MS, Motorola Join on Emergency Tech

Microsoft and Motorola announced on Tuesday an agreement to work together on technology aimed at emergency services and criminal justice customers. As a part of the deal, Motorola would develop new applications built on the Microsoft platform.

The Redmond company sees its alliance with Motorola as a way for it to further expand its business into the public sector, where contracts for services can prove quite lucrative and beneficial to those involved.

The agreement is expected to help Motorola improve its pre-existing NetRMS (Records Management System) product that would take advantage of Microsoft technologies immediately. NetRMS allows first responders to handle incident information and record and retrieve department records easily.

"Microsoft recognizes and takes seriously the growing challenge to law enforcement, first responders and emergency management officials to communicate vital information in real time," said Tom Richey, executive director of the Homeland Security department at Microsoft.

Programs would be built on Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Framework, and would use Microsoft's SQL Server, BizTalk Server and the Windows Server System to handle the data.

This is not the first time the two companies have partnered. Motorola was one of the first companies to make smart phones based on the Windows Mobile platform widely available to consumers.