Hexagon, VIDIZMO partner to streamline digital evidence management

Command-center and smart-cities vendor Hexagon and VIDIZMO, a provider of secure evidence-management solutions, recently announced a strategic partnership that is designed to provide public-safety with improved management of video and other digital evidence, according to the companies.

VIDIZMO CEO Nadeem Khan said officials with the two companies have discussed working together for almost two years, driven by Hexagon’s development of its HxGN Connect safe-cities platform.

“They were in the process of developing their HxGN Connect smart-city system. Hexagon has a great portfolio of products, but they lacked the evidence-management part of the puzzle, and HxGN Connect really depended on it … I guess they were looking to fill that gap.”

VIDIZMO tools allow government agencies to securely store, access and process video and other digital evidence, and these capabilities are available in both on-premise or cloud-based platforms. Customizable rules-based processing allows agencies to prepare video and other digital evidence with appropriate redactions for a variety of audiences: investigators, legal counsel, elected officials or the media/general public, Khan said.

VIDIZMO users include Santa Clara County, Calif, he said.

“Very large enterprises and government customers have done their full due diligence to ensure that VIDIZMO serves their purpose,” Khan said

Bill Campbell, senior vice president of global public safety for Hexagon’s safety, infrastructure and geospatial division, said Hexagon certainly is experienced in handling and processing evidence through its platforms, but not all forms of digital evidence—particularly video. The agreement with VIDIZMO is particularly important in light of the evolution of evidence used by public safety in its response and investigatory efforts, he said.

“Everybody’s got a mobile phone, and they’re taking videos of crimes,” Campbell said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Managing those digital assets for case management is so important, tightly coupled with records management. This was a natural progression of our portfolio of offerings.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, most of the evidence was all physical evidence. Now, it’s not. You’ve got text, e-mails, phone calls, voice, videos of crimes that are in progress, and you can see what’s going from the CAD system in different video cameras. All of that stuff has got to be stored, categorized, used for evidence, and case management.”

Hexagon is known for its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) products that used in many 911 centers, but the partnership with VIDIZMO will allow Hexagon to offer new digital-evidence-management (DEM) services—a fast-growing aspect of the public-safety market—to its government customers through existing sales channels, he said.

“Managing all of that for the public-safety enterprise is definitely where we want to play, versus just being a CAD vendor and doing incident management,” Campbell said. “There’s a lot more to it than that going forward, and that’s an area where we want to play.

“They leverage a lot of AI and analytics components to the solution, which is what we also leverage in CAD and RMS. There are a lot of complementary technologies, and public-safety agencies are struggling with it—how to manage it, how to manage it quickly, and how to do so in a cost-advantageous solution … We look to differentiate ourselves relative to the competition, and this was one area where we could do that.”

Khan commented that he believes a large company like Hexagon might have been able to develop a digital-evidence-management offering on its own, but Campbell said that approach would not have been practical from a business standpoint—especially if Hexagon wanted to take advantage of near-term opportunities in the DEM space.

“As far as developing this in house, it would have taken a long time and a lot of money,” Campbell said.

VIDIZMO’s deployment flexibility and customizable products made the Virginia-based DEM company a particularly attractive partner candidate to Hexagon, Campbell said.

Terms of the partnership agreement were not announced, but the companies can begin to take advantage of the agreement immediately, Campbell said. For instance, Hexagon sales staff can begin to include VIDIZMO’s capabilities in its talks with existing customers.

“The exciting thing here is that we have a significant customer base—not only in North America, but globally,” Campbell said. “When we do upgrades and renewals, we can package VIDIZMO in part of a CAD upgrade or a records-management upgrade.”

Khan said there already is a “basic” level of integration between VIDIZMO and Hexagon products, but he is looking forward to the opportunity to develop solutions that include “much deeper” integration in the future.

In the near term, Khan said it is important for VIDIZMO and Hexagon to make this vision a reality by solving problems for a customer.

“Now we’re working toward our first customer acquisition,” Khan said. “I think it’s just a matter of finding the right customer and doing our first implementation together.

“Technically, we are ready. But we are taking baby steps, because we want integration defined by the customers’ needs.”