Exclusive Q&A with Mike Shore, SVP & GM, Enterprise, Axon 

Axon

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Hear from Mike Shore, SVP & GM, Enterprise, Axon.

What does the Enterprise team at Axon focus on and what are your goals? 

Axon was founded in 1993 by Founder and CEO, Rick Smith, with the mission to Protect Life.

As the business has evolved and the suite of technology has grown, we have been drawn by customers to other verticals to extend our mission to protect more lives in more places.

In 2020, we received significant inbound demand, specifically in the healthcare and retail security environments, to expand our offerings into what we call the Enterprise space – all non-sworn safety and security teams in all verticals around the globe. 

As we started to learn more and became partners with more teams in these spaces, we realised how violent and unsafe these industries had become.

We have seen early results that our technology can help reduce workplace violence trends, and, over the last couple of years, we have started to partner with key leaders in the industry to collaboratively build the next iteration of safety and security technology bespoke to the industries we now serve. 

Our goal has never changed – Protect Life.

We believe that everyone deserves the right to socialise with friends and family in public spaces, to do necessary errands like grocery shopping, back-to-school shopping and attending live events, and to provide for their families at their jobs without ever questioning their safety.

We believe that our experience with our law enforcement relationships can create collaborative workflows and provide the necessary technology to rebuild safer communities.  

What are your main products that you believe will help you execute on your mission? 

Axon was actually founded under a different name – TASER International. Our initial product was the TASER Conducted Energy Device.

While TASER energy devices have been used to save more than 300,000 lives (Axon) from death or serious injury, our customers were often facing litigation issues surrounding the use of these devices.

To provide transparency, accountability and oversight for both public safety and communities, we introduced our first body-worn camera in 2014.

Today body-worn cameras are a mainstay of public safety and an accepted and critical part of modern policing.  

As body-worn camera adoption grew, we realised we needed to provide customers with a secure and compliant digital evidence management system, so we launched Axon Evidence in 2019 along with a few other products.

Axon Evidence solidified Axon as a technology provider with SaaS solutions that force multiply hardware offerings and can be the hub of more efficient workflows.

Recently, we acquired Fusus and announced an agreement to acquire Dedrone to further establish Axon as a leader in safety and security technology stacks.  

Axon Fusus bolsters our real-time operations solution, combining Axon Fusus’s real-time situational awareness as part of the Axon for Physical Security operating system to offer comprehensive safety and security technology.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Dedrone will strengthen Axon’s ability to help customers safeguard communities, improve response to incidents and protect even more lives in more places. Our operating system is built on an open-API platform, providing customers with the ability to integrate over 100 hardware and software options, with that number growing daily. 

No longer do teams need to be handcuffed by inefficiency; with Axon for Physical Security, all safety and security technology can be managed with a single login – and the best part is that existing technology is leveraged to avoid costly rip-and-replace investments.

With this solution and more partnerships soon to be launched, we believe that we have one of the only complete technology stacks with real-time situational awareness capabilities, advanced post-incident investigations and compliant and secure collaborative tools to optimise safety and security workflows.  

Where do you see Axon playing a part in the future of safety and security for all members of the community? 

We believe that Safer Starts with Axon. Currently, we serve most of the largest law enforcement agencies around the globe, are partners with US Federal Agencies, offer technology for litigators, District Attorneys and other justice partners and our Enterprise team is building relationships with the largest Global Fortune 500 companies.

With all these partners utilising the same backbone of the operating system, collaborative workflows are unlocked.  

These collaborative workflows supercharge efforts to convict high-impact offenders, to neutralise threats quicker through conditional real-time sharing across public and private entities, and, more importantly, deter and de-escalate potentially violent and life-threatening incidents before they occur.

Safer communities cannot be built solely by law enforcement or by retailers or by private security teams alone.

Rather, it takes a collaborative effort across all stakeholders in the community and frictionless workflows to ensure everyone can work and live in safer cities. 

What’s next for Axon and the Enterprise team? 

Axon invests back into research and development at a higher percentage compared to total revenue.

What that means is that we are constantly iterating and launching new hardware and technology to enhance our existing ecosystem.

And, if we believe there is already great existing technology that solves the problems industries need, we will partner and integrate through our open-API platform.

Most importantly, though, is that very little of this research and development and partnership activity is done simply because we think it’s what customers need. 

Instead, we solicit feedback from customers at all levels – whether it be summits at our headquarters with Rick Smith, Customer Advisory Boards around the world, International Tech Summits or some of the major trade shows.

We welcome feedback from customers and leaders in the industry that may not have an existing relationship with Axon to help us build the tech the industry needs, not what we think it wants.

For us to execute our mission to protect more lives in more places, we have to iterate fast and launch the right products at the right time for the right end users.

That’s what allows us to be confident when we say, Safer Starts with Axon.  

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