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Public safety agencies and first responders have long used radios and other basic technology to communicate, which sometimes hindered their ability to keep people safe. By embracing digital transformation and unified communications and collaboration, first responders can seamlessly and securely connect over voice, text and using images. Tony Pereira shows how Mitel Secure Collaboration brought it all together at the Super Bowl®.
Hi, my name is Tony Pereira. I'm going to talk to you about a brand-new application that we're going to launch at this event. It's called the Mitel Secure Collaboration. So, what I'll do is I'm just going to talk to you about where we deployed it, how we deployed it.
This was deployed in a live big event. It happened in Houston on February 5. And the Patriots won that game, by the way. I can't tell you the name of the game, because we have to send them a big check if we mention their name. I refer to it as the big game in Houston. You know who it is, right? If you don't, I'll tell you later.
Basically, this was deployed at the emergency operations center and also at the stadium. We had live operational teams using it. We had the actual law enforcement, police officers using it.
Why were they interested?
So this is a cloud app. It was deployed in the Amazon S3 cloud, running over the top, so they had a whole bunch of different call servers. It didn't matter, because this application basically came over the top, it was deployed on the mobile phones (Android, iPhone), it could be deployed on PCs, on Macs, on browsers. Truly, a very powerful mobile application.
Just to tell you how they operated prior to using the secure collaboration app, they had individual radio channels for each of these teams. Now imagine in your headset if you were listening to everybody here. It's pretty stressful because you can't concentrate, you don't know what's happening, but that's what these guys were forced to use. You know, multiple radio channels. When they found this app, with all the direct units in a single place, it could find people in your organization, it could bring people in, they could share information quickly.
What were the results?
Overall, the message we got back from the team was that this was a very, very productive app that turned out to be extremely organized, and they were able to keep in touch with all the different teams and really make the event safe.
Officers were able to:
- Identify a suspicious-looking individual who had an outstanding felony warrant
- Share photographs of counterfeit merchandise vendors
- Annotate and share pictures to speed up the process of securing the event, including locating lost individuals
How does it work?
I'll give you a demo of the actual app. These teams are all organized into what we call team streams. If I click on one of these streams, you can go in and you can see all the information that's been captured. It's all contextual. I could pull any one of you, I could pull you into the stream. You could come here, you could look at it, and you'll say, “Oh OK , I get it, I know what's happening.” You're able to bring new people in very quickly. You can annotate pictures, so we can say, look, here's the problem right there. This is where we need to send our resources. Instead of them having to describe it and not getting it right, you can pinpoint the problem.
You can even do, you know, a recording. This is a recording we took early on. So I can actually record you then. It's all done from my phone – no special editing. And then what I can then do is I can actually share this. If I want to share this say with another team, I'll just say copy to, send it to, another team and it's done.
This is a huge file that I'm transferring automatically through the cloud to another group. Whatever I'm seeing, they're seeing. This is the beauty of the app. It's so fast, it can move data — big data — rapidly between different teams. All the information's stored in the cloud. It's securely stored, it's encrypted at transit, encrypted at rest and then you can even put project to-do lists. If I wanted to create a to-do list, I can have the team set up with action, due date, what they've done. I can even track it.
And then the last thing I'm going to show you is the “meet” function. So, if you wanted to have a quick meeting, if you wanted to talk to some people, you can initiate an audio or video call. If I just hit the start meeting button, I can pull this guy into the video conference call. He's somewhere here. If he answers the phone, you know, I can do a live video session. And this is running over the LTE network, over the mobile network. You can see how quickly you can pull people in; you can put 40 people on this audio video call and have a full collaboration session.
Just to give you some stats, this app was used on the event day by 855 responders; 390 active policemen were using the app. We were shifting over 58,000 views, and 6,800 messages, 1,202 pages. A lot of information moving, flowing, and people following up and taking action. They called the app the killer app, not because it killed anyone, but because it didn't kill anyone. They found that this app made them work really well, offered a great environment for their teams to operate, and they kept the public safe.
