“It’s really exciting working for a company that’s growing so quickly, and we’re getting such great adoption across the country with the platform,” Howland told Techwire. In his role, he works primarily with law enforcement agencies across the U.S., helping them adopt and work with the Fusus platform.
One example was in the news last week: Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant announced that his department has worked with Georgia-based Fusus to upgrade its 10-year-old video surveillance system and can now incorporate video feeds from the city’s surveillance network as well as from businesses’ and residents’ video cameras across multiple platforms in real time.
“The new system, which was developed by a Peachtree Corners company called Fusus, can also send video from nearby cameras to officers in their patrol cars, so they know exactly what the scene looks like before they get there,” Atlanta’s WSBTV reported last week. “In about a year, Fusus could give APD access to 30,000 real-time cameras and share multiple video feeds to different parts of the city.”
Howland explained Fusus’ focus: “Our platform really helps agencies be more efficient and effective with technology that exists within their community. So we’re able to take disparate systems and disparate technologies and put them together in a single pane of glass. We’re a cloud-based, map-based platform. As an example … the video system that is in a school, one that’s at a city hall, and another that is, for example, traffic cameras, even private businesses … and pull all of those together and give law enforcement direct access to it. And then we also take a lot of the siloed technologies – license plate readers, gunshot detection – and get all those technologies working together ... in a way that technologies typically don’t work together.”
Howland said that what he enjoys most about working for Fusus is meeting with law enforcement clients across the nation ¯ “getting out there and really showing them the technology, and then having a whole crew of engineers that are putting together a cutting-edge technology platform that is really giving folks the ability to use technology that already exists in their communities.”
Howland said the company is growing very quickly, and he attributes that to a responsive, nimble team of engineers.
“So I’m super-excited to be able to spend full time guiding and directing where we’re going to go with the platform, and really digging into those customer pain points so we can deliver solutions,” he said.
Howland said his role has him meeting with chief information officers as well as patrol officers who use the Fusus platform. He said his decades in law enforcement – both as a patrol officer and as a CIO – give him unique insight into agencies’ needs.
“The advantage with the role I have now is that it’s not like I’ve left the public sector, because I’m still helping law enforcement agencies across the nation, and I’m still using technology to help them be more efficient and more effective.”
