RapidDeploy inks first enterprise mapping deal supporting General Motors’ OnStar call centers

RapidDeploy yesterday announced that its Radius Mapping solution will be used to support General Motors’ OnStar call centers that work closely with 911 centers during certain emergencies—the first enterprise agreement for RapidDeploy, according to CEO Steve Raucher.

OnStar has worked closely with RapidDeploy in the past to deliver vehicle telematics directly to 911 centers that leverage RapidDeploy technology, and GM Ventures has been an investor in RapidDeploy for years. However, this announcement marks the beginning of OnStar planning to implement Radius Mapping in its own call centers.

“For us, it’s an incredibly interesting project, given the fact that we can take all of the experience that we’ve had from public safety … and translate that into an enterprise vertical, but it’s not going into a generic enterprise vertical,” Raucher said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“It’s going into a life-and-safety vertical within the private sector—that being General Motors’ OnStar division, which incredibly focused on driver safety and making sure that the best possible result for the users of OnStar, the OnStar Guardian platform, and their other customers.”

Cathy Bishop, senior emergency-services manager at OnStar, expressed excitement about the announcement and explained how the RapidDeploy technology fits into overall evolution of the company’s call centers that are staffed with OnStar advisors.

“We anticipate this being operational by the end of the year,” Bishop said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We’re actually undergoing a complete re-engineering of all of our advisor tools, so this is just a piece of the various tools that the advisors will have available to them.”

These developments not only will impact OnStar’s popular in-vehicle offering, but it will be leveraged for the company’s Guardian mobile application and its Guardian Home service, which is delivered via a partnership with Amazon via its Echo speakers and Alexa platform.

Currently, OnStar advisors receive vehicle telematics data and any voice information from users when an incident occurs, and that information is provided to a 911 center when appropriate. By incorporating the RapidDeploy in OnStar call centers, OnStar advisors will be able to leverage other situational-awareness tools—text and video from customers, and potentially traffic information and video from fixed cameras—to better understand how best to advise the OnStar user and public safety, according to Bishop.

“Some of the things that will be highly beneficial for our customer base is the ability for our advisors to see traffic cameras, WAZE data and different mapping layers will give us much more situational awareness,” she said. “To know what’s going on around an emergency situation helps the advisor better support the person in need and better interface with the public-safety agency that we are working with for the emergency.”

Most of the initial benefits RapidDeploy Radius Mapping in OnStar call centers will be realized operationally by OnStar advisors, but Bishop said she anticipates that the RapidDeploy technology also will allow better integration with 911 centers in the future. Any 911 center interested in participating in testing such potential capabilities with OnStar can contact the company at [email protected], she said.

Raucher said that other enterprises have approached RapidDeploy before about using the company’s cloud-native technology. General Motors’ OnStar is a logical first enterprise partner, but it likely will not be the last, he said

“We’ve had a number of inbounds over the years, and we’ve always pushed them off, until we could actually find a partner with whom we could truly develop a solution that would work—plug and play—for the enterprise community that could use our technology,” Raucher said.

“That is now a tap that we’ve switched on, and we expect to be announcing more enterprise deals in the coming months.”

Jeffrey Massimilla, vice president of OnStar Safety and Connectivity at GM, expressed optimism about OnStar leveraging RapidDeploy technology in its call centers.

“Our OnStar Members rely on our Advisors each day to quickly respond to emergency scenarios, providing them with the help they need,” Massimilla said in a prepared statement. “OnStar’s needs are similar to those of public safety and  as we look to continue supporting next-generation 911 technology, we are confident in advancing the next step of our relationship with RapidDeploy by adopting Radius Mapping in our call centers.”

Wade Sheffer, managing director of GM Ventures, echoed this sentiment.

“GM Ventures strategically invests in companies which share GM’s enterprise vision of an all-electric, connected, and autonomous future, and helps commercialize their technology globally,” Sheffer said in a prepared statement. “Our ongoing collaboration with RapidDeploy aligns with one of our key focus areas of connecting more customers through innovative cloud service applications, and helps advance efforts to keep communities safer through next generation 9-1-1 technology.”

Raucher said that RapidDeploy is focusing its efforts on its mapping and analytics solutions, which have been included in nine statewide contracts. After a company reorganization in December, RapidDeploy continues to support existing customers using its computer-aided-dispatch (CAD) solution, but it is not pursuing new CAD contracts with 911 centers at this time, he said.

“We’re not selling new CAD until we, as an organization, are ready to deliver it,” Raucher said. “To be in the CAD market, I would like to have a much larger organization.”

RapidDeploy paused development of its CAD late last year, according to a company statement provided to IWCE’s Urgent Communications.