Smaller dispatch centers will be able deploy Avtec’s popular IP-based Scout console solution cost effectively with the introduction of three lower-priced tiers of the product that also provide a smooth migration path to the full-featured Scout platform for a growing dispatch center, according. to Avtec President Arjen Maarleveld.

Maarleveld said the decision to establish the new lower-tiered services—the Scout 100, the Scout 400 and the Scout 800—was driven by advice from the company’s dealers.

“A lot of what Scout has done in the transportation and energy industries has been working with very large customers on very large deployments—probably some of the largest in the world,” Maarleveld said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “But we hadn’t necessarily packaged our Scout technology in a way that was attractive to smaller customers and in a way that made it easy for dealers to sell the product.

“We’ve gone back to the drawing board and essentially taken that Scout wine that we’ve been selling in barrels and put it in bottles that dealers can sell.”

Of course, Avtec will continue to offer its traditional full-featured Scout platform, which has been rebranded as Scout Enterprise, Maarleveld said.

With the three new lower-tiered products, Avtec hopes to provide dispatch centers with a variety of affordable entry points into the company’s Scout technology, Maarleveld said.

“The Scout 100 is more of a hardware-based solution that can do four channels or talk groups or radios,” he said. “The Scout 400 is a software-based solution that can go up to four channels. And the Scout 800 is a software solution that can go up to eight channels.”

“They’re really designed to address the needs of different-sized, smaller customers, or customers with slightly different needs or requirements.”

For those who have seen Avtec’s full-featured Scout platform, the lower-tiered offerings will look familiar, Maarleveld said.

“It just looks like Scout; it doesn’t look that different. It just has some limitations that Scout [Enterprise] doesn’t have that allows us to set a lower price,” Maarleveld said. “But, when you look at it, you’re not going to say, ‘Oh, wow, this is completely and radically different,’ because that’s not the point—it is, in fact, the same stuff.

“It’s a different package. If you go to Costco, you can buy your shampoo in a two-gallon bottle, or you can go to 7-Eleven and buy it in a three-ounce bottle—it’s the same shampoo, just in a different package.”

As a result, a growing dispatch center could migrate easily from the software-based Scout 400 or Scout 800 to the full-featured Scout Enterprise with minimal user training, because the technology behind the lower-tiered solutions is “exactly the same stuff” that is found in Scout Enterprise, Maarleveld said.