president of NICE Systems security division. NICE will leverage its Inform incident-management solution, as well as its solutions designed to capture and record 911 calls, IP radio calls, cellular calls and text messages. NICE also will tap its intelligent video-surveillance system for the effort.
“We want to create a solution that makes it easier for public-safety organizations to operate,” Wooten said. “The goal is to streamline this in such a way that when they need to look at an incident to see what’s happening, they will be able to take all of this information that’s going to be riding over the network and tie it together very quickly, in order to speed response. Today they have to pull data from a lot of different sources.”
The promise of next-generation 911 is that its broadband capabilities will give first-responder agencies access to an unprecedented amount of information — ranging from surveillance video to gunshot-location information to data from intelligent transportation systems — that will aid incident command and response. The challenge will be in sifting through all of this information in a timely manner. Given that challenge, the ability to “cut through the clutter” should not be underestimated, Wooten said.
“In a lot of these incidents that we read about in the newspaper, we see — typically after the fact — that all of the pieces of the puzzle existed, but it was difficult to bring them all together. … We provide the ability to bring stuff together in a coherent manner so people can take action on it,” Wooten said. “Capturing and managing all of these pieces of multimedia information is very important.”
No timetable has been set for development of the joint solution, Wooten said. However, he added that much of the technology that NICE will be leveraging to develop the solution already exists in the form of commercially available off-the-shelf products. “It’s really just a matter of integrating them into Intrado’s program and testing it all to make sure that everything plays real well together,” Wooten said.
In August, Intrado and Positron Front Line announced a similar agreement at the APCO conference in Houston. The goal of this partnership is a jointly developed solution for public-safety answering points that would aggregate multimedia data from a plethora of content providers and deliver the data to the desktops of dispatchers and first responders. The data would be delivered over a platform that leverages Intrado’s NG-911 infrastructure and Positron’s computer-aided dispatch solution, the companies said.
