Motorola Solutions inks deal to buy Airbus DS Communications

Similarly, Airbus DS Communications employees—the company’s largest offices are in Temecula, Calif., and Quebec—should be comfortable in their roles, Brda said.

“We welcome the Airbus employees and the expertise that they bring into this space. It’s an area for us that we don’t have significant in-house expertise, so we welcome them into the Motorola family and the expertise that they bring.

“This is not about cost synergies. This is about adding components to our command-center solution that we didn’t have previously and building the industry’s best public-safety command-center suite of software applications. This is not a cost-synergy play.”

While the VESTA portfolio is “clearly the most significant” aspect of the announced acquisition, Airbus DS has an emergency-notification unit and a small P25 business that also are part of the deal, according to Brda.

A Motorola Solutions press release indicates that the Airbus DS Communications purchase will be subject to normal regulatory approvals, noting that the deal is expected to close. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Robertson noted that, until the deal closes, Airbus DS Communications will continue to operate as a separate company. For instance, the company will have a booth at next month’s APCO show in Denver, he said.

Airbus DS Communications has been on the selling block since September 2014, just a month after the company officials changed its name from Cassidian Communications. Its parent company, the Airbus Group, decided at the time to sell its global public-safety-communications assets, so it could focus resources on its core portfolio of aviation-related products and services.

Airbus Group officials in 2014 indicated that the plan was to sell all of the public-safety-communications assets in a single worldwide deal, and this strategy reportedly remained in place through at least the end of last year. However, with today’s purchase announcement, Motorola Solutions is buying only the North American public-safety communications assets of Airbus, Brda said. The proposed Motorola Solution purchase does not include European-based Airbus public-safety-communications assets, such as TETRA and TETRAPOL products and services, he said.

In addition, Robertson confirmed that the Airbus mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) over LTE team is located in Europe and is not part of the Motorola Solutions acquisition announced today.

Robertson, who was named as Airbus DS Communications CEO in the spring, said he is not sure why the Airbus Group decided it would be willing to sell just the North American public-safety-communications as opposed to demanding that a buyer purchase the worldwide assets in the sector. Although aware of negotiations for the company, Robertson said he “was not directly involved, and that was not the reason for my hiring. But I am excited about what this brings to us, for sure.”

Brda said one of Motorola Solutions primary goals is to transform its during the next several years is to transform its myriad 911 solutions into an integrated command-center solution that will be most effective for PSAP, particularly as they transition to next-generation 911.

“What we are doing is building an integrated suite in the command center and tightly integrate … what are today are stanalone workflow applications,” Brda said. “We believe the assets that we’ve built will give us—by far—the most complete suite in the industry. If you look at the competitive space in the command center, it’s quite fragmented. Nobody has the set of assets like we’ve acquired.”