Motorola Solutions buys data-analytics software firm PublicEngines

Motorola Solutions today announced that it has acquired Utah-based PublicEngines, a provider of cloud-based solutions that are designed to support data analytics of crime, “predictive policing” strategies and citizen engagement within a given jurisdiction, according to Motorola Solutions officials.

Purchasing PublicEngines represents Motorola Solutions’ latest effort to enhance its portfolio of offerings for intelligence-led public safety (ILPS), according to Tom Guthrie, Motorola Solutions’ vice president of smart public-safety solutions. PublicEngines has two products—CommandCentral Analytics and CommandCentral Predictive—that fit into this initiative, he said.

“These are primarily for investigative or detective roles for intelligence operators that are digging into the data,” Guthrie said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The Analytics tool [lets them] look at patterns, trends or specific types of crimes within a jurisdiction. The Predictive piece looks at some of that, as well as other factors and models that you can use with it, to be more predictive of where to place patrol—how to use resources the next day during a specific shift, when you are focused in on certain types of crime.”

In addition, PublicEngines offers two citizen-engagement tools—CrimeReports, which includes crime-mapping capabilities that can be viewed by the public; and TipSoft, which lets public-safety entities receive tips and respond to them while maintaining the source’s anonymity, according to a Motorola Solutions press release.

“What’s different about this is that this is all SaaS [software as a service],” Guthrie said. “These are not products that are deployed on the premise, like you’d see with a CAD solution, a real-time-intelligence console or things like that. These are multi-tenant and cloud-based [solutions] that will attach to the records systems and records data for each of the customer that use it. But they’re actually logging into a web interface to get access to this, so it’s more of a true SaaS solution.”

With more than 2,000 existing customers, PublicEngine largely will continue to operate as it has been, although the employees of the Salt Lake City company will be moved to a nearby Motorola Solutions facility—“about seven miles difference,” Guthrie said.

“It’s the same thing we did with Twisted Pair [a company headed by Guthrie that Motorola Solutions purchased early in 2014],” Guthrie said. “You leave the entity in place, because then all of the contracts are still just kept as they are—you just change the ownership of the entity.”

Motorola Solutions plans to continue selling PublicEngines solutions as a standalone offering, but it also will explore opportunities to integrate the PublicEngines platform into existing Motorola Solutions products, such as the Intelligent Data Portal (IDP) solution that was unveiled last year, Guthrie said.

“We have not started that [efforts to integrate PublicEngines solutions with IDP] yet, but it’s not going to take a lot, because they are both cloud-based and they are both hosted,” he said.

Currently, most of PublicEngines’ sales come from direct sales, Guthrie said. Motorola Solutions likely will market the PublicEngines solutions through its vast sales channels, although Guthrie noted that only a small percentage of Motorola Solutions dealers have the IT personnel and expertise necessary to support the data-driven software products.