Finance Committee - 10/18/2017 Page 7
Mr. Mansfield
| do not have an estimate at this point in time. This is fairly new software. It’s a new product that has come out
in the last six months. We’ve actually seen the product. The fire department has seen the product. They like
the product. The problem is it hasn’t been deployed that much so there’s no real pricing that we have received
yet for that. The biggest benefit for the upgrade of the system is every time you do an upgrade it pretty much
guarantees that your system will be viable for an additional five years. It adds five years of life onto your
system.
Alderman O’Brien
This is the first | heard of it. As a former incident commander and having actually conducted roll calls, itis a
long and tedious process because there is a lot of noise. If your conducting a roll call, something went bad on
the fire ground. You want to make sure that everybody is safe and trying to get people to listen and trying to
respond. If this enhances that, it could actually save a life because you are looking for that one person who
may be in trouble. He may be at the bottom of the roll call list. Any direction that we can do to try to help the
firefighters to get the software upgraded to get to the point where we can discuss it and purchase it, | think
perhaps maybe in the future will safe a firefighter’s life.
Alderman Siegel
What happens if we don’t approve this?
Mr. Mansfield
If this does not get approved, | think by 2019 or 2020, we would be required to do another forklift upgrade if we
were going to upgrade the system. If we didn’t do this and we put it off until next year, everything gets put off
for two years. Again, you can’t jump from 7.15 to 7.19. You have to go through the process of 7.15 to 7.17 to
7.19.
Alderman Siegel
Unfortunately, we sort of stuck with this because it is Motorola. It’s the choice we made. We don’t want to do
another forklift upgrade. That’s painful, and that was some of the motivators behind this as | recall our
discussion.
Mr. Mansfield
Correct. It seems like whether we chose Motorola or whether we chose another vendor, they are all doing the
exact same things out there today. It’s pretty much the industry standard of how other operating, how they do
with business.
Alderman Siegel
One of the things they are going to be doing is upgrading the software. Given the prevalence of attacks, ISIS
attacks, things of that nature, we need to make sure that our software is upgraded so we’re not vulnerable.
Mr. Mansfield
Correct. There’s another part of this whole $235,000. There was another memo that was submitted to provide
security update services to the system now. When we first bought the system, we were getting security update
services on a weekly basis. All it did was allow the main pieces of the infrastructure to get security updates.
Since May we have been without that and have not received any security updates. That’s why this is in here to
ensure that we continue with those updates on a weekly basis as we were before.
