Powerful communication in our most critical moments
While Motorola Solutions may be a household name in telecommunications, there’s a lot more to it than the iconic flip phone. It provides integrated public safety communications software to more than 5,000 agencies nationwide.
Motorola Solutions’ Spillman Flex software gives agencies a mission-critical ecosystem to serve anyone from 911 dispatchers to frontline responders to crime analysts. It offers custom-built integrated solutions from more than 60 ready-made modules, ensuring each public safety agency has exactly what it needs to best serve the public.
Every minute counts when lives are on the line
Servicing thousands of critical response agencies requires both power and reliability. After all, emergencies could happen at any time. This means Motorola Solutions’ foundation would need to have minimal downtime and rapid processing speeds. The federal government estimates that 10,000 lives could be saved each year if emergency responders arrived just one minute sooner.
The Flex Suite works to provide dispatchers, responders, and all other public safety agents with the information and context they need to provide the proper care as quickly as possible. But this can be difficult—because of the amount of data being generated, disparate locations needing to share and integrate information systems, or the cost constraints of publicly funded safety commissions.
Speed, reliability, and low costs
FairCom provides Motorola Solutions with its powerful cross-platform database, FairCom DB. It’s well-suited for Flex because of its high levels of reliability. In fact, maintenance doesn’t even require a database administrator.
“Our customers save time and money because they don’t have to dedicate a DBA to run our software, yet they get the same level of performance and sophistication that more expensive databases like Oracle offer,” says Chris Hellewell, former vice president of product development at Spillman. “We love it because we can focus on our applications and never have to worry about the database.”
"We love it because we can focus on our applications and never have to worry about the database."
— Chris Hellewell, VP of Product Development, Spillman
In addition, DB doesn’t limit the Flex Suite’s OS compatibility. It runs on all major platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and it can map between various data types, allowing Motorola Solutions’ developers to access data through their preferred API. Applications built on FairCom DB can use SQL and NoSQL APIs over the same data instance. This is a powerful feature for public safety systems, which may have decades of historical data that’s traditionally unavailable through modern SQL methods.
Lives saved, communities protected
Imagine a quiet April morning. The kids are getting ready for school, and you’re drinking coffee on the porch. Suddenly, the sky darkens. You see a funnel cloud begin to form in the distance.
This was the reality for the residents of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on the morning of April 27, 2011. A series of intense thunderstorms moved in, bringing multiple tornados. As the day went on, a multi-vortex tornado descended on the area, bringing 190 mph winds and $2.4 billion worth of damages.
Multiple police departments came together in the aftermath, working to locate and rescue missing persons throughout the area. Flex technology empowered law enforcement officers to track missing individuals as reports came in, even while cell phone services were unavailable.
“The system speeded up our responses to critical calls for service that would have been slowed or simply impossible to locate without an accurate mapping program,” says Jeff Hartley, then-captain of the Tuscaloosa Police Department.
FairCom DB empowers Motorola Solutions to create powerful, mission-critical applications for the nation’s public safety agencies. With more than 5-9s uptime and the flexibility to work on multiple platforms and with multiple APIs, DB was the obvious choice to keep American civilians safe.
About Motorola Solutions
Motorola Solutions is solving for safer. We build and connect technologies to help protect people, property, and places. Our solutions enable the collaboration between public safety agencies and enterprises that’s critical for a proactive approach to safety and security. Learn more about how we’re solving for safer communities, safer schools, safer hospitals, safer businesses—safer everywhere—motorolasolutions.com.
