Edge360 brings military know-how to the municipal surveillance market
As the role of video surveillance technology has grown in safe city applications around the globe, so too has the importance of being able to leverage cameras from a variety of different sources. Municipal surveillance networks can be sprawling and include everything from standard IP and analog cameras installed inside buildings to cameras mounted on utility poles, as well in-car and body-worn video solutions used by police departments.
Increasingly, cities are finding that they need wireless, re-deployable video assets to cover a wide range of events. Among the firms that have decided to specialize in this area of the market is Edge360, which, in addition to spearheading a number of safe city and homeland security integration projects across the U.S., has also developed a rapidly deployable mobile surveillance solution that cities can use for a variety of different use cases.
Founded six years ago, Edge360 was born out of the work John Rezzonico, the company’s CEO and majority owner, did during his Marine Corp. career in the intelligence and counter-intelligence field helping to improve the way the military gathers and streamlines various sources of video and other intelligence data. Before being deployed to support the war effort in Iraq in the early 2000s, he headed up an IT firm in Colorado which shaped how he viewed the role of technology and its’ ability to improve the military’s intelligence gathering efforts
“The Marine Corp. is, of course, very traditional in the way they do things – boots on the ground, etc. But me being a technologist, I started to look for other ways to solve the problems we were trying to address by using technology since I had everyone coming to me asking to use a lot of gear,” he says. “What I ended up doing is setting up a bunch of collections platforms – video, different types of surveillance platforms – everything from covert surveillance and ground-planted infrared/thermal cameras to really large aerial assets like predator [drones] and things like that and developed a plan for the military to use all of those to support our mission.”
Rezzonico eventually transitioned into a civilian career in the military in 2007 and was hired by the Army to be the collections adviser for Iraq. While working on a large project there, he came back to the U.S. and realized that there wasn’t an easy or cost-effective way for cities and other public safety agencies to enjoy the same level of integration that military did with its surveillance tools and decided to create Edge360.
“I decided it was going to be worth giving it a shot, doing it our own way from a small business perspective. What we noticed in the industry was that things are very expensive, a lot of it was over-engineered and just overkill,” Rezzonico explains. “My partner, [Edge360 President] Bill MacKrell, and I were working on the same projects with the Army just touching it from different angles and we started discussing what we could do together. I’m a service-disabled veteran, so we decided we wanted to start a small business based on the service-disabled, veteran-owned small business moniker to go after, originally, government contracts.”
Of course, the company wasn’t going to be handed federal government contracts right off the bat without some kind of track record and so in the course of forming Edge360, Rezzonico says they were asked to do some consulting work for safe city projects to figure out where their deployments were going awry. What they realized very quickly was that the mission of municipalities was the same as the military when it came to their surveillance networks but they naturally had a lot more challenges to achieving their goals.
“They don’t have the big budgets, they don’t have the luxury of being able to do whatever they want… they’re there to serve and protect not to detain,” Rezzonico adds. “We started looking at what they were doing and why they were doing it and we realized they were spending a lot of money on a lot of technology that they didn’t need. They just needed systems that would augment what they already had. So we went in, put together some solutions they could quickly deploy, meaning they could stick it on a pole, plug it in and it goes with very, very minimal input from anyone that has to touch it.”
Having a focus on ease of deployment and enabling cities to use the same video surveillance assets for a multitude of purposes, Rezzonico says they have taken a modular approach to building their wireless mobile surveillance systems, which means that essentially anyone in the field can open up a unit and perform maintenance on it.
“We don’t consider deployment the key factor, we consider redeployment the key factor and high-availability and ease of maintenance,” he adds. “Somebody with a ladder and a screw gun can either screw it or strap it to a pole or if they decide they want to move it they can just unplug it and move it. We’ve built the systems with redundancy - Wi-Fi, 4G, and LAN – so the system can plug into anything. Depending on where they are deploying in the city, if they have the backbone we can tap into, we’ll tap into the backbone via wireless or wired, if not we’ll fall back onto 4G.”
Rezzonico says the current political climate in the country combined with the overall need for cities to prepare for a worst-case scenario have led to Edge360 receiving numerous inquiries in recent months.
“We like to look at it from the fact that it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen, it’s when and are you prepared for that,” he says. “We’re seeing more of a proactive posture from that aspect than a reactionary one. The nice thing about this re-deployable system that we put out there is that it’s designed just for that.”
