Taser Aims To Be Emerging VSaaS Powerhouse
By: Brian Karas, Published on Mar 01, 2016
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Comments (26)
Konstantin Avramenko
Thank you for the interesting article. Are there any gov regulations (i.e. restrictions) in US regarding the usage of "cloud" services for the storing sensitive information? Does the vendor have to comply to specified requirements from the point of security, encryption etc.?
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Undisclosed #1
Strange company.
Even in the gun business their cost of goods = sales expense.
Who wants a third of the money they use to buy a product to be spent on selling them more?
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Paul Grefenstette
I sat through a Taser presentation to the Midwest Chief's of Police at the show here in Chicago last year. They hire ex COP's and from what I have heard their body worn camera is solid but it seems it's all about getting that cloud storage offering (evidence.com) and they take a margin hit on the hardware. We approached them to sell the solution as we have done a lot of police stations here in Illinois and have our clients coming to us to help them with this technology but Taser seems happy with selling direct and not using dealers. Anyone else approach them to sell their solution?
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Scott Bradford
Having dealt with the technical and sales engineering side of Law Enforcement for a couple of years, I've found that overwhelmingly Law Enforcement won't go through dealers with ONE exception..... very small towns.
In a small town, where there is usually only one or two dealers in town and the PD is very small, they might not have the technical staff to deploy anything, so they basically 'outsource' it to a dealer. I'd say this is less than 10% of the time.
Most departments are large enough they have an IT staff so they will go direct for whatever they need. Also, it's easier to use GSA, DIR or any other sort of purchasing contract when you go direct, vs going through a dealer.
Law Enforcement is a very close knit community. They ALL talk to each other. Once you get in good with one, you're in with another. Word of mouth and reputation is EVERYTHING with them.
Taser is THE name in the field. They have been pushing the cloud stuff since the beginning. They are under some pressure from the Chinese knock offs, but that's mostly from the small to medium size PD's that don't have the funds. You won't see LAPD with a body cam from AEE most likely. Some smaller PD's are asking their officers to buy their own body cams, or they are doing it on their own.
Just like with anything else, it's a matter of scale. The change over process with the body cams gets logistically harder the more units that you have. If you've got 2,000 cops, you couldn't manually offload them all fast enough. The original Taser unit I saw was very slick... the USB port was built into the charger. You drop it in like it's a 2 way radio and it takes care of the rest. Slick idea.
I do wonder what sort of chain of custody and encryption there is on that transfer though... Interview room systems have very specific, technical requirements to be admissible.
You also have an issue of the end user interface for retrieving that data. If you just had 100 self contained recording units that you were manually offloading and putting into a NAS, how in the world are you going to go back to a specific unit to a specific officer (if everyone is sharing) to a specific date/time. In car systems have the same situation. The hardware might not be that special, but the back end needs to be able to handle a million different situations and be usable for it to be of any value. Sticking a $30 dash cam in a police car might 'work' but it's not 'usable'
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Paul Grefenstette
Scott,
I disagree with you about large departments not using security dealers but maybe you are just talking about body worn but maybe thats the only way they have been sold.
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Scott Bradford
Paul,
That's been my experience, but it's certainly not a given or a rule. I suppose it depend on what they are looking for. We all know that some products are only sold through distribution and some are sold direct.
Some of the body cameras I dealt with were not sold directly.. at least at first..
They ended up shifting to a direct sales model, which naturally annoyed the distributors.
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Undisclosed #1
Point of integration:
Using Taser the weapon can automatically trigger Taser the camera.
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Taser clearly has the relationships because the solution makes no sense. Taser offers data packages which can cost more than $1,000 per year per device using evidence.com. Over a 3-5 year life that is $3,000 - $5,000 plus the cost of equipment and internet.
Brian is on target with how can you justify the cost of an under $300 hard drive vs. cloud ($3,000+). The costs are not only for the cloud but the cost of Internet service to upload the data to the cloud. A 10x higher cost for what perceived value?
The camera is a standard def camera with no display to see what you are recording. Another device such as a smartphone is required, which further increases costs as an officer needs to be outfitted with a smartphone and those recurring costs.
Credit has to be given to Taser who has managed to own the market. Think of what you get with a GoPro in terms of high definition and capabilities. In fact, the majority of the Body Cams are using Ambarella the GoPro provider.
There are lower cost alternatives with more functionality and usefulness which can work on local storage with no recurring revenues. The challenge is getting the attention of the end user who have long and intimate relationships with Taser and now Motorola.
The Motorola advantage is the integration with the radio which each and every officer carry. One device with one PTT.
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
The biggest problem for any company breaking in which comes back to the "appearances" is there is little to no chance. In researching many of these opportunities "all" of them require several years past performance with law enforcement agencies and minimum of 100s of cameras deployed, etc. Basically, no one can comply other than Taser and a couple of others.
There have been other solutions available which are better in terms of usability and video quality but no capability to break the old boys network.
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