TASER® Blog

“Challenging times favor the strong and bold. Our company’s financial condition is, indeed, strong. Our ideas and our people are innovative, and our thinking is bold.”    

Yesterday, TASER International reported earnings for first quarter 2009. While I’m proud of many accomplishments this past quarter, the announcement of EVIDENCE.com stands out as a significant milestone in the evolution of the company. TASER International is now primed to provide a complete solution set to law enforcement’s most challenging problems.   

Out in the streets, when lives are at stake, our family of TASER® ECDs provides the safest, most effective option for officers to respond to resistance. The TASER® AXON™ Tactical Computer, which was announced last summer, will streamline the collection and analysis of evidence, preserving an audio/video record from the officer’s perspective of what really happened during all incidents — from traffic stops to the most contentious and dangerous confrontations.

EVIDENCE.com will provide secure storage and groundbreaking analytic capability for digital information and evidence while preserving a pristine evidentiary chain of custody from time the evidence was captured all the way through the judicial process, until the last gavel drops. We are building this capability, through EVIDENCE.com, in a way that lays the foundation for a global, secure network for the law enforcement community.

This integrated set of hardware and software tools has the potential to revolutionize law enforcement in the same way that real-time tactical situational awareness technologies have revolutionized military capabilities. If we think about how GPS, and autonomous systems like the cruise missiles or GPS guided munitions that revolutionized our military capabilities in recent conflicts, we see a similar prospect for bringing advanced information technology to law enforcement to modernize their capabilities and allow them to more effectively and safely execute their mission.

Our TASER ECDs are reducing violence, reducing injuries, and protecting lives every day. AXON and EVIDENCE.com will protect truth through an end-to-end integrated solution to capture, store securely, and analyze digital evidence and information in ways that enable tactical and strategic decision making by law enforcement, as well as for legal evidentiary use.  

Through EVIDENCE.com, we will create a network that can tie together the eyes and ears of hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers into a global, secure law enforcement collaboration network of digital information. This capability runs to the core of how to keep our communities safe and how to address the modern threats facing society. In fact, the mission of uniting the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States was one of the core reasons that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was formed. However, it has proven extremely difficult to unite these 18,000 autonomous agencies with directives from the top down. We believe our bottom up approach will be successful. We believe that the revolutionary capabilities of AXON and EVIDENCE.com will create a unified collaborative network among our current 14,000 law enforcement agency customers.  

The future is digital information. Our breakthrough hardware — AXON — accelerates the need for massive digital data storage and management. EVIDENCE.com creates both the method and the network through which to handle this data. Using a Software as a Service (“SaaS”) approach removes the burden, capital investment, and implementation risk from local agencies who are all struggling with how to handle the complexities and volume of digital evidence and video. We are also designing the EVIDENCE.com infrastructure to enable next generation video analytics and to handle future law enforcement collaborative needs.

EVIDENCE.com will bring Software as a Service to main street, public safety and law enforcement for the first time.

In effect, we are taking elements from a variety of fast moving technology trends and combining them together to empower our law enforcement customers. The AXON Tactical Computer grew from the miniaturization of video recording devices and wearable computers, such as the iPhone™ or Blackberry® many of us now use every day. EVIDENCE.com is a world class, Web 3.0 Cloud Computing solution perfectly fit to address a highly complex, capital intensive technology need of the law enforcement community. We’ve also combined existing Web 2.0 social networking technology to enable secure grassroots collaboration across the law enforcement community.

It is a bold vision that is becoming reality. We are set to create the technology tool set of hardware and software products and solutions that will help us realize the vision of safer communities and a secure homeland, while making law enforcement significantly more effective and more accountable. Our technology will transform law enforcement. It will also transform TASER International — from a world-class product manufacturer, to a cross-technology platform solutions provider.  

Over the past two months, the senior leadership of TASER International has met with more than 60 senior command staff from the top 150 law enforcement agencies to share our vision of the TASER-AXON-EVIDENCE.com solutions. The results have been extremely promising. The significant majority of the agencies we met with have validated the pain points that we are solving, and interest in our solution set is very high. We have even received very favorable feedback from agencies who were not significant customers for our core TASER products.

Next week, TASER International is hosting a technology summit, with more than 130 participants from leading law enforcement agencies across the country who are joining us to learn more about EVIDENCE.com, and to provide further vital customer input into our final product development phase. In fact, more than 400 officers have already participated in prior focus groups and surveys that have helped us to develop this breakthrough solution set.

At TASER International, we are keenly aware of the challenges which exist as a result of a troubled global economy. But, as I’ve said before, now is the time to invest from a position of strength to extend our lead, enter into new markets, and provide solutions to the most complex problems.  

Challenging times favor the strong and bold. Our company’s financial condition is, indeed, strong. Our ideas and our people are innovative, and our thinking is bold.