Carbyne partners with CentralSquare to offer integrated 911 portfolios

Cloud-based 911 solutions provider Carbyne announced a strategic technology partnership with legacy 911 vendor CentralSquare that is designed to let public-safety answering point (PSAP) customers benefit from the integration of the two companies’ offerings as the migrate to next-generation 911 (NG911).

Carbyne CEO and founder Amir Elichai said the agreement will provide CentralSquare customers—users of 911 and CAD solutions in more than 5,000 centers—with the ability to leverage Carbyne’s cloud-native c-Live platform to receive location data, video streaming, voice, text and analytics while continuing to use existing systems.

“The beauty is that it will be integrated throughout the entire CentralSquare ecosystem,” Elichai said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “That means that, instead of ending up with two separate systems that are either sitting side by side or one over the top of the other, with the partnership between Carbyne and CentralSquare, citizens will be able to deliver real-time video streaming and additional information through the CentralSquare ecosystem, starting from dispatch to the first responders to RMS to hospitals.

“All of that will be basically fully integrated between the two companies. We see CentralSquare as a great partner for Carbyne for [sales] distribution, but this also will be a great help with agencies working with us to increase situational awareness, reduce time to dispatch and help citizens.”

CentralSquare CEO Dave Zolet echoed this sentiment.

“At CentralSquare, our mission is to create smarter, safer, connected communities,” Zolet said in a prepared statement. “We have an unwavering focus on identifying opportunities to deliver even greater value for our customers and are excited for the benefits this partnership with Carbyne will bring.

“Partnering with Carbyne will further empower our thousands of public-safety customers with the new frontier in text messaging, video and more via 911 call. We look forward to working closely with the Carbyne team to help our public-safety customers accelerate dispatch-center operations and equip them with a best-in-class solution for keeping our communities and first responders safe.”

From a sales perspective, the non-exclusive partnership is a reciprocal deal that allows the sales teams for  both Carbyne and CentralSquare to sell products from the other company, but Elichai acknowledged that CentralSquare is a more mature company that has a much larger sales forces and customer base.

Carbyne is known in the industry for its cloud-native platform, which is unique in the 911 call-taking space.

“From what we are aware of, Carbyne is the only company that is really delivering cloud-native contact center to emergency services, and we have already have the first few that have signed up and will be delivered in early 2021, like a purely cloud-based contact centers,” Elichai said. “In the U.S., we are not aware of someone developing something like that.

“As far as we know, we are the only one doing it. It is very complicated.”

Carbyne also provides innovative technology beyond 911 call-taking, according to Elichai.

“What Carbyne is bringing to the table is basically the innovation beyond 911 related to natural-language processing, real-time video delivery and images—and everything is delivered from the cloud, whether it’s our Universe platform or our cloud contact center, which are currently things that CentralSquare doesn’t have,” he said.

“Instead of going and developing it, they realized that a partnership might be a good path going forward.”

Meanwhile, the ability for a relatively young company like Carbyne to partner with an established vendor like CentralSquare—a company formed through the 2018 merger of Aptean Public Sector, Superion, Tritech and Zuercher—should prove beneficial to both companies, Elichai said.

“We’ve been looking for the right partners to work with, and obviously CentralSquare was a great fit, due to the fact that they probably one of the top three biggest companies in this domain,” Elichai said. “Their willingness to partner, their willingness to embrace innovation, their understanding of the cloud and the benefits that Carbyne is bringing to the table, all of that together caused us to come to an agreement that resulted in this partnership.”

Carbyne is one of the cloud-native companies that has helped lead public-safety acceptance of cloud-based solutions. This is a trend that many industry sources believe has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic—from an interest standpoint, if not actual deployments—as 911 officials and public-safety agencies increasingly realize the value that cloud-based offerings can provide when compared to traditional on-premise 911 systems.

Elichai said that Carbyne’s deployment in Fayette County, Ga., is a demonstration of this value.

“It’s 95% in the cloud and 5% on-prem, because they’re still using trunks,” Elichai said. “What’s amazing about this deployment is that, once you’ve deployed it, you don’t need to be on site anymore. So, all of the monitoring, upgrades and updates are done remotely.

“Due to COVID, we’ve pushed updates and new solutions into the Fayette County 911 center without being there, which is great. The future of cloud is tremendous, and we excited to be the first to bring it into the call-taking space.”

One of highest-profile initiatives within the 911 community is the implementation of IP-based NG911 that is designed to enable PSAPs to accept multimedia information, as well as voice-based emergency calls. Cloud-based solutions like Carbyne can help 911 centers become familiar with multimedia functionality while waiting for funding necessary for the nationwide deployment of ESInets and other expensive components of NG911.

“If you’re comparing the cost-effectiveness of our solution to distributed ESInets that cost billions of dollars, I can’t say that you’re getting the same [capabilities as you would with NG911],” Elichai said. “But you’re getting all that you need to give a proper response at this time to dispatch and meet your KPIs.

“Again, I’m not here to claim that Carbyne is here to replace ESInet, but initially you can get a lot of benefits from using a cloud solution that can be distributed very fast and give you a lot of benefits, without spending billions of dollars on something that people are not implementing as was envisioned by the people who wrote the different standards.”