Zetron boosts UK presence with purchase of Eagle NewCo unit from NEC

Zetron yesterday announced that its Codan parent company paid about $15 million to acquire Eagle NewCo, an NEC Software Solutions UK business unit that boast significant contracts with United Kingdom public-safety and transportation entities.

Zetron President and Executive General Manager Scott French said that the Eagle unit—previously known as APD Communications—became available after the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) forced NEC to divest of some UK police command-and-control holdings in the aftermath of its purchase of Capita.

“What APD … represents is a suite of command-and-control applications that has tremendous traction in the UK,” French said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Today, they have roughly 30% to 40% of the UK control-room market share. They’re in some of the biggest accounts within the UK—for instance, they have 80 police control rooms that all sit on the Airwave network [the nationwide TETRA system owned by Motorola Solutions].”

In addition, Eagle solutions are used in the transportation sector, including by the London Underground and the Dubai International Airport, according to a Zetron press release. Eagle’s product offerings include:

Each of these Eagle products will keep their branding now that the acquisition is complete, but the overall company branding for the business unit is being transitioned to the Zetron moniker, according to French.

French said he believes the Eagle solutions fit well into the Zetron portfolio of products and indicated that Zetron customers outside Eagle’s existing geographic footprint could benefit from the acquisition in the future.

“Our plan is to bring a lot of those applications—where it makes sense—into North America,” French said. “We have strong presence in the Middle East, in terms of command-and-control solutions. We have a good presence in Australia.

“There are some technologies and applications that we think are very, very complementary to our ACOM and MAX lines.”

Terry Miller, business-unit director for Eagle, echoed this sentiment.

“Highly similar and related markets, yet virtually no overlap in core functionality, services or customer base is what makes this acquisition such an exceptional strategic and tactical fit,” Miller said in a prepared statement. “We are tremendously excited to be joining a rapid-growth critical-communications company in Zetron that will enable us to offer customers new solutions, integration opportunities and world-class service.”

In addition to its existing command-and-control solutions, Eagle also working on mission-critical communications that are designed to be implemented with the Emergency Services Network (ESN), the UK’s LTE-based public-safety-communications system that is several years behind its original deployment schedule.

“They’re developing the MCX solution that is going to ride on the ESN [Emergency Services Network],” French said. “We were just fortunate that the CMA forced this sale.”

“This was just an opportunity for us to really establish a beachhead outside of the U.S. We go from being thought of a commercial provider of dispatch technology outside of the U.S. to having … significant market in the UK, with the distribution to be able to bring that beyond just the UK.”

French said the Eagle deal fits well with Zetron’s expansion strategy that has been in place since Codan purchased the company in 2021. Earlier this year, Codan bought GeoConex on behalf of Zetron.

“We continue to grow,” French said. “We had another record year—our second year as the new Zetron. We’re in a position where we can make these sort of investments.”

Meanwhile, French said that Zetron officials remain loyal to the company’s foundational principles.

“We think we are the provider that provides our customers with the most choice, because we’ve got so many applications,” French said. “What put Zetron on the map is our ability to be interoperable with everyone. We continue to do a lot of business with Motorola, we do really good business with L3Harris, we’re partnered with EF Johnson where it makes sense, and then think of all the various CAD providers—that’s our focus.

“As long as stay true to that identity—which we will—I think it really differentiates us in the marketplace.”