SIA New Member Profile: Axon Enterprise

New Security Industry Association (SIA) member Axon Enterprise works to protect people and assets through a holistic, integrated approach to security technology that provides companies with the confidence, focus and time they need to protect and serve their clients. The company is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has offices and customers across the globe.

SIA spoke with Axon Enterprise Director of Marketing Zach Jory about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

ZJ: The company was founded by Rick Smith in 1993 following a very unfortunate road rage shooting in which two of his friends were killed by an irate driver. Three lives were ruined that day – those of his two friends, and the man who was convicted of murder. Rick set out on a mission to protect life through the invention of the conducted energy weapon, otherwise known as the TASER. The first-generation TASER was introduced in 1999. Since then, our customers have really driven our product development. After about a decade of having TASERS out on the street in a litigious society, we realized that there was a real need to understand the circumstances surrounding a TASER deployment. We had experimented with the taser cam, which is a camera that you put on the bottom of the taser weapon to see what occurred – that had very strong market interest. What we quickly realized was the challenge wasn’t capturing the video, that was the easy part. The issue was managing all the video data that was generated from the incident. So we embarked on a journey of managing unstructured data, and we came out with evidence.com in 2009. This allows users to ingest, access and store information in an efficient way. Axon was one of the early adopters of the cloud, particularly in public safety.

Since then, we have iterated on the TASER and the camera – moving the camera from the weapon to the officer’s head or chest. We have built the body-worn camera industry over the last decade. We have also introduced an in-car camera and other edge sensors that increase safety and transparency. Our latest generation of products – like the TASER 7, the Axon Body 3 and Fleet 2 – are ensuring officer and public safety and accountability, and we offer a number of applications like Respond, Records and Standards that increase the efficiency of organizations.

Over the last few years, we have seen customers in industries like private security, transportation, logistics, manufacturing and construction that have similar challenges to law enforcement. We are building out the Axon Enterprise division to provide monitoring and security solutions to users outside of public safety. ​

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings/company unique?

ZJ: The Axon Enterprise suite of solutions offers a smarter and more efficient set of de-escalation and incident management tools for private security companies. Axon body-worn cameras, conductive energy weapons and the Axon digital evidence management platform are proven and rapidly evolving technologies that directly support and improve transparency, de-escalation and safety. Axon Enterprise solutions offer enhanced situational awareness and transparency, strong means of de-escalation and an easy way to manage and share datato mitigate the unique threats, risks and liabilities that exist for private security companies. Axon offers private security companies a smarter and more transparent way to protect and serve their customers. Conducted energy weapons provide a strong deterrent that often negates the need for force and are a non-lethal option when force is necessary. Body cameras negate any “he said, she said” situations and ensure guards are acting professionally. Our rugged, proven body-worn cameras have an error-proof user interface that requires minimal training and automates the capture and upload of data. When incidents become evidence, the Axon Evidence platform ties you directly into one of the largest law enforcement platforms in the world and makes it easy to manage and share incidents. Respond can provide real-time situational awareness which can be very valuable for lone guard or nighttime situations. The Axon network enables you to easily capture incidents, create a chain of custody, redact and transcribe videos and share important incidents with the click of a button. The efficiency gains and elimination of manual tasks provided by Axon ensure private security organizations can spend less time on operations and more time serving customers and growing the business.

What is something we might not know about your company – or something new you are doing in security?

ZJ: If you have been in law enforcement, you know Axon. We are taking our same commitment to protecting life and truth and bringing that to private industries with an additional focus on protecting critical assets and an expanded focus on managing data to help security organizations offer new value to their customers.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

ZJ: We hope to learn more about the challenges and drivers of private security. We have a solution set that can help security companies modernize and add more value to customers they serve, but we also want to work with the industry to inform the direction of Axon Enterprise product development in a way that will provide the most value to security users.   

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.