Motorola Solutions enhances its commercial portfolio by acquiring Avtec

Motorola Solutions yesterday announced that it has acquired South Carolina-based Avtec, a leading developer of software-based, dispatch-console solutions that have gained significant traction in the commercial transportation and utility sectors, as well as some adoption the public-safety space.

John Kedzierski, Motorola Solutions’ corporate vice president of infrastructure and systems, said that Motorola Solutions has partnered with Avtec for years, so company officials are well aware of the capabilities within the Avtec product line. Acquiring Avtec is expected to let Motorola Solutions provide end-to-end solutions, particularly to Fortune 500 commercial customers that leverage the MOTOTRBO radio technology.

“Our focus, as a company, is to offer end-to-end solutions to our customers,” Kedzierski said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We thought it was important to add this piece to our MOTOTRBO systems, so that we can have everything for our customers in the commercial-market space—as well as in public safety—from the handset that the commercial workers hold in their hands to the dispatch console that they have in the command center or control center, … as well as the communications infrastructure in between.”

Although Motorola Solutions has a portfolio of dispatch solutions for its public-safety solutions, the company traditionally has outsourced dispatch solutions for commercial customers, but that is expected to change with the Avtec acquisition, Kedzierski said.

“We’re happy with the portfolio of dispatch products that we have, but there’s all kinds of different tiers and customers,” he said. “Avtec has a large presence in Fortune 500 [companies], particularly in transportation, such as airline and rail. In the MOTOTRBO product line, we use their dispatch console as the primary console, as well as with a couple other tiers of products.

“We wanted to be able to complete that end-to-end solution across all of our verticals, not just public safety.”

John Zidar, Motorola Solutions’ corporate vice president for North America commercial markets, noted that Avtec has customers in a wide variety of commercial sectors, including energy, transportation, logistics and manufacturing. Through the acquisition of Avtec, Motorola Solutions plans to continue serving these customers’ dispatch needs and pursue opportunities to integrate other aspects of the company’s portfolio—for instance, Avigilon video, analytics and data-management solutions—to help customers improve efficiencies, he said.

Doing this with Avtec is a natural fit, according to Zidar.

“The relationship has been going on for years … We’ve been partners for a long time, and we think it’s a win-win [situation],” Zidar said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It’s rare that you get an acquisition that can address both government and commercial or both business-critical and mission-critical. This is one of them, and that’s why it was so attractive to us.”

Retiring Avtec CEO Michael Branning echoed this sentiment, noting that the longstanding partnership between Motorola Solutions and Avtec makes him confident that the merger can be successful.

“Motorola Solutions has been a committed partner to Avtec for years,” Branning said in a prepared statement. “Under Motorola Solutions, Avtec will continue to evolve the Scout platform and maintain the culture of service our customers and channel partners have come to expect.”

Kedzierski described the Avtec acquisition as “good fit” for Motorola Solutions. There are no immediate plans to consolidate the Avtec enterprise, he said.

“It’s business as usual,” Kedzierski said. “We like the business. We like the customer base. We like the team that they have, and our intent is to continue that success and not break any part of it, to be frank.

“Over time, we’re going to look for those opportunities to enhance the entire end-to-end solution … by integrating additional parts of our portfolio where we see opportunities with customers that want a simpler experience and more of their things just to work together. But we bought the asset because we really like it, and we really like the team. We have no plans to change things.”

Motorola Solutions closed the transaction to buy Avtec—a private company—yesterday, Kedzierski said. No terms of the deal were disclosed.