SAN DIEGO — July 10, 2010 — Today, at the Esri Homeland Security GIS Summit being held in San Diego July 10–13, Microsoft Corp. announced the broad availability of the Fusion Core Solution (FCS), a public safety and homeland security solution architecture jointly developed by Esri and Microsoft. The solution allows federal, state, local and tribal agencies to efficiently manage the intake, analysis, dissemination and archiving of information to more effectively identify and help prevent threats posed by organized crime, gangs, drug cartels and terrorists. The Fusion Core Solution leverages technologies within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Esri’s ArcGIS Server to provide enhanced intelligence and information-sharing capabilities.
“Fusion centers work with massive amounts of information, which can be difficult to organize, analyze and distill into meaningful and usable intelligence,” said Joe Rozek, executive director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at Microsoft. “Without access to effective information management, fusion center managers and analysts often lose valuable time and effort determining what information is relevant to the current task.”
Recently, the first full-scale deployment of FCS took place in Salt Lake City at the Utah Statewide Information & Analysis Center (SIAC). Already FCS is at work enhancing Utah’s security through collaborative intelligence, and eventually it will be available to over 180 local law enforcement agencies including police departments, sheriff’s offices, state corrections and specialized task forces.
SIAC is a public safety partnership designed to collect, analyze and disseminate intelligence, enhancing protection provided to Utah’s citizens, communities and critical infrastructure. The impetus to build the SIAC stemmed from the state’s need for a solution to help identify growing threats posed by organized crime, gangs, drug trafficking organizations and potential terrorists.
“Previous attempts to work in such a collaborative way proved fruitless, as it involved an inefficient use of time and resources. Now we can better use existing assets and integrate with domain-specific applications, while improving business processes, compliance and communication,” said David Carabin, former Intelligence Bureau Chief and Commander of the Utah Department of Public Safety. “This allows us to take more proactive action to prepare for and respond to crises and to counter potential threats and criminal activities.”
The state uses FCS’s enterprise geographic information system (GIS) platform for the spatial analysis of suspicious activity reports, crime data and other criminal threat information. This has been shown to increase situational awareness and help expedite the dissemination of alerts, notifications and intelligence products to first responders. Through the tools available in SharePoint Server, analysts are also able to collaborate on generating and viewing intelligence reports, as well as risk assessments, from remote locations via the Internet.
More information about the Fusion Core Solution is available at http://www.microsoft.com/fusion.
About Esri
Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com/news.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
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