Dyfed-Powys Police selects APD Communications and Cisco to update its Emergency Contact Centre
TETRA World Congress – 16th May, 2012 – APD Communications, a global leader in mission-critical mobile information, resource location and control room solutions, today announces that Dyfed-Powys Police has selected APD and Cisco to update its Emergency Contact Centre. The main components of the solution are APD’s CORTEX Software Integrated Communications Control Solution (ICCS) and Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) solution.
This solution refreshes the control centre system and provides significantly increased resilience and intelligent routing of emergency and non-emergency calls; essential for the Force to realise their planned resilience and efficiency gains in call handling. Cisco’s tradition as a leader in the telephony arena and APD’s innovative work in the mission critical contact centre market ensures emergency services are guaranteed best of breed telephony and contact centre solutions, providing both users and citizens with efficient and cost effective ways of working.
APD’s CORTEX ICCS is in daily use in over 40 Police control rooms across the UK, as well as national systems throughout Sweden and the United Arab Emirates.
Apart from the business benefits that will be derived from the Cisco UCCE and CORTEX solution, the force needed to impose a short lead time with go live on 14th May. Today, we’re pleased to announce that all calls coming into the control room will be utilising the Cisco/APD solution, meeting the force’s plan and timescales.
Mark Hall, IS & T Networks Manager at Dyfed Powys said, “working alongside APD makes this type of upgrade easy; we have the same work ethic and the project has been carried out smoothly and with very little disruption to the day to day running of the control room. Dyfed Powys Police will benefit from greater functionality, as well as increased resilience and efficiency – thus significantly enhancing the service offered to the public.”
Jonathan Hamill, Sales & Marketing Director at APD Communications commented, “APD has enjoyed a long and privileged relationship with the emergency services within the UK and in particular with Dyfed-Powys Police. Our strategic alliance with Cisco enables us jointly to deliver best in breed emergency contact centre solutions and further positions APD as a market leader. Police finances are under pressure and the requirement exists for increased resilience and efficient working practice and we are delighted to be in a position to respond to deliver a best in breed solution to Dyfed-Powys Police and the community it serves”.
CORTEX merges TETRA radio dispatch, emergency and non-emergency telephone call handling, access control, video monitoring and much more into a single user friendly touchscreen interface and is relied on by critical communications users and the Emergency services to answer 999 calls and despatch resources to incidents.
APD is responsible for the CORTEX to Cisco integration which includes full support for Cisco’s ACD (Automatic Caller Distribution) solution which will ensure 999 calls are routed to skilled operators as quickly as possible.
APD’s CORTEX ICCS is totally software based, creating a clear differential between APD and its competitors. The inherently resilient distributed architecture of CORTEX has enabled APD to design an integration with Cisco that makes CORTEX the only ICCS in the World to be officially approved by CISCO’s stringent A2Q (Acceptance to Quality) assessors to handle emergency calls via a Cisco telephony platform.
For more information please visit: http://www.apdcomms.com
Media Contact:
Lucy Jones, Noiseworks: 01628 421 557, lucyj@noiseworks.com