By: Amit Chowdhry

Mark43 is a company that builds the world’s most powerful cloud-native public safety computer-aided dispatch (CAD), records management system (RMS), analytics, and property and evidence platform. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Mark43 co-founder and Head of External Affairs Matt Polega.

Matt Polega’s Background

Matt Polega is the Co-founder and Head of External Affairs at Mark43 where he oversees all planning and execution of all outward-facing efforts, including company and product brand, positioning, thought leadership, employer branding, and public relations. 

Matt developed the earliest iteration of the Mark43 RMS, and remains deeply connected to the mission and what it takes to build effective public safety technology. In 2015, he was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for the category of Enterprise Technology. He holds a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in computer science from Harvard University, where he was also the captain of the Division I Track and Field team.

Formation Of Mark43

How did the idea for Mark43 come together?

“Paying homage to Tony Stark’s inventions in Marvel’s Iron Man trilogy, in which he created 42 versions of his protective suit, Mark43 is on a mission to enhance public safety technology and take it to the next level,” Polega reflected. “Eleven years ago I co-founded Mark43 with two of my classmates, Flo Mayr and Scott Crouch, while we were still at Harvard. We were three engineering students who expected that public safety agencies were using the same cutting-edge technology that we saw on CSI or NCIS. We quickly realized through a class project that this was not the case, and the public safety sector was underserved by the antiquated technology that was available at the time. We wanted to bring them the modern tools that would empower governments and their communities to improve the safety of officers and the people they are sworn to serve. We believe in the power of technology to transform public safety and founded a company that would help police leadership better serve their communities and keep their officers safe. Our first customer was the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and ten years later we have partnerships with more than 200 local, state, and federal public safety agencies.”

Favorite Memory

What has been your favorite memory working for Mark43?

“Working with my co-founders, Scott and Flo. Eleven years after we co-founded Mark43, we are still working together at the same company. That is a rare thing, and it is a tribute to how well we work together. It isn’t always easy, but we believe in having difficult conversations when necessary and letting each of us leverage our strengths while supporting each other in our weaknesses,” Polega highlighted.

Challenges Faced

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in building the company, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company? 

“Public safety is not an easy industry to break into – policing is a tight community that can be wary of vendors. We worked very hard to establish trust with police leaders, and we did that by demonstrating that we were passionate about public safety, we’re mission-driven and truly committed to delivering technology that makes public safety professionals’ jobs easier, allowing them to get back to what drew them to policing in the first place,” Polega acknowledged. “Like most tech companies, we run our business in a sustainable way that ensures we can continue delivering dependably for our customer base.”

Core Products

What are Mark43’s core products and features? 

Polega said that Mark43’s mission-critical, cloud-native product suite, includes:

1.) Records Management System (RMS) allows streamlined workflows, intuitive search, and native NIBRS validations to form the most comprehensive and intuitive public safety reporting platform. Mark43’s RMS has six core capabilities: Report Writing, Case Management, Property & Evidence, Booking, Stat Reporting & Crime Analysis, and System Administration.

2.) Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) operates as a natural extension of the dispatcher, call taker, and in-field first responder during an emergency response. Using this system, officers are able to take calls from anywhere, regardless of whether they are at a computer or on their mobile device. This system has 2 core capabilities: Dispatch and First Responder.  

a.) Dispatch enables telecommunicators to respond to events swiftly and efficiently, armed with the right information at the right time. The right information includes alerting dispatchers to potential hazards at the scene of emergencies and helping them make the best use of field resources by suggesting which units should respond. The software alerts dispatchers of potential hazards at the scene of emergencies and helps them make the best use of field resources by providing unit response suggestions. 

b.) First Responder is thoughtfully designed to provide field personnel a direct window into incident response and emergency dispatch via our specialized mobile in-unit solution. Agencies can leverage First Responder both in-unit and through our Mark43 OnScene mobile app, which extends an agency’s CAD deeper into the field and untethered from a mobile-data terminal (MDT) and vehicle. Mark43 OnScene equips first responders with the context and situational awareness of a traditional CAD but puts that information into their hands via their mobile devices even while away from their vehicle.

Evolution Of Mark43’s Technology

How has Mark43’s technology evolved since launching?

“We never deviated from our core belief that the foundation of any public safety operation is CAD and RMS since they are the main software data collection tools used by agencies for analysis and data-driven decision-making,” Polega shared. 

“Agencies that adopt modern, cloud-native platforms will be best- positioned to leverage new and evolving technology that adds capabilities and enhances user experience. As we developed and improved those CAD and RMS systems – all on the AWS GovCloud platform – we were able to deliver more leading-edge technology such as Mark43 Alternate CAD and Mark43 OnScene.”

Significant Milestones

What have been some of Mark43’s most significant milestones? 

Polega cited that the top milestones include the wide variety of public safety organizations that have implemented their systems and proven that the software has been extremely successful and beneficial to those agencies.

— Boston Police Department

— Seattle Police Department

— San Antonio Police Department

— D.C. Metropolitan Police Department

• Louisiana State Police
• Albuquerque Police Department

— The Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office

— The Cumbria Constabulary (UK) 

“Furthermore, recent product launches and advancements have disrupted the space. While on-prem and other primary dispatch systems might go down, our resilient, cloud-native CAD and Alternate CAD stay online. Mark43 OnScene, available on iOS and Android devices, untethers officers from their cars, bringing the full functionality of mission-critical CAD systems with them into the field. Mark43 is significantly improving the way public safety agencies can do work,” Polega continued.

Customer Success Stories

When I asked Polega about customer success stories, he replied: 

“We recently grew the Mark43 footprint across the state of Florida, including new deals with both the Coral Gables Police Department and the Boynton Beach Police Department, the first agency in Palm Beach County to benefit from these much-needed public safety technology upgrades.

Coral Gables telecommunicators, serving both the Coral Gables Police and Fire Departments, will use the system’s vital functionality to pinpoint exact locations and clearly display data for increased situational awareness when responders arrive on the scene. This enhances safety for emergency responders and their ability to meet the specific needs of their community. The cloud-native public safety platform also ensures superior data security controls that public safety agencies can trust, due to Mark43’s unwavering commitment to the highest levels of compliance and cybersecurity. In addition, Mark43 Analytics will give the Coral Gables Police Department leadership real-time access to complete and accurate data, which can be used to drive positive outcomes and assess trends. With dedicated customer support, Mark43 provides 24/7 steadfast partnership to address any Coral Gables Police Department needs.

Boynton Beach, in addition to Mark43 CAD, will use Mark43 RMS to enable faster report-writing, integrated compliance standards, better case management, and a superior user experience that leads to enhanced work performance and job satisfaction.

In 2019, the San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) knew its RMS wasn’t meeting the department’s needs. Deputy Chief Karen Falks, at the time responsible for Community Engagement & Technology, led the team that upgraded SAPD from a legacy records management solution to Mark43 RMS, establishing best practices and innovative ways of thinking along the way. After implementing our systems, SAPD saw an increase in the amount of time that officers are in the field, a decrease in investigation time, an improvement in public satisfaction, and zero scheduled downtime for maintenance and upgrades.

Total Addressable Market

What total addressable market (TAM) size is Mark43 pursuing? 

“Mark43 is executing against a $7 billion total market. Our key customer categories are U.S. state and local governments, the U.S. federal government, and international governments,” Polega assessed.

Differentiation From The Competition

What differentiates Mark43 from its competition? 

“From day one, we were committed to cloud-native technology. We partnered with industry-leading cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure maximum security, resiliency, and scalability for agencies around the country and the world,” Polega noted.

“With a world-class team from leading tech companies, the U.S. military, and many law enforcement and public safety agencies, we employ the best to ensure our platform empowers our customers today as their needs evolve for tomorrow. From day one, we knew this meant building cloud-native technology.”

Future Company Goals

What are some of Mark43’s future company goals?

Our goal is to be the last CAD and RMS a public safety agency ever needs to buy. With our pace of innovation and improvement, we aim to help our customers see around the corner as public safety evolves.

We also will continue to have a relentless focus on security. We will soon be one of the few companies in the world to be FedRAMP High and StateRAMP certified, meaning we adhere to the highest standards of security protocols and compliance and are ready to serve the U.S. federal government. 

We believe resiliency is the future. The pandemic, an uptick in large-scale weather emergencies and cyberattacks, as well as the growing costs and security vulnerabilities associated with on-prem systems will make it increasingly difficult to justify any technical environment that is not cloud-native.

Mobility will continue to be a game changer. What can we do to take our responders out of the car and into the community? How can we dramatically cut the time spent at the station?

AI is the big topic that everyone is talking about right now. And we are too. But for public safety agencies, we believe in the need to proceed carefully. Agencies need to work closely with community members, elected leadership and end-users to develop policies and procedures that allows agencies to safely, effectively, and ethically deploy new technologies like AI .

No matter what lies ahead, our goal is to ensure that our customers have what they need to keep their communities safe.    

Mark43 is the leading cloud-native public safety technology company. We deliver a modern, intuitive, and mobile-first CAD, RMS, and Analytics platform that empowers governments and their communities to improve the safety and quality of life for all,” Polega concluded. 

“Working with more than 200 local, state, and federal public safety agencies, Mark43 is transforming how first responders use technology to respond, engage and serve the community. We provide the tools, resources, expertise, and security foundation that public safety needs so they can get back to the business of public safety.”

Original Story: https://pulse2.com/mark43-matt-polega-profile/

By: Gio Insignares (Anchor/Reporter)

CORAL GABLES, Fla. – We all know the importance of a quick response time when calling first responders.

It can especially make a difference in major disasters, like hurricanes, that risk power outages and other issues.

In this week’s “Technically Speaking” report, Local 10′s Gio Insignares shows us how one software company is hoping to bring agencies across South Florida into the future and transform how they prepare and react to trouble across their communities.

The new partnership between the software company and Coral Gables promises to revamp the way officers respond to future emergencies.

“What it does is it makes our city, streets, and our residents and visitors safer. Because if I can look at that stuff faster, I can pivot, I can move resources that I need to move,” Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak Jr. said.

Hudak is talking about a new platform currently being integrated into the department from Mark43, a public safety technology company.

It’s a cloud-native platform that provides analytics tools, computer-aided dispatch (CAD), and records management services (RMS) to public safety agencies across the country.

Essentially, it takes all the tools and resources already in use by departments and folds them into one, universal, streamlined process, making it like a one-stop shop for everything they need.

The system will serve not just the Coral Gables Police Department, but also the Coral Gables Fire Department and the University of Miami Police Department, which uses the Coral Gables Police Department CAD and RMS systems.

“We realized that police technology was not what you see on NCIS or CSI. This was very surprising to us, but Hollywood being what it is, we said, ‘You know what? We’re going to run off our direction and build them something to help them out somehow, someway,’” said Matt Polega, co-founder & head of external affairs at Mark43.

Mark43 was started in an engineering class at Harvard University more than a decade ago.

Polega says while working with the Massachusetts State Police, the need for something more efficient was necessary.

The company’s platform provides real-time updates and an ability to maintain communication across its users, as long as there’s a wireless connection.

“Even if the network at the agency goes down, you can go to Starbucks and continue dispatching, you can use McDonald’s Wi-Fi and continue dispatching. All you need is the thinnest internet connection and a laptop, and you can literally run the emergency dispatch services for an entire city from wherever you need to be,” Polega said.

“Having everything on a computer at one place, and not having to open up several other platforms, because it’s all there with a click, it really kind of minimizes the time it takes and kind of can put some things together,” Hudak said.

One of the other highlights of the system, they say, will be in natural disasters, like hurricanes, where the risk of a power outage threatens to cripple a department’s infrastructure and response time.

“That means that those dispatchers that are working so hard to get those lifesaving units to where they need to be, are no longer using computers, they are writing things down on index cards, they are logging things on a whiteboard, they are failing over to using exclusively radios as the only piece of technology that they have. It would look like something that is out of the 40s, 50s or 60s,” Polega said.

With Mark43, officials say they can still be operational even in a worst-case scenario.

“If there is an issue with one particular data center, we’re able to move all of that traffic elsewhere, and make sure that the agencies that we work with continue dispatching, continue capturing information,” Polega said.

Mark43 has also partnered with Miramar, Miami Gardens, Fort Myers, and recently Boynton Beach.

t’s an opportunity Hudak says was too good to pass up and will be a game-changer moving forward.

“You cannot, as a law enforcement professional, not take advantage of the best 21st century technology to continue to provide service for an entirely blind community,” he said.

While Coral Gables PD is still working to fully integrate the Mark43 platform in their systems, there are certain elements of it being used right now and will continue to be used through the rest of hurricane season.

Full integration of the Mark43 platform is expected sometime in early 2024.

Original Story: https://www.local10.com/features/2023/08/10/software-company-transforms-way-some-south-florida-law-enforcement-agencies-prepare-react-to-emergencies/

By: Business Wire

Mark43 and RapidSOS partnership will enable public safety telecommunicators to access precise location information from callers in need and shorten response times

Mark43, the leading cloud-native public safety technology company, announced a partnership with RapidSOS that will provide 911 call centers that are using Mark43 CAD with access to RapidSOS enhanced location information, a partnership that will improve the response speed and accuracy of first responders.

“We are proud to be partnering with RapidSOS”

Through this partnership, Mark43 is recognized as RapidSOS Ready, providing telecommunicators with accurate caller location and rich additional data shared by RapidSOS. The partnership allows Mark43 to share robust data from the RapidSOS Platform – including dynamic location, health and medical information, connected building and alarm data, and more – with first responders in an emergency. This information provides first responders with unprecedented situational awareness so that they can arrive on scene faster and better informed.

“We are proud to be partnering with RapidSOS,” said Bob Hughes, CEO of Mark43. “When getting emergency help and resources to those who need it, seconds matter and lives are impacted. This partnership ensures that first responders using Mark43 CAD are dispatched as efficiently as possible and with the most accurate location information available. Public safety agencies deserve the best mission-critical technology, which we’re committed to providing. This partnership with RapidSOS is proof of that commitment.”

“We’re united in our commitment to empower safer, stronger communities with intelligent, data-driven emergency response worldwide,” said Dave Sehnert, Head of Public Safety Partnerships at RapidSOS. “Together with our RapidSOS Ready Emergency Community, we’re providing people with an added layer of safety and security and supporting our heroic first responders in saving millions of lives annually.”

Mark43 CAD operates as a natural extension of the dispatcher, call taker, and in-field first responder during an emergency response. Using this system, officers are able to take calls from anywhere, regardless of whether they are at a computer or on their mobile device. This keeps officers away from the station, out of their car, and in the field where they belong.

RapidSOS technology provides public safety telecommunicators with device-specific location information by accessing the GPS information inside a specific mobile device. This is a significant improvement upon how location information is typically determined, whereby a 911 call center or public safety answering point (PSAP) relies upon a cell phone network carrier to determine where the device is located.

The enhanced accuracy provided by the RapidSOS integration with Mark43 CAD enables telecommunicators to send first responders exactly where they are needed – to the device’s specific location. This partnership also reduces the call handing / call processing time by providing telecommunicators with an accurate location as soon as the call comes in.

Both Mark43 CAD and RapidSOS are cloud-native, and are far more prepared to support public safety and evolve with the landscape to provide the best security and resiliency that is available today, tomorrow, and beyond.

Original Story: https://aithority.com/technology/mark43-announces-partnership-with-rapidsos-bringing-even-more-speed-and-accuracy-to-its-computer-aided-dispatch-software/