The Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department (MDFR) selected NICE Systems' Inform platform and other security solutions to capture voice data and manage emergency communications, said Chris Wooten, president of the company's security division of the Americas.

Wooten said the MDFR is staffed by more than 2550 employees across 66 fire rescue stations within unincorporated Miami-Dade County. To better capture incident data across the county, the department installed the company's multimedia incident-information-management platform to synch voice, video with other multimedia information for comprehensive incident reconstruction. It also captures, consolidates, manages, and analyzes information from multimedia sources, including video, GIS information, call-taker CAD screens, crime-scene photos and video clips (sent from cell phones), incident reports, mug shots, e-mails, and more, he said.

"What we did for the Miami Fire Department was to upgrade them to newer technology that synchronizes all of the voice incident data together in that single platform," he said.

Wooten said the MDFR dispatch center handles almost a quarter-million emergency calls each year and dispatches fire-rescue apparatus and aero-medical transport services. He said the Inform solution will be used to record and manage 911 and radio emergency communications in the dispatch center, as well as VoIP administration phone lines. The solutions will help investigators reconstruct and retrieve emergency call scenarios for training or legal purposes, he said.

"Different fire departments operate differently; some field phone calls directly, some calls come straight from 911 and some have a hybrid approach," he said. "We capture the telephony and incident radio communications, and the incident-management application lets them reconstruct the incident and investigate — and package as evidence — data and share that information with other people who need access to that information, such as the police department or district attorney's office."

Wooten said the platform can be tailored to the specific needs of command-and-control centers for first responders and homeland security, transportation, government, universities, utilities and other organizations.