Lincolnshire Police enlists Motorola in cloud upgrade deal

Lincolnshire Police has signed a 10-year agreement with Motorola to transform its control room, replacing the constabulary's legacy contact management, computer-aided dispatch, mapping and call logging system.

This is the first time a UK force has run its entire control room tech stack on the cloud, according to Lincolnshire Police, and it will have significant benefits for the public sector organisation, including lower costs and heightened staff productivity.

Motorola will implement its CommandCentral Control Room Solution (CRS) to handle calls in the 6 million deal. Those overseeing the deal hope that its scalable platform will mean people will be able to get in contact with a call handler far faster than currently possible, even at peak times.

Because the solution scales according to demand, Lincolnshire's Police Force and IT teams don't have to manually increase capacity or work out the likely call volumes in advance.

"The new command and control system is one important step in that journey and will allow the chief to get assistance to those in need quicker than ever before and armed with the right information to handle the situation," said Marc Jones, police and crime commissioner for Lincolnshire Police.

"It has been a high priority for me to ensure frontline officers can be deployed quickly, with the right equipment, and to spend as much time as possible in the field reassuring communities, preventing and fighting crime."

The implementation of Motorola's cloud-based contact centre platform was overseen by G4S Policing Services.

"The G4S strategic partnership with Lincolnshire Police will enable Lincolnshire to be at the forefront of technology, supporting officers and staff to make the best decisions by being better informed," G4S Policing Services' managing director, John Whitwam said.

"This is the best of a private and public partnership, with G4S, Motorola Solutions and Lincolnshire Police working together to provide sustainable and effective policing services to the public of Lincolnshire."

The announcement follows a series of initiatives launched by the UK government to modernise policing and embrace cloud-based technologies. In August the Home Office announced it was seeking partners to help it migrate Police and Public Protection systems over from its own data centres to those operated by Amazon Web Service (AWS).

The Met Police also revealed in September that it had chosen Microsoft Cloud partner New Signature to help it modernise its own infrastructure by moving over to Microsoft Azure, considered to be one of G-Clouds largest procurements.