Canadian Security: You mentioned the use of BlackBerry devices. What is your Mobile Guard application?

Saunders: It gives real-time reporting and provides the guard the ability to do things like take a picture of an incident and depending on the severity of the incident the guard can report it in real time to senior management. Perhaps the head of security has indicated he wants to see all Severity 1 incidents no matter what time it is in the day. Basically you define what information you want guards to collect and it’s sent in real-time to pre-determined recipients. It can be emailed to the appropriate individuals in maintenance, security or facilities etc. Right now it’s built for BlackBerry. In the U.S. G4S also has Secure Trax, which is security management software.

Canadian Security: So how has G4S changed its approach with clients now that there are more technology-specific products to take to market?

Saunders: It’s three-fold. Organizationally, I think it’s important we structure ourselves to answer the market demand and there are things we’ve done to help meet the client needs. We’ve segmented our business to be very much an integrated solutions perspective. Secondly, it’s people — we’re investing in the appropriate training and skills for back end and frontline people. We’ve created the vision and culture to know where we’re going as an organization.
 
Frontline people have to be able to have that broader conversation with clients when it comes to talking about technology as well as providing guards. We’re not saying to the client: “Let’s do a guard deal and then I’ll bring in a technology guy.” One person can speak to both pieces of business.

We’re also spending a lot of time and money upgrading the skill set of our sales individuals so they are now solutions experts with a layer of technology subject matter experts behind them. We have a whole community of people working in the common mission of having a much broader conversation with clients about developing a security program versus a segmented approach.
 
The third approach would be purely from a product perspective and that’s developing relevant integrated product suites for our clients. So that might look like a guard holding a mobile device as opposed to just a guard; it’s access control integrated into the guard program and so on.