Collaboration between Excelerate Technology and Unblur improves safety and situational awareness at major incidents

UK-leading technology partner to UK emergency response organisations, Excelerate Technology and leading data-driven solutions provider for front-line emergency services Unblur, based in Barcelona, have announced a non-exclusive partnership that marries market-leading communications infrastructure and an intelligent platform to revolutionise safety, situational awareness, communications and incident response for UK emergency services.

Excelerate’s integrated approach provides a robust and reliable communications infrastructure and connectivity eco-system to support and underpin Digital transformation applications which includes the IRIS Core platform. The ‘always on’ solution improves on-scene situational awareness, interoperability and operational outcomes for first responders. 

The partnership is born out of an instrumental collaboration which saw input into Mid & West Wales Fire & Rescue Service’s (MAWWFRS) Transformation2020 Digitisation ‘T20’ programme. T20 was designed to overcome key challenges for emergency services such as gaining real-time situational awareness, the ability to track and know the location of personnel in any given environment, and to easily share that critical data through a robust and resilient network infrastructure.

Recent tragic incidents have brought potential communication breakdowns into sharp contrast, and the collaboration and use cases such as that with MAWWFRS, goes some way into helping to learn lessons and address common issues faced by UK emergency personnel and first responders. 

IRIS Core, and its associated app, IRIS Tactics, for smartphones and tablets, simplifies decision-making and facilitates the sharing of this real-time data between incident commanders, sector commanders and other stakeholders, and can incorporate video feeds from drones, cameras and smartphones. 

David Savage, CEO at Excelerate Technology, said: ‘This truly is an exciting partnership that has already delivered benefits through our work together with MAWWFRS, where we have delivered solutions capable of supporting reliability and scalability across incidents grounds.

‘We collaborate with many partners for incident management, where our enhanced resilient networks support a vital link for accessing cloud-based applications, and our work with Unblur will continue to flourish as we work closer together to deliver market-leading solutions to UK emergency services.

‘There is a significant need to improve safety for emergency services personnel by ensuring “always-on” connectivity, so they never find themselves facing a dangerous and challenging situation without access to the support they need, and to the people that can help make quicker decisions for them.’

Oscar Bachs, head of business development at Unblur, added: ‘We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Excelerate Technology, and proud to be working together in our ambition to revolutionise safety and efficiency for those on the front lines.

‘For more than five years, we have provided user-friendly solutions to help emergency services personnel and their partners to overcome operational challenges and truly enable interoperability. 

‘We know that issues such as when having difficulty communicating with other services, the saturation suffers, and a lack of insight into critical information can create unexpected challenges. For our firefighters, police and paramedics, who are already entering into dangerous situations, issues can vastly undermine safety. In partnership with Excelerate Technology, we are providing solutions to improve safety and outcomes for emergency services.’