Radical Systems wins Motorola Solutions 2017 New South Wales hackathon

Northern Territory developer impresses with secure communications solution

Singapore – 20 September 2017 – Radical Systems has won the 2017 Motorola Solutions (NYSE:MSI) public safety hackathon.

The Darwin-based business systems developer won the fast-paced, 48-hour challenge with a solution designed to capture vital data for emergency services while maintaining the integrity of highly secure and covert communications.

The solution is designed to provide better connectivity and communications for public safety organisations, enabling improved decision making and response to major events such as bushfires. The application would also enable system users to capture vital data on their devices when they are not connected to the network.

Radical Systems incorporated the use of Motorola Solutions’ convergence suite of software in its solution design, enabling radio network access to be securely extended to users of smartphones and other devices.

The Northern Territory technology developer was awarded $30,000 in prizes through the competition, including AUD $15,000 in cash and credits with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further develop its solution in the cloud. Second place went to a combined team from Mastercom and Battlerz which were awarded a combined AUD $10,000 in cash and AWS credits. 

Other competing developers included DiUS, Motorola Solutions, Gridstone and a team of New South Wales university students studying engineering.

The hackathon was supported by public safety agencies including NSW Telco Authority, NSW State Emergency Services and NSW Rural Fire Service. Agencies provided challenge statements based on real operational problems faced by their frontline personnel every day.

Applying the principles of agile development, application developers worked to resolve the challenge statements by developing smart applications in a pressure-cooker environment.

The event highlighted how mobile broadband innovation could be applied to improve situational awareness and collaboration for Australia’s public safety organisations while opening up new possibilities for developers.

“This experience taught us a lot about what emergency services personnel face in their daily work,” said Iain Buchanan, senior developer with Radical Systems.

“This really stretched our thinking in terms of solutions design and forced us to consider how technology could be applied to improve safety and productivity within their environments,”

All solutions developed during the hackathon remain the intellectual property of competing developers, giving them the flexibility to complete their applications either on their own or with support from Motorola Solutions.

“This win will stimulate further growth for business and we plan to expand our solution – possibly by incorporating video streaming and image sharing – to create an even more valuable product for our customers,” explained Adam Whitehead, Radical Systems’ technology director.

Motorola Solutions’ vice president of cloud infrastructure, Tom Guthrie, said his company would continue to invest in hackathons and the growing number of services available within the cloud to deliver innovation to emergency services and enterprise organisations.

“Hackathons and the rapidly-growing, common tool sets available within the cloud make a powerful combination,” Guthrie said.

“Used together, they provide a new way for us to work, share our ideas, iterate and learn from each other. This kind of collaboration is essential to developing much-needed technologies to support public safety and enterprise organisations into the future,” Guthrie said.

Planning for Motorola Solutions’ next hackathon, in Melbourne in mid-2018, is now underway.